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What's the Business Case for Microsoft and Open Source?
Friend of perl developers everywhere, Jeremy Zawodny, has an intriguing question: "If you had to explain to Microsoft why they should change their
attitude toward Open Source, what would you say?" For more about this, read on...
From Jeremy: "If you had to explain to Microsoft why they should change their
attitude toward Open Source, what would you say? More to the point,
how can Microsoft benefit from better supporting or even adopting
Open Source in their business? (Replace IIS with Apache, for
example.) Does it make sense for them? Are there ways that they can
use Open Source as a competitive advantage without pissing off the
Open Source community in the process? Which of their products would
make sense on Open Source platforms? How can the Open Source
community help Microsoft? Or is this a lost cause? IBM has made it
work. Can Microsoft?
I ask these questions because I may have the chance to talk with folks at Microsoft about Open Source. And it only makes sense that I look to the community for input. So let's hear it. Flames won't help. Thoughtful answers and ideas very well could."
Microsoft is a corporation, bound to it's shareholders, and is chartered to make a profit. In order to adopt an open source mentality, it would need to be demonstrated that open source is as profitable as closed-source projects. And, in the many years of the open source movement, I have not seen many open source projects that are highly profitable. So, therefore, I don't think that there is an argument that would convince microsoft to change their approach, other than federal injunction.
Weaseling out of things is important to learn. It's what separates us from the animals... except the weasel. -
As a guy who has to support IIS in mission-critical apps, I'd have to say that it would give them a lot of credibility in the enterprise if they opened the source just for IIS, for starters. At least once a quarter, somebody in our organization asks why we're not using Apache yet, and with the IIS security problems that crop up all the time, it's getting harder to answer that question.
I know what their answer is going to be, though. They don't want to open up IIS because it will expose all of the existing installations to attacks until patches are written. They'd rather keep it closed to protect the morons who don't apply patches than to open it up to fix the rest of the holes.
What's your damage, Heather?
Unlike the pro-open source evangelists like RMS, ESR etc. the whole pro and cons OSS thing is not an ideological question for MS.
The problem is that some open source program are a threat to MS market dominance. And MS gained that dominance by ruthlessly destroying all competitors. They act shark like - see, attack, kill. This made them the no. 1 in the software business. And not the quality of their products. (Some of their products are good despite what OSS zealots say.) If they give up their attitude towards OSS, they would have to give up their attitude towards competitors. And this would destroy their market dominance, making them an ordinary software company like any other.
So, "convincing MS of the benefits of OSS" is nonsense. There is no real benefit for them and they will never be convinced. And they have at least one very good argument for their behavoir - their outstanding economic success. You cannot convert a predator to a vegetarian.
Owner of a Mensa membership card.
personally I'd be happy if MS would just adopt and adhere to open standards, even if there code wasn't open, at least then MS systems would be able to operate with other things without a lot of effort wasted on reverse engineering (is it a fault with 3rd party apps/sytems or is it an undocumented feature of MS? - most CEO's and the likes toe the MS party line so the 3rd party apps/systems are at fault, which in alot of cases is just plain wrong)
It seems to me that Linux and open source are classic disruptive technologies. In this case the technology is not the OS itself (anyone here who can't name a dozen OS's in one breath?) but the GPL, the development model, and the worldwide linking of motivated developers into a slightly-cohesive competing co-operating group.
The GPL has provided a framework whereby a self-sustaining body of software has come into being. The body of developers don't rely on traditional business models to sustain themselves.
If Linux and open source become at all successful Microsoft is going to lose billions of dollars in revenue. Heck, they probably already are. I'm suprised they haven't sent the boys around to break RMS' and Linus Torvalds' kneecaps or roll over them with a bus.
This is a 'company' or community MS can't fight using traditional business models. They can't lower their prices enough to beat free. Many of open source products are at least of equivalent quality to MS products.
They've tried running attack PR campaigns, but to some extent attacking open source is as hard as attacking any other community spirited organisation, such as (for example) the Scouts or Guides, and all the bad press has so far rebounded on MS, it's a bit transparent after all. And how do you effectively attack people who are giving things away for free? It's like trying to claim that "Meals on Wheels" volunteers are evil because the food they deliver sometimes isn't absolutely perfect.
As an aside, I was in the Science Museum in London a few years ago and I saw a gas-fire powered room fan. The idea was that when it got too hot in summer, you lit this gas-fired engine and it turned a fan to blow (now warmer) air around the room to cool you down. It was a last trump of the old monopoly gas companies trying to show their product was as versatile as the new-fangled electricity. It shows the lengths an old monopoly would go to, to try and preserve their old business model in the face of a disruptive technology.
So, in a possibly vain attempt to get back on topic... I'll be interested to hear what you have to say. Because I feel only one of a few possibilities can actually happen. One is that open source limps along as a permanent embarrassing cousin to shrink wrap proprietary software. The other is that it more or less displaces shrink wrap commercial software.
My money is on the latter, and for a simple reason. MS has sent many companies down the tube by the simple expedient of knowing that the other company will eventually make a mistake, and then they are dead. MS has made many mistakes too - but the synergy of owning the OS and some popular apps meant they've had the revenue to recover from them, whereas companies reliant on a single app only had to trip once and they were gone.
Now the tables are turned. Open source isn't going away. If it can survive and get to where it has now, on an insignificant market share and difficult to use products, it isn't going away now it has growing market share and great things like KDE3 and Moz and GNOME and open office and so on that stand up against MS' core products.
Now it's MS that has to avoid making mistakes.... In my view that classic mistake they are making is concentrating on their market share and revenue rather than the customers. Look at the PR and mindshare disaster that Licencing 6 has proven to be. Just goes to prove the old saying that once a monopoly finishes dealing with it's competitors, it starts beating up on its customers.
MS contains some of the greatest developers in the world under one roof, probably THE greatest number of developers working for a single company. The problem is that so much of their work seems to be directed towards a 'scam' - keeping MS on top and killing other companies, rather than just turning out great products. It's proven a very effective strategy so far, the issue is can it survive against a community who isn't playing the same game?
So what can you say to MS about open source in general? It'll either eat them or live alongside them. Either way, they lose. And it's as inevitable as what happened to the horse and cart when the automobile was invented, and nothing they do can really change how this game is going to play out economically. So they may as well ignore it and hope it'll go away.
What's needed is a change in the way MS developers think, with this I mean the people using Visual Studio etc to build solutions for the MS platform. If they start adapting Open Source more, then THEY will start pushing MS. With most MS platform developers being used to buying, and selling, their apps without source code and with a restrictive license, there's no demand on MS at the moment to go Open Source.
However, it's not likely to happen as long as Open Source is pushed by zealots (*cough* RMS *cough) who have nothing to say about MS (or M$) apart from some rant about how they suck, preferably in 1337 5p34k.
There are a lot of gains from sharing source and solutions, but, that culture just doesn't exist in the MS platform developers mind, thus there's little pressure on MS to even consider it as a policy.
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Fact: "30% of Microsoft its revenue comes from the Operating System licensing alone."
This means they'll do practically anything to protect that.
Linux is moving quickly to 'embrace and extend' Windows with projects like wine, wineX and CrossOffice getting very good.
The Linux-Windows war used to be a kernel war initially, but soon it will be a win32 api war. If Microsoft doesn't launch it's version of Windows with a linux kernel underneath (MacOS X system architecture), they'll loose massive market share in the bigger enterprise market and OEM's. If that happens, all will be lost for Microsoft.
They currently are in a position to create a 'Microsoft Linux'; a linux kernel with their dll-base inserted with a proprietary kernel module (kernel fork needed because of Linus' policy). In that case they would be able to create the best 'Lindows' around, possibly loose some market space with applications like IIS being replaced with Apache and such, but with again a dominant position in the Intel OS marketplace.
Microsoft is afraid of such a move, because it'll be expensive and because of the antitrust suit (although, such a move could settle it: "We will make the following version of our kernel OpenSource").
BTW, Microsoft currently already sponsors certain GNU development, like with Perl on NT.
Conclusion:
- A Linux system running windows apps is a huge opportunity for the enterprise market and OEM's.
- If that happens MS will have lost their foundation. Either they try to make the ultimate mix of their Intellectual Property and the OpenSource world, or they'll face utter destruction. They have a window of oppertunity here, but wine is getting better fast!
- Getting them to understand this is quiet simple: they initially had the same fear of the Internet and the old MS guys understand the comparisation: the Internet was a chaotic and anarchistic network, Bill Gates said "they would never invest in it". Time has proven the contrary.
To beat a Microsoft Linux, we just need to work a little harder on wine and its integration in the desktop environments.
www.microsoftlinux.com
It's hard to believe that, even among "the Community" itself, so many people are barking up the wrong tree. The question asked about open source software, not free software. Obviously Microsoft can't justify free (beer) software to its shareholders. The relevant, and more subtle, question is whether Microsoft can justify releasing its source code. Releasing source code is distinct from giving away software.
Bear in mind, that Microsoft already does reveal its source code to people who pay enough. However, if it supplied its source code to anyone who bought the built product (even with side-conditions that the source could not be used to commercial advantage etc etc), that would still constitute open source software. And the advantage to Microsoft would be many, many more knowledgeable people finding bugs. And the disadvantages would be that someone might pinch some ideas from it to help a competing product and also that a million custom patches for their products would appear, and be sure to interfere with each other.
Any sufficiently self-referential snowcloned
open source != free as in beer
open source != free as in speech
Open source means the source is open, yes, this means it might be used without permission. open source to me is sharing information, not giving away work for free. Allow people to view the sourcecode, but license and charge for the app.
Mostly like any HTML page is today. Design theft occurs occasionally, but still there are plenty of people who pay web developers to build a site for them. If HTML code was compiled and unreadable, what would the web be today? Didn't most of us learn website coding by copying HTML/CSS/Script snippets from other pages? Has the webdesign industry died because of it?
Problem is, we (as in MS developers) are used to HTML being open source, but anything else must be hidden or someone will steal it for sure!
We need a change of culture and way of thinking is all.
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Microsoft is the only successful proprietary software product company. That is, they're the only company that can sell shrink-wrap software (or user licenses), walk away from them, and still make billions of dollars.
Every other proprietary software company must back up their products with service and support or they're kaput. These are the companies you can possibly convince to open source since their true business is supporting their products or supplying services based on them.
Microsoft going open source would be throwing away an extremely lucrative and unique monopoly.
* Games are an exception, and you may find some niche companies with a similar business model.
3. The Access back-end.
As I said, nobody buys Access because it's a great database.
Yeah, and they'll never improve that back end because it drives sales of SQL server. Let me make this perfectly clear: making Access a better product would cannibalize sales of SQL Server, so MS will never make it good
Making good products is at odds with market segmentation. This is one of the fundamental benefits of free software- there is no market segmentation for code so the perfect never becomes the enemy of the good, as we see in the Access situation.
microsoftword.mp3 - it doesn't care that they're not words...
It is not in Microsoft's interest to change to open source. They have a tremendously successful business model making them one of the richest companies in the world. They are the sole-source supplier for the most popular computer software in the world. There is no rational reason for them to switch to selling and/or supporting open-source software.
Sure, we can all bitch about Microsoft products' security holes. We can gripe about performance and architectural issues. And many of those complaints are valid ones, but Microsoft is not in business to produces the most secure, high-performance, well-designed software in the world. Microsoft is in business to make money -- which they do very well.
The only rational points to argue are:
1. Microsoft's continued attacks on the open source movement are damaging their credibility and hurting their customers, many of whom want to integrate open source products into their Microsoft networks.
2. Microsoft's data storage and transmission formats should be opened up to allow value-added third-party vendors to produce products that use and manipulate the data. All that leaving the formats closed accomplishes is a delay while third-parties reverse engineer them.
3. Continued battles with the open source community are going to result in more public outcry for anti-trust action.
4. Microsoft has a PR problem right now due to their insistence on software audits at cash-strapped school systems, security holes, the Justice Department case against them, etc. Extending an olive branch to the open source movement might help reduce that PR problem.
Above all, remember that Microsoft is a for-profit business. They aren't going to get teary-eyed when you tell them about the comaraderie and inspiration that you feel when working on open-source products. They don't want to be part of some big, happy family. They want to rule the world.
IBM has changed its business model: they no longer sell software products; they sell a "solution to a problem", which they use some of their own software products to solve. They provide a service, which is what their customers need, and it provides them with steady, subscription-style income that fosters a better and more honest relationship with their clients than the hit-and-run attitude developed by salespeople who only need to sell a product once. Plus, because it's clear from the outset that they're going to be selling a service, customers don't get pissed off (as they do with Microsoft) having to pay continuous fees. Make no mistake, both companies charge continuously: however, Microsoft charges for support (which gets people pissed off -- the product is supposed to work without help!) while IBM charges for the service (which includes support when things go wrong). It's the same thing, but with important psychological differences on both sides.
Microsoft is already seeing the value of selling services rather than products (spurred by the success of subscription-based AOL) and is slowly moving to software-as-a-service. However, their legacy of selling expensive products is making software-as-a-service very unpopular with their customers, who see it only as a way of charging many times for a product they used to buy only once. By changing their model to being entirely service-based, they would be free to use open source wherever it happened to be better than their in-house solutions (e.g. Apache) without it costing them any revenue. They could then contribute to the open-source products they use just like everybody else does.
It's interesting to see Apple and how OS X uses an Open Source kernel (Darwin). Why shouldn't Microsoft be able to do the same thing?
They can keep closed sourced programs and user interface portion, but why not open up the kernel?
Ciryon