Microsoft Dilutes Open Source, Coins 'Open Surface' 191
sfcrazy writes "Now, Microsoft is coining yet another term to further confuse users — 'Open Surface.' Senior Director for Open Source Communities at Microsoft, Gianugo Rabellino, said at Oscon 2011 that customers don't care about the underlying platform as long as the APIs, protocols and standards for the cloud are open. That's when he threw the term 'open surface.'" This seems to have more than a grain of truth to it — after all, programmers have been creating open-source software with closed-source programming languages for many years, and I'm certainly more impressed by Google's willingness to let me export my data than I am turned off by the fact that they use a mix of open and closed source software to run the Google circus.
Re:"Published API" (Score:3, Informative)
"published API" (an interface that requires direct use of software providing the interface within common framework such as libraries, plugins, compilers' handling of interface definitions, etc.)
It doesn't. You can take a published API, and provide your own clean-room implementation of the same - see .NET/Mono.
Nothing short of published, open protocol is going to suffice.
http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/technical-specifications/default.aspx [microsoft.com]
Re:What is the point of the linked page? (Score:3, Informative)
Submitter is an idiot.
Anyway, for a coherent link, zdnet [zdnet.com], which has more than three sentences. What it boils down to is that the Microsoft Azure platform is not open source - but how to interact with it is well known and open. You can then run Open Source programs on top of a closed-source platform.
To be honest, I think it's a complemntary idea to Open Source; and I'm not sure that he explicitly set out to 'dilute' the term open source.