Microsoft Cracking Open the Door To OSS

AlexGr sends us to a long piece in Redmond Magazine on Microsoft's changing relationship to open source. The article centers around a profile of Bill Hilf, Microsoft's internal and external evangelist for OSS. It's an even-handed piece that fully reflects the continuing deep skepticism in the community of Microsoft's motives and actions.

Oh?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's an even-handed piece...

Oh really? What dimension did it come from?

I've certainly never seen anything in this time/space reality that has been even-handed about the relationship of Microsoft & OSS.

Accomplishments?

[pembo13]

What has Mr. Bill Hilf actually accomplished? This isn't the first time I've seen his name championed as Microsoft's OSS evangelist, which in and of it self is all well and good. However, I haven't actually heard/read of him doing anything that actually benefits OSS (not necessarily Linux). I'm hoping someone can enlighten me.

Job prospect

[otacon]

How does one become the Open Source Software evangelist at a practically 100% proprietary company?...That's like being a Christian Evangelist at a Mosque.

Motives?

[Threni]

They have one motive - to make money for their shareholders. Perhaps you mean `strategy`? They might ponce about with OSS if they can make money from it (not directly, but by selling apps/services which support OSS), but they make their money in the main from the desktop (which they show no signs of losing control over, despite/because of the number of Linux distros out there) and supplying Office (and exchange server, if you want to consider them as separate) to businesses. There's still no serious rival to them there.

Can't and won't trust them.

[roman_mir]

"I ask those folks, 'How often has Microsoft sued over IP?' The answer is two [times]," he says. "We are not a patent troll company. We protect our IP and our licenses, but we do not want to litigate." - I assume this does not include the fiaSCO from Utah, I guess it is not direct enough to count it into these two times.

In any case, one thing I know I don't want to deal with in this life is MS stuff.

The difference

[dedazo]

I'm pretty sure what the comments on this story will be like. But I think that Microsoft recognize the problem they have with FLOSS and are trying (or pretending at least) to co-exist. The FLOSS party line seems to be the eventual "destruction" of Microsoft. When the chips are down people will look at this and say "well, at least Microsoft did X and Y, but the vociferous mass of FLOSS evangelists spend their time howling for blood in creative spelling"

I see that every day around here and elsewhere. The different degrees of "M$ WINDOZE IS TEH SUX AND I HATE U LINUX ROXX LOL!!!1!" are getting to be completely ridiculous and will eventually hurt more than they help. People (you know, out there, not "here") by and large don't have a negative view of Microsoft, and ultimately that's what matters.

As long as ...

[CSHARP123]

Hilf's work around interoperability may be best exhibited within the Open Source Software lab at Microsoft that tests its products in every conceivable environment. The lab is currently running 30 to 40 different Linux distributions. Hilf also heads up Shared Source Licensing, which represents Microsoft's approximation (that's a generous assessment) of a GPL-type license model by providing IT administrators and developers access to source code to test and review. This helps organizations make internal application fixes, do security evaluations and ensure interoperability with their own environments.

Interoperability -- Why don't they support Open formats then. Why don't they come up with proper documents so open source vendors can interop. They will be friendly as long as it do not hit there cash cow products i.e Windows OS and MS Office.
MS's Mantra is you can open source any product as long as it runs on windows and we are not yet developing that product.

Skepticism in the community....

[MS-06FZ]

in the community of Microsoft's motives and actions?

They have a community?

Re:The difference

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

But I think that Microsoft recognize the problem they have with FLOSS and are trying (or pretending at least) to co-exist. The FLOSS party line seems to be the eventual "destruction" of Microsoft.

This is 100% not true. The party line of FLOSS fans is the promotion of free and open source software and advancement of the computer industry in general. If MS actually started developing and contributing open source software without any hidden lock in technologies, FLOSS advocates would embrace them. Personally, I don't dislike MS because they develop closed software. Lots of companies do that, like Apple and Sun and Adobe and I don't have any problem with them and I don't think most FLOSS fans do either. The problem I have with MS is they abuse their market position to hinder the adoption of FLOSS and in the process stifle innovation and slow down progress in the software industry in general. All the commercial companies out there are trying to make money, but MS is the one huge influential company that is lying and breaking the law and refusing to play by the rules everyone else does. They are criminals profiting by hurting the computer industry. That is why they are not trusted or liked by computer people in general.

People (you know, out there, not "here") by and large don't have a negative view of Microsoft, and ultimately that's what matters.

A lot of people do have a negative view of MS, not because they understand anything about their business practices, but because their computer does not work and is a stupid piece of crap that keeps slowing down and messing up. I don't think there is anything wrong with trying to inform people that it doesn't need to be that way and there are better options and if the laws were just upheld the whole industry would get better. Ranting incoherently about MS obviously will not give you any credibility, but your strawman argument about what FLOSS people are saying is just that. You're the only one that wrote leetspeak crap about sucking, so stop trying to pass it off as "the community."

I'd be curious to see that

[Programmer_In_Traini]

I'd really be curious to see Microsoft dive in the OSS and try to come up with a business plan.

My take on it is that MS realizes that OSS is here to stay and that its gaining due in part but not totally to their crappy vista.

So they said "if people are gonna move to OSS, we'll follow them" - as they say "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em"

but that's highly hypothetical and way too optimistic, with MS, there's always a snake somewhere trying to bite you in the arse.

That said, lets assume they do jump in the boat, i'd be curious what they would do to keep making money with OSS.

Re:Microsoft learning it's lesson?

[soft_guy]

Microsoft has been the company that poisons standards. For example, they sat on the OpenGL standards body for years while actively engaged in a disinformation campaign against OpenGL. To this day Windows doesn't support it very well out of the box - they support it just well enough to try to convince people that it sucks which is worse than if they just dropped all support.

Microsoft has been lying for many many years. They will have to start acting with honor and telling the truth for at least a while before people start trusting them.

It is like Apple in 1996. Back then people thought that Apple was incompetent to execute anything or bring interesting and relevant products to market. Then Jobs came back and things changed, but it took years before people starting trusting them again.

Microsoft would have to do the same thing - and hiring one guy isn't much of a start.

Re:I don't want an open-source Microsoft.

[Trelane]

because they are the central evil empire around which all opposing viewpoints, practices and communities can clearly see as the colossal against which they're flinging the rocks of their own progress and movements.

No, then the KDE vs GNOME flamewar will go to a whole new level. Linux is all about competition.

Bullshit

[bonefry]

That's marketing talk.

Yeah ... if Bill Hilf worked for IBM, then he must have HUGE contributions to OSS, right ?
Oh please ... point to at least one major contribution to OSS that he has done.

You OSS zealots (particularly twitter) are doing more harm than good.

Ironically, anti-OSS zealots are a lot more widespread and a lot more poisonous.

Re:Motives?

[joto]

It's not that hard, it's just that

• It's not as fun
• You will not become famous. (you've heard of Bill Gates, Dennis Ritchie and Larry Wall, but who created Lotus Notes or Microsoft Exchange?)
• It's a huge effort. (it needs to be feature complete before people will even consider to take it halfway seriously)
• It doesn't scratch an itch I have (I want fifteen new compilers to play with much more than I want a boring groupware app, it's other users who want that, perhaps not even running linux)

Device Driver Limitations

[PingXao]

They're not supportive of OSS in the realm of device drivers for Windows, that's for sure. Vista 64-bit version does not permit unsigned device drivers to be loaded. Period. That is going to shut out a lot of OSS projects aimed at controlling all the nifty hardware you can hook up to your machine. Microsoft's official reason for this is they want to make it harder for malware to infect a machine. The real reason probably has something to do with DRM.

Re:Motives?

[CastrTroy]

I can see where you're coming from. A lot of what open source produces seems to be stuff that the developers need to use themselves. Operating systems, databases, web servers, compilers, source control, desktop environments. If you look at the projects that seem to have the biggest problems, word processors, spreadsheets, email, groupware, calendars, etc., it seems like open source programmers just ignore stuff that isn't fun to program, while ignoring that there is an actual need for this type of software.

Re:Accomplishments?

[kdemetter]

well , that's the beauty of open source . you may have a good idea but suck at coding /graphical design , and then some one takes a look at your project and improves the code . then someone else improves the graphical design ,etc ..

With closed source people will just say it sucks and that will be the end of it .

Shill or double agent?

[nobodyman]

I'm not sure if your comment was meant as a jab at Bill Hilf, or if your just literally meant that it seems incongruous to find Bill Hilf and Bill Gates in the same roof. I'll assume the latter - I agree it seems odd.

The cynical side of me thinks that this is purely a political gesture, and that Microsoft is giving him a "window seat" with little influence inside of microsoft.

However, Microsoft attempted the same thing with Robert Scoble [scobleizer.com]. Most people wrote him off as a shill, but he (IMHO) brought about real, substantive change in how Microsoft communicated with the outside world, and that they are now a more "transparent" company, especially with the development community.

Maybe he's a "double agent". I'm hoping that, even if Microsoft is being disingenuous, that Bill Hilf is able to undermine this attitude from within the inside?

this should not even be discussed - it's MS vs OSS

[Locutus]

come on, the MS Linux/OSS lab is nothing more than a place for Microsoft to keep an eye on what the OSS projects are doing and how they'll work within a Microsoft based environment. All this is to help them target their marketing and tweak their products so that they win and OSS loses. And I doubt if there is a single instance where befriending Microsoft will help OSS. We are talking about the "One Microsoft Way", "Linux is communism", etc Microsoft, are we not?

THERE'S 20 YEARS OF HISTORY HERE FOLKS. They are doing this to protect the MS Windows monopoly and their profits from this, noting more. So there is NOTHING in it to help you, the customer or you the developer. The game is about market protection and has been since the late 80's. IMO

LoB

Re:The difference

[99BottlesOfBeerInMyF]

According to Richard Stallman, because I write "closed-source propietary" software, I am immoral and should find another line of work.

Morals are personal beliefs. He's free to express his, but why would you care?

How does that tie in to the usual "oh, but we're all nice" party line? I will not generalize to the point of claiming every single person associated with open source has the same views, just that there are enough of them to be a problem.

I've spent my entire life working at companies that create open source software. I've contributed to numerous projects. Almost all those companies also produced closed source software. There are probably close to a hundred Linux and OSS contributors in my office. All of them are paid and some work on other OSS projects as hobbies. I've not heard any of them objecting to keeping some of our software closed source when it benefits the company more.

Richard Stallman is to FLOSS as Billy Graham is to christianity. He is an extremist who advocates a hard-line approach and adherence to doctrine in the hopes of motivating change. You should not judge the FLOSS community by Mr Stallman and more than you should judge the christian community by Mr. Graham.

"Criminals" is another one of those weasel words, eh? Please show me where Microsoft was convicted in a criminal court of a crime. I'd love to see that.

Umm, the US DoJ v. Microsoft. Antitrust abuse is a criminal code of law in the US, although prosecution of it is often precipitated by civil suits. I believe that applies as well to the EU antitrust suit MS lost, although I'm much less versed in EU law.

That aside, I think the industry is doing just fine...

Are you joking? Web standards are frozen using subsets of 7-8 year old versions of the standards because while every browser development group on the planet has managed to implement almost all of much more recent versions, MS has intentionally declined to do so to prevent the Web from becoming a viable platform for rich applications that might threaten their lock-in and desktop monopoly. Most people who have ripped music CDs over the last 10 years ripped their music to a format that added DRM and is incompatible with the most popular portable player forcing them to do the whole thing over again. Most users still don't have a spellchecker that works in all their applications. Holy crap its only been decades since users started asking for that one. By default most users cannot just run random binaries from the internet without substantial risk that it will completely take over their machine and start sending spam, despite the fact that most users want to perform that exact task. Where's my ubiquitous real time translation between languages, written and spoken? Why is it that I still can't send an IM message to anyone I want on any network, but only within proprietary networks? Why is it that binaries are still not all cross-platform? Voice recognition is still at the same state it was 8 years ago.

From my perspective the industry has been dragging along and when I look at most of the reasons I keep coming back to MS. They buy up innovative companies and mothball the technology. They slow things down so they can charge feature by feature and they halt anything that looks like it has the potential to revolutionize things because revolutions are dangerous to an incumbent.

More often than not the FLOSS claim that Microsoft "hinders" them is centered around disappointment over unrealistic expectations of fame and fortune, not to mention conveniently forgetting that Microsoft is hardly the only commercial software in the world.

What do you know about the economics of monopolies? Traditionally a monopoly is considered dangerous because they can remove the incentive for innovation in markets by introducing artificial problems and barriers that mean the best product will not necessarily make money and win

A philisophical question...

[antirelic]

Do you know why Microsoft comes late to the buffet? Because they like their meal well fed.

Re:Really??

[dedazo]

Did Netscape (The leader in browser software at the time) have unrealistic expectations when Microsoft crushed them by illegally leveraging its OS monopoly?

Ah, NS is a really, really bad example. You should have picked another one. Shall we?

Once upon a time, NS was king of the hill. People couldn't download Navigator 2 enough, and NS was flying high. NSN2 was an excellent browser, bar none. Then came NSN3. Kinda iffy. A lot of people would stay away from it. But Netscape was awash in IPO capital and they were having an identity crisis and they couldn't figure out if they were writing a "collaboration platform" or a web browser and an email/NNTP client. And yet, they were still on top. By that time IE3 had been released. It sucked ROCKS. It sucked so hard that it was laughably being used to download the Netscape browser by people who for some reason also had IE3. Then, with Netscape still in the lead, Microsoft released IE4. Remember, IE would NOT be bundled with an OS until Windows 98. It wasn't bundled with W95 at all, except at the very tail end of OSR2.

And then NS4 saw the light of day. Holy shit, NS4 was the worst piece of crap ever released by any software company. It was dead slow, it crashed with alarming frequency and it looked like crap. Compared to IE4, it was a dinosaur that was hardly worth running at all. So, people used IE4 because it was inherently superior to the competition. You don't have to take my word for that, BTW. Go read jzw's essays on the topic. About the only thing it had going for it was that it was cross-platform.

Do you remember using Linux in 1998-99? Do you? Remember which browser RH used to ship with? It was NS4. Did you enjoy using it? I sure as hell didn't. It sucked even more on Linux than on Windows.

So Netscape fucked themselves with gusto, fucked up their plan to influence the direction of the W3C (blink!) and control web standards, and when they finally figured out they were indeed utterly fucked, they went to the government to whine about how "evil" Microsoft had "destroyed" them by bundling IE with Windows. And the rest is history.

Now, if this bundling is so damaging to "competitors", how come it took years for WMP to gain traction? Why did so many people simply download Real, Winamp, Sonique, MusicMatch, etc? Because they were all better than the piece of crap WMP. Why are so many people using Firefox now? Why? Because Firefox is better than IE6. If NS4 had been an actually usable application, Microsoft could have bundled until the cows came home and they would have never gained 90% of the browser market. Never.

But it's always nice to blame Microsoft for other people's fuckups, eh?

And I said, there are other examples - it's not like they're angelic or anything. But Netscape? Cry me a big, fat river.

Re:Accomplishments?

[rtb61]

Well from my point of view, I can tell you it is pretty hard to come back from calling customers cancerous, unAmerican, communist, terrorist, mafioso, religous zealots. From my on point of view, doing it as a marketing tactic for profit, makes it fucking impossible. Until M$ has paid and paid dearly for that tactic there is no coming back.

Thanks

[dedazo]

Thanks twitter, I think I'm all grown up now and I can figure out when I need to be "liberated".

I love that you have lots of free time because your computers "work", and I'm trapped with "M$ Windoze workarounds" yet I have all this free time to "harrass" you. You don't even read what you write, do you?

As to the rest of your post, it's just the usual paranoid schizo "join us or die" zealot bullshit that doesn't even merit a response. It's always amusing to see you whining about "FUD" when it's about the only thing you have left as your desperation over your failure to do anything meaningful becomes more and more evident.

Re:Device Driver Limitations

[cyborg_zx]

That would seem to be a very good argument for open source drivers.

Re:Competing monocultures

[mgiuca]

Note that you had to change the word "monopoly" into "monoculture" in order to apply it to free software.

Because while RMS may be creating somewhat of a "monoculture", it is by no means a "monopoly".

If we imagine a future in which every computer in the world is sold with an end-to-end open source/GPL/FSF solution, you will still never see:

- Documents locked into a particular format, unable to switch
- Software which locks you out of media you purchased
- Software controlled entirely by a company
- Software which nobody understands and therefore nobody can fix or improve

The difference being that code released under the GPL isn't really owned by anyone. It's available to everyone. So that isn't a monopoly.

As for GCC, I think it's quite rare to find code made specifically for GCC. Most of the time, the issues with other compilers are:

- GCC is the most standards-compliant C compiler there is. Other compilers (VC++ included) have difficulty.
- Part of this is that GCC is POSIX compliant and VC++ isn't. POSIX is not a monoculture, it is a standard which predates Windows. A lot of open source code is written for POSIX.

The point being that someone could come along and write a new C compiler which is also POSIX compliant and it could be used instead of GCC. It isn't like anyone's protecting trade secrets as to how to write a C compiler. It's just really really hard, which is why nobody does it. That's separate from a "monopoly".

Re:Halloween Documents off OSI

[Russ Nelson]

Errrr, is Google down today?