MS To Become Open Source Friendly Post Gates 424
ruphus13 writes "Now that Gates has 'retired' from Microsoft, ZDNet is speculating that Microsoft will become much more Open Source friendly. From the article, 'We already see quite a different approach to dealing with OSS and OSS companies from Sam Ramji's group [which is] doing a great job in establishing dialog,' said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange and a former marketing exec at SUSE Linux. 'With Gates' departure, the only mammoth remaining is Ballmer. With him away in a near future, Microsoft will definitely open up. They have to.'" Microsoft could become the world's largest open source company; they've certainly made some concessions to it lately.
Re:System complexity driving OSS? (Score:3, Informative)
Have you ever looked at DBUS [freedesktop.org] ?
Re:In related news... (Score:1, Informative)
Christians to become Pro-Reason post Apocalypse.
I know that this post was sarcastic and that the collective slashdot crowd is generally anti-Christian, but the sweeping generalizations are getting old.
Repeat after me:
Just because some Christians (albeit a very vocal group) seem to fear science/reason, doesn't mean that all Christians do (see biased sample [nizkor.org], Composition [nizkor.org], hasty generalization [nizkor.org], and Straw Man [nizkor.org] fallacies).
Re:April Fools? (Score:4, Informative)
Mod parent up to stratosphere!!!! Microsoft is the synonym of "Death of Open Standards". There's nothing Microsoft as a corporation hates more than Open Standards and as an extension, Open Source. And I don't mean the "Microsoft of the past", I mean the Microsoft right here and now, the behemoth with billions of dollars and tens of thousands of developers under its belly, the Microsoft that COULD change the world of computing, if it wanted to, due to it's enormous installed base.
But no, THIS Microsoft is a company that has learned how to leverage that installed base, and closed or poisoned standards is what it thrives on.
Sorry but the article is crazy talk.
Re:Speculation means nothing (Score:5, Informative)
Vista financial success... Fortune has an article on Bill Gates and his next move, plus one on Microsoft. In the years that Gates has been transitioning out (about 10 years now, in 98 Ballmer named President, in 2000, named CEO, and the last 8 years Gates has brought people in for his other senior roles), MS revenues have increased 5-fold and the company has diversified.
Microsoft's problem is that the stock is in the doldrums because they aren't seen as a growth plan, so their P/E ratio has dropped about as fast as they've increased earning. Their other problem is that their brand is tarnished... Original Xbox was a disaster, Xbox 360 had a good run but is being beaten by the Wii. The Apple commercials, while silly, are trashing Microsoft as old and lame. They are seen as part of the boring business infrastructure. They make plenty of money, but they don't have a good consumer brand right now. This isn't inherently a problem, plenty of companies have a lousy brand but sell industrial services... combined with monopoly rents, MSFT can remain a Fortune 500 company that way... however, that's a 10% growth, PE 12 story, not 25% growth, PE 50 story.
Further, growth will get harder, Linux keeps getting closer to being good enough for more and more stuff. Apple is carving out an increasing niche... all of these slow MSFT's financial growth....
Gates without Microsoft [cnn.com]
Microsoft without Gates [cnn.com]
Re:"They have to" (Score:3, Informative)
"There's still no definitive evidence that there's a viable business model in an open source, software only company."
* jboss ...
* mysql
* mozilla
* exo platform
*
Re:You haven't been paying attention either (Score:4, Informative)
I didn't say anything about a lack of profit at Red Hat, I just stated that the day may come when corporations ask themselves why they should pay for something that is available for free.
You clearly have no idea what Red Hat's model is. We don't sell bits on a CD. We sell support. We sell the ability to call us and (in some cases) talk to the original kernel developer who wrote the code. I'm sorry but support is not "something that is available for free" to any user of Linux.
Does Red Hat have any brand new product ideas that aren't part of the Linux OS that they'd like to spend a few years developing and release version 1.0 under the GPL license?
Yes, absolutely dozens of products. Off the top of my head, Red Hat MRG [redhat.com] (developed for years and just released, GPL, version 1.0 last week), ClusterSuite, LVM and all the Sistina stuff, FreeIPA [redhat.com], all the ET virtualization tools [virt-manager.org], all my stuff [redhat.com], virtio, JBoss (bought, already open source), RHN (recently open sourced), Netscape Directory Server (bought and open sourced), and probably 10 more that I can't even remember now [redhat.com].
Rich.