Why Microsoft Cozied up to Open Source at OSCON 325
This year at OSCON it seemed that you couldn't throw a stone without hitting someone from Microsoft (and in fact, I'm sure several people did). They were working very hard to make themselves known, and working desperately to change public opinion of Microsoft's involvement in the open source community. Linux.com's Nathan Willis took a look at what they were preaching, with a hefty dose of skepticism, and tries to postulate what the "angle" is. Of course, the powers that be at Microsoft may have finally seen the writing on the wall and felt the pressure from Google enough to alter their strategy a bit. For now I guess we'll have to wait with guarded optimism (or laughable contempt, depending on how old/jaded you are).
MS Open Source is a Web Fallback (Score:5, Interesting)
Microsoft's biggest problem isn't Google, it is that everyone is writing for a platform that is vendor neutral. It's extraordinarily difficult to find a business client that wants a client program - they want everything on the web whether it is stupid or not, and that's what has MS really worried. Google has failed in web apps fairly well, besides search, so they aren't the threat. What is the threat is that no one is really writing any sort of new applications for Windows SDK, .NET, etc. Open source people are at least interested in desktop applications development or PC applications development for Linux, and so, this could be part of a larger effort to at least get their stuff on Windows. Ultimately, Microsoft would rather have Windows running Linux applications on it desktop, then to have no desktop at all!
Luring developers back (Score:5, Interesting)
The argument that Willis makes about MS wanting to lure F/OSS developers back is quite accurate. I just wonder how much MS's past behaviors will hurt them in this endeavor. Many people, especially those closely aligned with projects like Apache, Open Office, etc. are well aware of MS's historic practice of "embrase, extend, extinguish" so they're likely to be very cautious about any olive branches that they offer. I wonder if this well documented behavior of MS's is likely to doom such tactics to failure in the long run. As the next generation of programmers gets their feet wet they'll likely read & hear about all the trouble MS has caused, and see growing number of F/OSS projects. My guess is that many of them will likely deduce for themselves that sticking with F/OSS as much as possible is the preferred track to go and that they shouldn't trust MS themselves like those before them. Perhaps some folks within MS have also realized this and that's why they're starting to "cozy up" to F/OSS. They likely realize they've got a LONG way to go to start winning the real hard-core F/OSS folks back to supporting Windows.
Re:MS Open Source is a Web Fallback (Score:5, Interesting)
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Google needs to release its web office applications as a server that can be installed in a corporate datacenter. That would allow corporations to maintain full and auditable control over their data, while leaving the high cost of MS Office behind.
Cashing the GNU (Score:5, Interesting)
What about this crazy idea:
Yeah, there even doesn't have to be a "???" step.
Re:MS cannot be trusted (Score:1, Interesting)
Linux has not been taken off Microsoft's threat list yet, so this is only a strategy to eliminate linux in the end. I personally, do not like the thought of Microsoft helping Apache in any way, shape or form.
Re:MS cannot be trusted (Score:5, Interesting)
You may want to rephrase that slightly:
Don't forget, they CAN help Apache by making IIS even crappier...
Anybody else think this might backfire for MS? (Score:5, Interesting)
The one thing that MS has going for it is a complete lack of understanding of "open source" by upper management of many companies. I know that at previous jobs I couldn't even use those two words together without fear of a slap on the hand.
I realize that things are shifting and many companies are already investigating "open source" solutions, however they still weigh the pros and cons of both and still usually go for the business model that they understand the most.
Now that Microsoft is trying to be Open Source friendly, their name is appearing in all kinds of articles with those dreaded words "open source" and therefore all those managers who disreguarded that entire sector of the software industry are now that much more willing to let their IT departments experiment with "open source" solutions. And us IT people who have been waiting to jump the MS ship for years actually have an audience for that great MS replacement solution we have had in our heads.
I predict that this pandering to the Open Source community might signal the downfall for MS. Unless they embrace it completely and bleed "open source", they will never be as good as their "truely open" competitors.
It would be like Coke advertising that it now tastes more like (insert cheap cola maker here)... all of those people who have been drinking Coke because they thought it was better because they knew the name will now try the alternative. If the alternative is truely better, who's gonna drink Coke anymore?
MSFT adding staff to compete against open source (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:All together now: (Score:5, Interesting)
No doubt that approach remains dominant, but it's too simplistic. The article seems to conclude that Microsoft is after hearts and minds, developers, specifically, but anyone else within earshot would help just the same. That would make the latest developments more akin to Walmart's "our valued associates" commercials, oil companies touting "green" initiatives, US car makers promising economic turnarounds with concept cars, or, if you're so inclined, presidential political political strategies that ranged from compassionate conservatism, to "restoring honor", to the latest "I'm Different (honest!)" by McCain.
Right. That's step 1, "Embrace". I'm interested to see what "Extend" is in this context. Possibly a new open source license? They've made steps down that road, but not seriously.
Re:This should be obvious... (Score:1, Interesting)
Since Steve Ballmer isn't a programmer, there's no geek pride to be stepped on here. Just watch out for the chairs. :P
Ho ho ho! The chairs! Will that joke ever stop being funny? Oh, hang on, it did... about two years ago, at least.
:-P
Listen, I hate to break this to you and *every damn person* (nothing personal, you're far from the only one) that thinks the mere mention of chairs whenever the topic of Steve Ballmer- or even just MS- comes up is funny... it's not.
The incident was in the news almost three years ago. The novelty's worn off.
Secondly, most of the "jokes" aren't; they just mention chairs.
It's as if the subject is deemed to be automatically "funny", not because it's actually funny any more but because its "funniness" is a self-reinforcing classification. People think it's funny, so people make jokes about it, which make people think it's funny, so more people make.... you get the picture.
This shouldn't be mistaken for true group-shared humour. Whether it's funny is irrelevant. People don't even bother making true jokes about it any more, they just mention chairs as a shortcut. It's canned humour... it's cargo cult humour, because most of those jokes have lost sight of what was meant to be funny in the first place. They just go through the motions of mentioning Ballmer on the assumption that it's "funny".
Do we actually think it's funny any more? Do we actually think that others find it funny any more? Or do we just all know that everyone else has implicitly agreed that this topic is considered funny?
What was I talking about.... oh yeah, chair jokes. They're so 2005
Re:enemies close (Score:3, Interesting)
This is spoken from someone working on a macbook, so don't mark me down as an anti-apple zealot. OSX eats up memory. 2GB is the minimum I'd want on a leopard machine. If you plan on using parallels at all, 3GB is likely not enough. Of course, I tend to always have tons of tabs open in safari, I run mail, a terminal, xchat, adium, textedit, itunes,and other stuff at the same time.
At the end of the day, RAM is dirt cheap. I can buy a 2GB stick for about $40. If my OS eats memory it really isn't a big deal. The real problem is that my machine can only accept so much RAM.
Phil
Google open source ? (Score:3, Interesting)
> Of course, the powers that be at Microsoft may have finally
> seen the writing on the wall and felt the pressure from Google
> enough to alter their strategy a bit.
So Google has open sourced its search engine? Cause all I've seen them open source is some fluff plus some contributions to projects that they use in order to provide their services (where the ratio between them receiving and giving is about zillion to one). No open sourcing of their golden eggs.
So please Slashdotters, stop being such bitches for Google and Apple. Try to understand that for-profit companies have only two relationships with the GPL license: If they provide services or sell hardware, they love it. They can piggy back on the stuff others have built and make a buck. If they sell software, then they hate GPL because selling GPL'ed software is damn hard. (Not impossible, but hard.)
Microsoft is playing nice with open source for three reasons:
1. Microsoft is working very hard to improve its image. Look at the number of lawsuits they have settled in the last few years vs. the 90's and you'll see a company that's trying very hard not to get any bad press.
2. Regulators have squeezed Microsoft's balls to publish their protocols and file formats and play nice with others.
3. Corporations that they sell a lot of licenses to demand they interop well with other operating systems and applications that they use.
Dejan
Re:MS Open Source is a Web Fallback (Score:5, Interesting)
Once I saw the Google search appliance in action, I started to wonder about Google's business. Sure - they're making money with advertising. But I also wonder if all these beta web apps aren't just proving grounds / test beds for enterprise services. What better way to test out your tech than ask the public to throw every conceivable (and even unimagined) kind of data at it and see how it works (as well as watch how they're making their data and your system work for them).
Re:enemies close (Score:3, Interesting)
Using big words like "elucidate" doesn't make you right. It just makes you verbose.
Empty RAM is as useful as not having the memory, because you still have to load off the drive to get data into it. If the data's already there, then it's much more useful. There's no reason to leave available RAM empty, to cache data until there's something else that needs to be there. Anything else is a misuse of memory.
The problem with Vista is that it REQUIRES all that memory. Using it as it does isn't the problem.
Re:All together now: (Score:4, Interesting)
Right. That's step 1, "Embrace". I'm interested to see what "Extend" is in this context. Possibly a new open source license? They've made steps down that road, but not seriously.
As a college student nearing graduation (and thus target to a barrage of recruitment efforts), I don't really think MS is specifically after the classic "3E" method here.
What MS realizes right now is that their company is staffed by a lot of career types - people who want to clock their hours, get their paychecks, and spend time with their family. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but they've also seen the effect of Google - a company full of people who would be willing to throw in insane hours and effort to get a cool, hip product out the door. Given MS's current obsession with *being like Google*, I suspect they want their share of the hip, dedicated, insanely motivated developer base... aka open source devs.
My school is very pro-open-source (what college isn't?), and recently MS has been sending more and more "open source evangelist" types to recruitment talks. The whole point is to convince people to join MS, because they're no longer evil, and are now doing cool open source, innovative projects!
Re:Google open source ? (Score:3, Interesting)
So Google has open sourced its search engine? Cause all I've seen them open source is some fluff plus some contributions to projects that they use in order to provide their services (where the ratio between them receiving and giving is about zillion to one). No open sourcing of their golden eggs.
Open source is not about being anti-competitive-business. If I had to simplify it down to that level it'd be closer to anti-customer/end_user-abuse. It's perfectly reasonable for a company to be very pro-open source without giving away everything. In many cases, like Adobe's flash player, it seems obvious that if it were open sourced a better implementation would come about (either from a fork or just community assistance). This doesn't exactly correlate to Google's search engine.
If Google can make a zillion-to-one ratio by their contributions to things like Firefox it's win-win for both them and their customers. Such things are most certainly successful business tactics the open source community can fawn over which Microsoft definitely feels pressure from. For many not-so-savvy computer users, Firefox is the face of open source. It's something they can use with relative ease (not much to learn after jumping from something like IE) and is - even to them - obviously better than the best-known proprietary equivalent (IE). Funding Firefox is absolutely a huge boon for open source.
Honestly, I always saw Google's golden egg to be their reputation. Even if MS or Yahoo! suddenly had a better search engine Google could ride their reputation pretty far. This reputation goes beyond simply their excellent search engine to - you guessed it - their open source support.
So please Slashdotters, stop being such bitches for Google and Apple. Try to understand that for-profit companies have only two relationships with the GPL license: If they provide services or sell hardware, they love it. They can piggy back on the stuff others have built and make a buck. If they sell software, then they hate GPL because selling GPL'ed software is damn hard. (Not impossible, but hard.)
There's technical problems about being a bitch to a company as a F/OSS advocate. The beauty of F/OSS is how it keeps companies from being able to be abusive to their customers. Now, if someone supports a company which bases their business on things such as vendor lock in... "bitches" may be an appropriate term for their fans.
If a company like Google (which provides services) can have a successful mutually beneficial existence with the open source community why should we, the open source community, not feel grateful? If we can indirectly fund Firefox by backing Google, we get an awesome F/OSS web browser. We get improvements in WINE for Photoshop and further limit the reasons against moving to Linux or BSD. Etc, etc.
1. Microsoft is working very hard to improve its image.
An image like Google's?
Regulators have squeezed Microsoft's balls to publish their protocols and file formats and play nice with others.
Right, because those are icky closed source proprietary things. Pretty much everything Google does is sufficiently open to work with everyone else's everything, so they don't get pressured as Microsoft is. Again, Microsoft wants to be like Google here. (Even if it had to be beaten into their skulls)
3. Corporations that they sell a lot of licenses to demand they interop well with other operating systems and applications that they use.
Right, pleasing their customers by supporting their costumer's needs like interoperability with other platforms. Like Google.
Beyond Trolling, do you have a point? You've said nothing to show how the GP was incorrect: Some people high up in Microsoft have finally realized that it would be financially advisable at this point to start being nice to their customers, who have come to expect such treatment thanks to companies like Google.
Microsoft could easily demonstrate support (Score:3, Interesting)
If MS wanted to support open source projects, they could devote some resources to help them. In particular:
- MinGW could use help porting to Win64
- Anyone using gcc compilers on Windows would benefit if Microsoft's debuggers supported debugging one of the gcc debug info formats, or if they helped gcc to produce their format.
I suggested these ideas to a Microsoft rep at the Flourish conference in April, but was brushed off.
What it really looks like. All Guns Blazing. (Score:1, Interesting)
Any attack that M$ can make, they will make. There's never been a weapon M$ has that they have not used and they have always done it with the most charming face they can make. Historical examples include knowingly selling inferior tools to Lotus developers and the ongoing software patent attack and continued. M$ is an evil company and they will attempt all three attacks the article mentioned and one more:
At the end of the day, M$ wants you to pay them when you use your computer. Vista, IIS, and Visual Studio all show that they don't have much that merits that pay, so they need to steal a new set of software.
Re:What it really looks like. All Guns Blazing. (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm probably going to regret this, but here goes:
- The only link I can find for 'selling inferior tools to Lotus' is to a Roughly Drafted article that, as usual, fails to cite sources. Can you provide any? I'd be interested to read them.
- You say that Microsoft actively smear advocates of freedom - can you show me one example?
- What you call co-option others call co-operation. Can you explain why you feel that Microsoft helping Novell to create an OSS version of .NET is 'poison'?
- Can you give me an example of Microsoft creating fights between OSS developers? All the ones I have seen publicised on Slashdot have been the inevitable result of the politicisation of OSS and FOSS by people such as yourself.
- We all know you hate Vista, but what in your view is wrong with IIS and Visual Studio? I'm assuming you're going to cite security issues with IIS, but IIS 6 has had only one known remote code execution hole, and even that cannot run code with more privileges than IIS itself is given. Furthermore, Visual Studio is highly rated by most who have used it.
I write this in the interest of furthering discourse, but I have to admit I'm not holding my breath. I hope you surprise me.
Re:What it really looks like. All Guns Blazing. (Score:3, Interesting)
Mostly all of this stuff, M$ cosying up to open source, is just a cynical exercise in marketing. As a lot of developers are finding open source tools cheaper for the medium and long term M$ is finding it much harder to attract them, for example silverfish is really just going nowhere. I certainly hope you wont ask me to cite developers, developers, developers, developers and the associated billy goat wild gesticulations ;).
How long ago was it that M$ was doing exactly this same sort of thing, only to be followed up a month later with a 'all your patents belong to us claim' by ballmer. Of course M$ can change, just as soon as it tosses out the old management team and replaces it with a new team, one that is capable of successfully diversifying a company with billions of dollars of capital (you would have though that was a no brainer) and converting money losing divisions (after years and years of losses) into money making divisions, ballmer's boast of being able to lose a much money as necessary to gain market share eventually has to wear a bit thin, dare we say, threadbare.
Re:All together now: (Score:3, Interesting)
But how would you co-opt the community with an open-source license? I mean, if it passes OSI's criteria, then what leverage would that give?
I don't have this completely thought out yet, but imagine something more restrictive than BSD (like GPL), but incompatible with GPL (like that should be hard). Even if it passes OSI requirements, having multiple incompatible licenses would hurt. Now, at least GPL can take BSD code, if not vice versa.
Not sure how they'd get people to use a new license; ideology isn't likely, but what if they made a good toolset open source? What if they heavily funded some Open Source projects with the requirement that they use the MS license?
To me, one effective thing to do would be to make some good tools open source, but include algorithms or whatnot that MS almost certainly has patents on. That would make it impossible to include in GPL projects. They could make it so that the patent encumbrance didn't hurt redistribution much, but made it hard to merge with other projects.
Just a thought. If they're smart, they could try something like that.