Microsoft has to deal with governments and corporations. And the opensource page at http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/ is an answer to the question: "What is MS's policy towards opensource" and similar questions.
if thats not enough, we can go ahead with open source OS (android, chromium, hired linux kernel devs), browsers (chrome, firefox participation), python, go language..
just out of my head of course ;)
on the other side we have companies that just try to conform to licenses.Atleast that's my impression. I am wondering how open source contribution from apple or MS would look like if there where no GPL but only BSD licensed software.. (now, i'll most probably be bashed for trolling, sorry.)
I am wondering how open source contribution from apple or MS would look like if there where no GPL but only BSD licensed software..
For Apple, probably the same. Most of their open source software is under the APSL, or (more frequently) BSD or Apache 2 licenses. I can't think of any (L)GPL'd project started by Apple.
Fair enough. I deliberately avoided commenting on how it would look for Microsoft, since I'm not at all knowledgeable on Microsoft's open source policy.
I don't really get that idea from the code.google.com. It looks to me rather like microsoft, but with cleaner design. Both have the search bar at the top, navigation bar on left and news/announcements at the center and on the right. Neither of them looks very inviting to me (as someone who's just studying programming and not already involved in any open-source projects).
As for apple, I didn't actually have any idea what to do if I wanted info about open-source on mac.
Yeah, well, the navigation bar on the left has links to some of their open-source projects and their web APIs, and on the right you have links to a bunch of videos, and their news links are targeted at developers ... I couldn't even read the stuff on Microsoft's page because it's full of weasel-words.
Apple's page doesn't bother me much ... they have links to resources. They are efficient and don't pretend like they care :)
I really can't put my finger on it, but the message from those pages kind of show what kind of companies they are ...
* Apple doesn't care much, but here, a clean design with links to resources
* Google is like ... hey, we're cool open-source people, come join
* Microsoft is like ... "we partner with open source-based businesses and communities", bla, bla, here's a list of news