Thursday, March 28, 2002

Microsoft Gives Researchers and Students Access to Code for Web-Services Platform By FLORENCE OLSEN The Microsoft Corporation is attempting to win the minds of academic researchers and college-aged programmers by offering universities more than a million lines of source code from the company's much-vaunted .NET programming platform for Web services. Apart from restricting commercial use of the .NET source code, Microsoft says it will place no additional restrictions on students or their computer-science professors who use the code for teaching or research purposes. A brief license spells out how the Microsoft source code can be used. Students and faculty members will be permitted to teach with and experiment with the code, and to modify it and then share it, but not to profit from it, and not to release it without attaching a copy of the Microsoft license. The offer to let students work with the source code represents a considerable loosening of Microsoft's restrictions, which have typically required pledges of secrecy from programmers who sought access to the company's code. The company had been criticized for placing such strict limits on its code. But the offer that Microsoft made public on Wednesday is not likely to overcome the reservations of some professors. Professors generally steer clear of software licenses that could get them or their institutions in trouble, says Henning G. Schulzrinne, an associate professor of computer science and electrical engineering at Columbia University. If students do something in violation of the license, he says, professors worry that they themselves could be held accountable. David Stutz, a Microsoft program manager, said in a statement announcing the code-sharing program that "by allowing people in the academic community to freely access these tools, they will be able to make changes that can push the technology forward and allow innovation to happen." The source code runs on Microsoft's own Windows XP operating system as well as on FreeBSD Unix, an open-source version of the Unix operating system popular among academic programmers. Open-source code can be modified and used freely by others. Microsoft is now referring to the .NET code as "shared-source code." FreeBSD and Linux, which is the most widely known open-source operating system, are popular with students because they can work with the source code "unencumbered," says Mr. Schulzrinne. For students, whose work on open-source projects is usually unpaid, the idea that a future employer might find useful something the student created for class is a powerful incentive, he says. Mr. Schulzrinne says he uses Linux, Apache Foundation, and other open-source tools to teach an advanced programming course at Columbia. All students in his class are "exposed to some Microsoft Visual Studio," which is a set of Microsoft programming tools. But Mr. Schulzrinne says he suspects that a million lines of open-source code from Microsoft's .NET programming platform would be too unwieldy to be useful as a teaching tool. A beauty of many open-source programs is that their components are small, says Mr. Schulzrinne. Faced with a million lines of unfamiliar Microsoft source code, he says, a professor would need to spend several months studying it before he could teach with it. Students and researchers can download the source code from a page on Microsoft's Web site. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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