Aras Goes Open Source, but Only for Microsoft

The company, headquartered in Lawrence, Mass., announced Jan. 15 that it is moving away from a proprietary user-based licensing model to an open, distribution model where there is no charge for, or limitation on, the use of its software.

Aras has also announced the availability of Version 8 of its Innovator suite of solutions, which only run on proprietary Microsoft technologies and need a minimum of Microsoft Windows Server 2003 with .Net 2.0 and SQL Server 2005 to run, are available under the Microsoft Community License, and are hosted on Microsoft's Codeplex Web site.

The Microsoft Community License is one of the Redmond, Wash., software maker's Shared Source licenses, none of which has been submitted to the OSI (Open Source Initiative) for approval under the Open Source Definition. Codeplex is Microsoft's open-source project hosting Web site.

The move is certain to reignite the debate about what can be regarded as truly open-source software, how this is governed going forward and the role Microsoft technologies play in all this.

In fact, when I asked company founder and President Peter Schroer if he was at all concerned about the reaction from the open-source community about not going with a license approved by the OSI and not offering the software for Linux, he admitted that he expects "some controversy, at least heartburn," over these decisions.

Schroer also believes that the "whole community has gotten a little too biased toward a very narrow thinking: that it's not open source if it doesn't run on Linux. What open source is about for us and our customers is control and flexibility," he said.

He adds that Aras customers will be able to download its code, yet are not shackled to Aras as a software vendor. The license allows flexibility, and the solutions can be used to deploy to as many users as needed, while the source code can be changed, and users can contribute back to the project if they want to, he said.

"I just described open source, and I didn't have to use the word 'Linux' to do it," Schroer added.

Aras is not the first company to use a Microsoft Shared Source license. Last February, open-source vendor SugarCRM announced its plans to launch a distribution of its Sugar Suite 4.5 software under the Microsoft Community License.

But SugarCRM also came under scrutiny for using another license that was not approved by the OSI. Its open-source Sugar Suite 4.0 release was licensed under the SugarCRM Public License Version 1.1.3, which is the Mozilla Public License Version 1.1, modified to be specific to SugarCRM.

Some in the community felt that, as SugarCRM had modified the MPL for its own purposes and had not submitted it to the Open Source Initiative for approval, it was not an accepted open-source license.

Others, like Peter Yared, the CTO of ActiveGrid, said they believe that such custom open-source licenses are in the interests of the publishers rather than their communities. "What we need are [fewer] licenses, not more, and we definitely don't need 'open-source' licenses with company names in them," he told me at the time.

Aras' Schroer also maintains that open source needs to be made available to a far larger audience, which is his goal with this move. "The open-source community is really a fairly closed group of people. Essentially it's the programmers who create the code. Also, most of the way that is packaged and offered is palatable to someone who is also a programmer," he said.

This play with Microsoft takes open source as an idea to a different, and far bigger, audience: IT professionals such as business analysts and programmers who know the Microsoft environment. "Here's a chance to offer a bigger audience something that is still very much open source in terms of beliefs, just a different agreement," he said.

Also adding fuel to the fire are Schroer's statements that while Aras had looked at licensing its Innovator software under the GPL (General Public License), when talking to its customers it encountered a lot of confusion with regard to the GPL.

Customers were worried that they would have a legal obligation to submit back any changes they made to that open-source code. "The perception is that open source comes with this obligation, which is fine for programmers, but not for businesses," he said.

These concerns from enterprises about the GPL, which is currently being rewritten, piggyback onto those of the top Linux developers, who have announced their objections to the proposed new version of the license and who claim it could kill open source.

So what's your take on all this? E-mail me or post your comments here.