Bruce Perens has released a peice called stand together that dave has responded to.

There is such a amazing amount of crap in this doc that it stinks.

The first paragraph contains this "Equality, however, isn't what Microsoft is looking for. Thus, they have announced Shared Source, a system that could be summarized as Look but don't touch - and we control everything." Yup, this is completly correct, but it's part of the market. People pay for software not so they can tinker with it, but so that they can use it and often build ontop of it. They give feedback and the product can possible improve. The phrase "we control everything" is a really a lame monopoly tie in. The reallity is that people have choices for any given task, and the end user or developer has the choice in the market. The easiest way to see through the rhetoric is to see how well it applies back to the camp saying it. In the worst case of closed source, you get a binary that you can't do anything but run. In the worst case of free software you get the GPL, which means that you can't ever reap the benifits of your own work except for the first payment, or something like the ticketmaster "convienence" charge in distribution, that's freedom for you. Also on a related note if you make money on the support or setting up the installation, you have a financial inscentive to make the software so that the user is dependant on you to help them.

Second paragraph. "The dot-coms gave away goods and services as loss-leaders, in unsuccessful efforts to build their market share. In contrast, the business model of Open Source is to reduce the cost of software development and maintenance by distributing it among many collaborators." Hold up here... I thought the suggested buissness model for free software was to have the software be a loss leader for service? The second point really only makes sense for big companies that have more people and money then they know what to do with. How often does your buissness need that level of control, how often does spending man hours contributing to the open source pool more cost effective then simply buying/leasing software. I guess we will find out in a few more years on that front.

"...they hope to get the benefits of Free Software without sharing those benefits with those who participate in creating them. We urge Microsoft to go the rest of the way in embracing the Open Source software development paradigm." Shared source is specifically to benifit the person who uses it. The primary utility of the program is for a developer looks at the code and make thier own code work. If they find something broken by looking at the source, they can get it fixed by ms, but the reality is that it may not happen till the next release (and in many cases this is the right way).

[Scripting News]
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