Slashdot Mirror
What Should Microsoft's Open Source Strategy Be?
JWinterboy asks: "I'm guessing that everyone here has a valid criticism of Microsoft's attacks on, and approach towards the Open Source model. To me, that begs the question of what we think would be an "appropriate" reaction from Microsoft towards the Open Source model. It doesn't have a service arm, so IBM's approach isn't really viable. At the same time, non-service related business models haven't fared very well.
What would we like to see Microsoft do? How can it work with the Open Source community, leverage its resources, and still make a buck?"
why not open up the code for the stuff they don't make money on? heh open up IE, Messenger, etc. Don't allow anyone to distibute their own versions, but let people look and submit bug fixes etc. It would not be a huge step, but i'd be a step in gaining people's trust
I believe sex is highly over rated... unless it involves me
What MS should do to work well with Open Source:
a) Document API's thoroughly, and keep the docs up to date
b) Standards: Microsoft is frequently the first one to implement a standard or to make it mainstream. As an example, XSLT comes to mind. AFAIK, IE was the first browser to support XSLT. As the first big boys there, they usually claim the right to make modifications to a standard or to fill in details in the standard. They could win a lot of goodwill merely by consult other companies and open source developers before as they implement the standard. This will greatly reduce (though probably not eliminate) the feeling of railroading that we all feel when MS' software doesn't follow standards, and we all have to deal with it.
c) Document and admit mistakes and bugs. One of the most infuriating things about Microsoft software, is that it either doesn't do what it says, as in undocumented behavior and bugs, or cryptic error messages saying things don't work unless the OS is configured right (which is true ipso facto, but somewhat accusatory, and certainly not helpful). I think this happens mostly because they can get away with it, and writing thorough documentation for your programs is not nearly as satisfying or financially rewarding as designing and writing the code itself. They could again improve goodwill if they were responsive to outside developer's questions about these bugs and behaviors, rather than being dismissive.
I'm sure there are more, but these sure would make it easier for an outsider to like Microsoft.
Personally, I don't see how Microsoft -- a closed and proprietary company -- could ever cooperate with Open Source Software.
Like Apple?
Besides, Microsoft has already made clear that the GPL is a threat to capitalism; hence, their desire to have nothing to do with it.
Well, it is. Now, whethor or not a threat to capitalism is a good or bad thing is left to the reader to determine. The bottom line is, there is still no proven way for coders to make money off of GPL's software. Red Hat makes money, true, but little of that money makes it to the major contributers of Linux. Capitalism is about making money. The GPL is about programming for fun and community innovation. They are logical opposites.
There is no longer anything that can be done with computers that is nontrivial and clearly legal. -- Paul Phillips
They continue to write their closed source, proprietary software, but they adopt open protocols, without trying to co-opt them with hidden API's. They stop adding Feature Bloat, and get serious about security, and the overall quality of their products.
Your Servant, B. Baggins
Personally I don't think they could do it. See the movie Revolution OS, which has ESR, RMS, Linus T, and Bruce P. They actually dealt with Billy gates back in teh 70's about this issue. Billy said "Open Source is a bad business model" back then. How can anyone make money off of it. It is a good movie to see if you want a better understanding of where they all were coming from.
Only 'flamers' flame!
Actually, it will have to be a lot better than windows, or else there have to be other compelling reasons to switch, like the cost of hardware vs the MS Tax.
Which MS is desperately trying to avoid as a fate.
"It is a greater offense to steal men's labor, than their clothes"
For one, Apple does not use the GPL, it uses BSD licensed products.
besides, who says that making money and having fun is mutually exclusive?
Guess what. Redhat, Mandrake, SuSe, and a host of others WANT to make money. They may have started as a fun project, and they may make innovations along the way: are they bad?
In fact, I bet Apple would love to see a modest investment, say $6 Bln - a fraction of MS' current warchest, estimated at >$30Bln - into Darwin. An investment into an OSS platform might be part of a settlement that would satisfy the 9 states. Maybe not, but it's worth a try.
A solid OSS OS like Darwin, with support from Apple and MS, available for X86 and PPC would be a considerable competitor to Linux. A lot of corporate types would feel comfortable about using this where they currently feel unsure about Linux. MS could sweeten it a lot by offering their Office Suite on this OS, but insist that they'll never offer it on Linux. This would backup Bill's contention that there's a healthy ecology between OSS and proprietary that the GPL breaks.
MS could, at some point, come out with their own Darwin-based OS with proprietary kernel enhancements integrated into it. They already have a start with the CLR ported to FreeBSD. This new OS could use a Windows GUI, but be mostly Darwin underneath. The corporations that want to have the benefits of running OSS would snap up such a Darwin based offering from MS. It would represent the best of both worlds. The advantages of community development and the testing and deep pockets of MS behind it.
This new OS might be more appropriate for Net appliances, web servers, and a number of things where *BSD is showing to be superior. Heck, it might compete head-to-head with Windows, but they wouldn't really have to position it that way at first.
MS could move all the people in their development groups who might be sympathetic to Open Source over to these projects, energizing the Windows people to compete.
Now, it seems that the MS culture is one where they don't feel they have to compete on engineering as MS can depend on their power to intimidate and eliminate competitors. This fosters a sick culture of non-competition.
I think companies that are afraid of internal competition don't recognize that it's better to compete internally than to leave the opportunities up to your external competitors.
I doubt that MS would ever do any of this, however.
Darwin runs on x86 as well.
The interesting thing about Apple is that MacOS X is *not* open source, although the Darwin kernel component is. The Quartz graphics engine, the Aqua gui layer, and all of the traditional MacOS apis, are not open source.
Microsoft has a product called Interix, which consists of a Unix subsystem that plugs into the Windows 2000/XP kernel, plus a large set of Unix utilities. Microsoft has open sourced their versions of gcc, gdb, etc, because they have to, but they haven't open sourced the BSD based utilities that come with Interix, even though they'd lose little by doing so.
If Microsoft open sourced the entire Interix product (utilities and subsystem), then their operating system would be like Apple's, with an open source Unix component, and a larger proprietary component containing all of the APIs that are special to Windows.
Doug Moen
I have written a truly remarkable program which this sig is too small to contain.
Embrace and extend. What else? Or were you wondering what their strategy should be if they did NOT want to dominate the whole freaking world? That's kind of academic.
In fact, the strategy they have is a damned good one. It'll be even better if nobody clues to it in time, which is why I particularly delight in outing it here. This is my interpretation, and they may possibly phrase it differently- or not. Maybe in the NEXT antitrust fiasco this will come to light.
MICROSOFT'S OPEN SOURCE STRATEGY
This. Is. What. They. Are. Doing.
Note that it plays to their strengths, including the strengths they've learned in the antitrust trial, of barratrous lawsuits and dragging things out endlessly, and note the brilliance of embracing and extending, not the openness of collaboration, but the concept of a viral license. This is brilliant conceptual work on their part, it really is.
But it does not have to succeed- because they really need people who are KNOWN to have agreed to their license. They can't really go around suing everyone who writes open source and dragging them into court and saying, "You DID agree to the Shared Source license, didn't you? Everybody does! You had to have!". That won't fly- people who can legitimately say they've never agreed to that license are in a position of strength.
However, people who have in fact agreed to their viral Shared Source license, EVER, are fucked. And can never be allowed to participate in open source or free software development- because of the legal exposure.
Given this state of affairs, why would Microsoft ever need to find another open source strategy? This is unquestionably the best one for their goals. Yes, it's evil. And your point is?
Personally, in 6 continuous years of running Linux with ext2fs, I've never had a dataloss problem.
Maybe this is one of those "then you don't use it right" things. So what am I doing wrong?
Bob-
The Ludwig von Mises Institute. The reasoning individuals economics
"Mozilla will hopefully change the story, but it's YEARS too late in an industry that works on Internet time. "
No it's not too late at all.
Right now I prefer mozilla to IE on my windows box. It loads faster, it renders faster, it has more features then IE and it crashes less. No I am not kidding it's true. I honestly don't know how people get along without tabs and gestures they simply don't know what they are missing. Not only that but Moz does not cram advertising down my throat whenever I make a typo in the URL bar, it does not have crypic and misleading "options" like "enable profile assistant" and "show friendly HTTP messages". In other words it does not lie to me and try and fool me into giving up my privacy.
All we have to do is to make this knowledge widespread. Tell everybody you know that mozilla is better, faster and safer then IE because it's the truth. IE and Mozilla are designed for different things. Mozilla is designed to deliver the best web browsing experience possible IE is designed to deliver advertising to people who use windows, to increase hit counts at MSN, to get people to sign up for hotmail, to get people to sign up for passport. Different products for different purposes.
If you want to browse the web use mozilla if you want to receive adversing and help Bill Gates make more money use IE.
War is necrophilia.
Consider the following things:
1. Windows and MS's major OSs are pretty unique, but at the same time are'nt nearly as advanced at the core as other major OSs, meaning a) nobody would want to steal it, and b) if somebody did, it would probably be easy to catch anyone if they did.
2. All the software outside of the base OS really does'nt provide MS with income. Media player, IE, directx, et. al. are ad-ons MS uses to get market share in those realms. If open, the worst that could happen is somebody makes it better and MS steals the ideas.
3. With thousands of programmers pouring over source code, security issues could be identified much quicker, allowing MS to (eventually) shed one of it's major banes
4. Somebody might actually figure out a way to make windows stable. MS buys the rights to include this in their Windows.. wow, they have improvements at a very marginal cost.
5. MS actually does something that makes geeks happy.
The Internet is generally stupid
ARRRRRRRGH!
I've heard this argument so many times, and I can't really understand while people continue to believe it.
Yes, Netscape has been inferior to IE for many years now, but to say that IE gained dominant market share because of that is to ignore history and to reverse cause and effect. Netscape didn't lose because it is inferior; Netscape is inferior because M$ forced it out of competition -- illegally, as the poster admits --, drying up its revenues ("cutting off Netscape's air supply", in M$'s own words), making it nearly impossible to invest in improvements of its product.
Recall that the first versions of IE (versions 1 & 2) were abonimably bad, universally regarded as far worse than Netscape. Version 3 was good enough to work with, but still the clear consensus was that Netscape's version 3 was far better. And yet it was around this time that M$ entered into all the exclusive deals and illegal shenanigans that impeded or closed off Netscape's means of distribution. IE's market share increased rapidly not because of its quality, but simply due to its easy availability. At the time, Netscape was trying to make money from its browser, and needed the revenue to finance further development, but as market share fell, they started to lose money and lay off employees.
It wasn't until version 4 of the two browsers that IE was widely regarded as fairly equal in quality with Netscape (not better, but just about the same). But by this time, IE was bundled with every copy of Windows, impossible to remove, and OEM's and ISP's were contractually forbidden to give Netscape equal availability. Netscape never had a chance to recover.
This where many Slashdotters answer with an argument that assumes that all the world's a geek. So IE was the default setting, they say. So the icon was on the desktop, and you might have to go download Netscape, they say. Then couldn't people use Netscape after all, if it was so good and that's what they wanted? Surely you can change your default settings! Surely you can, and a geek does it all the time, but it is an empirically well-established fact that most users don't. That's not to assert that they're dumb or lazy; for whatever reason, most users never change their defaults, even if there are superior alternatives, and to believe otherwise is to display vast ignorance of the facts about software consumers. And so whoever has the power to control the defaults has significant power to determine which products get used. M$ knows it, and that's why they did everything they could, illegal if necessary, to use that power.
What I miss in many M$ apologists is the recognition of lost opportunity -- how much better software could be in today's world if there were a real opportunity for competition. Yes, a lot of the alternatives really and truly suck, but don't just think about the way the world is; think about how the world could be if the creators of innovative, quality software had a genuine chance to compete.
Always keep a sapphire in your mind