Who would have thought a few years ago that Microsoft, a force to reckon with in proprietary software, would increasingly align towards the open source ecosystem? Well, that’s precisely what’s happening on the ground today. Be it the company’s $7.5 billion acquisition of GitHub or the decision to open source the Infer.Net machine learning framework, or the fact that recently Microsoft open sourced 60,000 patents and joined the Open Innovation Network, the technology giant is taking giant strides in the open source community. The most recent decision is that of Microsoft joining the OpenChain platform as its Platinum member.
The official announcement states that Microsoft will help in creating best practices and defining standards for open source software compliance by joining OpenChain. Several other companies including Uber, Google, and Facebook had joined the OpenChain consortium last month.
By joining OpenChain project, Microsoft wants to bring improved clarity to the contentious issue of open source software licenses. Today, companies need clarity that the open source software that they use, complied with the rules that govern its use.
In an official blog post announcement, Microsoft's Assistant General Counsel David Rudin said, "A lot goes into making open source great – from licenses to code to community. A key part of doing open source right is being able to trust that the code you receive complies with its open source licenses. It’s a deceptively hard problem and one that Microsoft is working with the community to address. Our goal is to work even more closely with the OpenChain community to create the standards that will bring even greater trust to the open source ecosystem and that will work for everyone – from individual developers to the largest enterprises."
The consortium is setup to help introduce common standards regarding how companies declare their open source efforts. OpenChain offers detailed specification, processes, policies, and training to companies that need to manage their open spruce license compliance.
As the latest platinum member of the OpenChain consortium, Microsoft is expected to follow best practices and define new standards for compliance, which will further help in providing more insights to customers when it comes to the software that they use.