Biden's $400B vaccination plan Galaxy S21 preorders Google Doodle celebrates basketball inventor Drivers License breaks Spotify records WandaVision review Oculus Quest multiuser support Track your stimulus check

Warriors face off in open-source debate

Microsoft's Craig Mundie and Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann will talk about Redmond's "shared source" program and how it's been received by the open-source community.

 CNET Radio
Nathan Torkington, conference chairman, talks about the debate surrounding open-source software. (4:09) 
• RealAudio
• Windows Media
Warring sides of the contentious open-source debate will meet Thursday to talk about the future of software such as Linux in the face of competition from incumbent Microsoft.

At the O'Reilly Open Source Convention in San Diego, Microsoft Senior Vice President Craig Mundie and Red Hat CTO Michael Tiemann will participate in a panel discussion about open-source software and Microsoft's "shared source" program.

Mundie is expected to explain why Microsoft's vision of shared-source software--in which the software giant makes the source code of some of its products available to customers and partners while still maintaining intellectual property rights--is better than open source. An open-source application is one in which people have the right to see and change its code and are bound to freely distribute any changes they make.

Red Hat's Tiemann will present the case for open source. Red Hat sells a popular version of Linux, the open-source operating system and rival to Microsoft's Windows.

In an interview with CNET Radio, Nathan Torkington, the O'Reilly conference chair, talks about open-source software and what we can expect from the panel discussion.