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Microsoft's Reaction to OSS Adoption
inode_buddha writes "Eric S. Raymond has the eighth "Halloween" memo available here. It looks like Microsoft is really beginning to notice the national and corporate movement towards FS/OSS, and is reacting accordingly."
Looks to me like this has a lot to do with perception. PArt of MS' deal is that they have lots of mindshare. If the people realize that they HAVE options in terms of office and OS, then they certainly will at least explore those options. MS needs to keep people thinking that MS is the only way to get something done, so this memo is no surprise IMHO. Interesting though anyway.
The memo is mildly interesting, but ESR is growing more shrill and childish with each passing year. GOOD LORD a company is exploring how to compete with other products?? ALERT THE PRESS.
Sheesh, maybe Microsoft is good for some things, and OSS is good for other things. And to talk like Microsoft is going to "lose" with $40 billion dollars in the bank is ludicrous at best.
Fah, ESR is not as annoying as RMS (that is, of course, impossible), but he seems to be heading down the path.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
I find this 'fear' quite enlightening. It's about time MS felt *some* form of competition. They were getting a little too miserly and stifling innovation. (i.e. HOW long has Mozilla had tabbed browsing and ad-suppression? *When* might IE?)
It's also nice that quite a few companies, such as Lindows.com, are taking a bite out of MS's Law Creation/Politician Acquisition fund by suing them over patent abuse and/or common-name copyrighting.
Hopefully the "little people" in the market will have more of an effect on MS than the DoJ.
Yes. Some of his comments are just childish. "We'll start by learning how to type the word "become" correctly. We promise." I mean, come on. Everyone makes mistakes.
main(c,r){for(r=32;r;) printf(++c>31?c=!r--,"\n":c<r?" ":~c&r?" `":" #");}
I'm going to have to stop writing now before I smash my keyboard with rage at how much I hate ESR.
Who cares any more? Clearly, free software has now risen to the point where competing software makers take it into account in their planning. Eric Raymond periodically gets his hands on some entirely routine memo from Microsoft and spins it into some apocalyptic confrontation between Good and Evil. He needs to lay off the Lord of the Rings, I think.
Actually, the memo is funny in its concern. Basically, it deals with the fact that when some government considers switching a few servers to Linux, or some legislator proposes an open-source-only policy, Slashdot and the rest of the Linux media turn it into "INDIA SWITCHING TO LINUX!" AND "NORWAY SWITCHING TO LINUX!" It's not nearly as much deliberate spin as it is complete journalistic incompetence and the inability to read linked articles, but it's an effective enough fUD technique that Microsoft feels compelled to respond to it. ;-)
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Miscrosoft is just behaving like any other company would when threatened by competition, be it OSS or other...
... running a normal business. Microsoft is a business that is looking to make money. Goverments and Corporations moving to Linux and Star Office means less money for them. They are trying circumvent that. Can you blame them?
This is an unusual Halloween memorandum in that it's not particularly redolent of evil.
Was this newsworthy? Microsoft definitely does not have a monopoly on servers. Also they are beginning to lose their grasp of a monopoly on the desktop. They realize this, why doesn't everyone else.
"It takes many nails to build a crib, but one screw to fill it."
Now look at the last couple of documents. They are totally different beasts of virtually no importance or interest; ESR simply calls them Halloween documents in order that they will garner interest on the back of the original docs. Look at the seventh one - it is the result of a market research project. Why is this grouped under the same umbrella as MS talking about unethical monopolistic practices?
Eric: When you get some interesting, shocking documents leaked from Microsoft, please feel free to publicise your Halloween documents. If all you get is this boring tripe, feel free to publish it, but just call it "leaked MS email" or something.
In short, I agree with the parent - get a fucking life ESR.
I don't really see anything that sinister here. It looks like a typical memo defining a procedure for responding with "one voice" to a business challenge that Microsoft faces. Frankly, I'd be surprised if they weren't having these kind of discussions.
Some of the comments seem unecessarily shrill to me. Example:
Name the key contacts within the gov't
{Translation: Who can we suborn?}
Providing a list of people to contact does not imply suborning (from m-w.com "to induce secretly to do an unlawful thing") to me. How is it unlawful to contact a customer who might be going to a competitor and trying to convince them to reconsider?
Don't get me wrong - I'm excited to see governments looking at Linux and Open Source as an alternative. I just don't think it serves anybody's best interest to take a pretty routine memo and try to turn it into the Pentagon Papers.
** The opinions expressed here are my own, and do not reflect those of my employers - past, present, or future**
My question is, if Linux overtakes MacOS on the desktop, can Microsoft continue to justify to it's shareholders the reasons behind not making Office for Linux?
So, this is an interesting and obvious question that has been kicked around for some time. As a M$ shareholder I have made this argument before that if Microsoft would cease attempting to make everything fit within the Windows paradigm and start writing quality software that meets consumer demand, they would be a much more powerful and wealthier company. Hey, all one has to do is look at the profitability of the Macintosh Business unit at Microsoft which is doing quite nicely thank you, making software for a completely different platform than Windows. In fact, I find the Office X for OS X to be a superior product to the Windows version of Office given the tie-ins to OS X functionality and rendering.
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Comment removed based on user account deletion
This sound's like Micro$oft's attempt to keep the news of OSS acceptance into the world at bay, and if not then to debunk it's worth in the eyes of the news savy readers. Joe User doesn't give a rat's @ss about this, but one day he will finally see something different of the shelves and the advertisement flyer's of CompUSA and Best Buy that wasn't there before. The readers of /. already know the benefits of OSS and Linux, but Joe User will need to be kicked and dragged to see the light, and it will burn.
Everyone knows that OSS will be more wide accepted when the user will not have to decrypt configuration files. It might, and I repeat, MIGHT be better to go to an XML based configuration file so they could also be editable through a, dare I say it, GUI? Don't flame me, but most people, including I prefer to use GUIs since it's almost idiot proof so I don't miss-type that comma or underscore. We also know how powerful the command line is when we know what we want. Again, Joe User doesn't want to see a command line. I don't much about cars, but I can drive my truck all day long, refill with gas and continue of my way. That's the way Joe User wants it, and should be. I prefer Linux because it has many many more knobs for me to tweak to my liking.
Anywho, let me get back to the path about MS trying to subvert the truth about OSS. OSS will be more widely accpetable when Joe Admin User can configure his machines easier with a GUI instead of configuration files and look-n-feel feels more "professional" and maybe more high-tech looking instead of the Fisher Price look-n-feel. Yes, eye candy does go a long way.
Now... I am ready for your bashing.
Was that necessary either?
Not to mention that their security 'sucks dead maggots through a straw.' Having run out of actual things to call Microsoft upon, it's nice to see the bulwarks of OSS are reduced to such as this.
Maybe one of these days I'll try out some dead-equine-flagellation myself; it seems to be awful fun. Happens so much around here, I MUST be missing out on something....
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Considering that ESR *writes* these phoney memos from microsoft, I doubt that.
That's it. These aren't the plans to Death Star, and no Bothans have died so Eric Raymond could ridicule a misspelled word. Except maybe for the first one or two, they're utterly routine corporate memos.
The fact that much of Raymond's fan base has never had a job causes them to read a memo from a sales head saying, "Go out there and fight!" and freak out. "M$ is plotting to destroy Lunix!!! To the X-wings!" There's nothing the "opposition" is going to get out of these things.
What I'm listening to now on Pandora...
Is Microsoft actually dumb enough to write memo after memo about something they now have admitted is their biggest threat and allow all of these memos to leak so the opposition can read them?
In short, yes, they are. Never worked at the enterprise level, have you?
Exactly how else are you going to communicate with divisions that have over 5,000 people in them in order to set policy and implement proceedures than send out memos and other documentary evidence? Direct communication doesn't work over around 30 people in an office, that is why there are entirely different managment techniques for very small buisness situations and mid sized business scenarios.
As for "allowing them to leak", when you have hundreds of people in on a memo, some of whom might have their own motives for wanting to see one idea/department/division spun a certain way, it is exceedingly difficult to keep that information from going public. Just ask the government, which is constantly leaking information, sometimes intentionally, but just as frequently unintentionally.
Microsoft used to be a sure path to making millions quickly for an employee, but the stock options aren't worth what they used to be. It is not surprising to me at least that the level of employee loyalty might drop. Further, this might actually be a case of employee loyalty. If you really were devoted to your company, but were convinced it was going the wrong direction, this might be a way to help force the situation.
I am not saying that I know that these memos are real, but thinking that Microsoft just wouldn't let this happen isn't realistic. All you need is a couple of people at the right level and it is exceedingly hard to stop this kind of thing. It can be done, but requires tight compartmentalization, which is very hard to do with large scale policies that you are implementing across entire enterprise groups.
7. What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence.
What's missing? What am I missing?
The ability for my wife to walk into Best Buy and purchase "Hoyle Card Games". Or "Reader Rabbit Preschool".
Or buy a digital camera and use the included picture organizing software that my in-laws bought.
Of course, Quicken is unavailable. GnuCash is not a particularly "friendly" substitute for most people either. And until I can pay my bills over the Internet, it wouldn't be a substitute for me either.
I really could go on and on, but the point is that Linux is not mainstream and you can't get mainstream software.
Sometimes it's best to just let stupid people be stupid.
The fact that this solution is complex, and there is no gurantee that all present and future applications will actually work on citrix?
GOOD LORD a company is exploring how to compete with other products??
M$ doesn't compete with other products, it eliminates them. When it can't eliminate the competition (in the case of linux), it FUDs or sues them to death. I strictly believe to compete with a product is to make a better product. That's just my $0.02
Sure you will get flamed but you are right. They may suck as a company but on occasion, they can accidentally create (or buy) something decent.
Tisha Hayes
This makes no sense at all. The annotation is not going to stop Microsoft filing a suit, it might provide a defense but it certainly isn't going get the case thrown out.
Microsoft is not going to file a case like that for damages, if they did file the case it would be to shut the squirt up. The fact they have choosen not to do this indicates that either they don't care or they realise that that type of tactic is likely to give more to feed ESR's ego.
What it comes down to is that the comments are just another way that ESR uses the documents to feed his ego.
Looking for an Information Security student project suggestion?
Try http://dotcrimeManifesto.com/
from a pure valuation standpoint, the returns that MS share holders recieve come from the monopoly tag team in both upstream and downstream markets (the OS and the application). to weaken that link would dramatically change the dynamics of the free cash flow forcasts going forward.
that is to say nothing of the signalling effect that it would have in the market. begining to sell office for linux be taken as a very pessimistic signal about MS management's view of their relative strenth.
the stock would take a beating and the lawsuits would fly. at this point i'm pretty sure it would do nothing if not make a train wreck of the equity value.
That may be a valid reason, but if he cannot come up with better annotations that what he used this time, I move that the underlying memo was not worth the trouble.
Sometimes I get the impression that ESR has painted himself into a corner with these Halloween documents. The first two were absolutely worthwhile, but as time goes on he seems to feel obliged to produce follow-ups at almost regular intervals (advance notice for the trolls: please don't take that literally), whether or not he's got something substantial to comment about. All in all, I think he is doing both himself and a lot of others a considerable disservice with that. When promoting Linux at work, for instance, I do not want to be confronted with "Look at how childish these Linux zealots are. How can we ever entrust our valuable data to software produced by such people." argumuents. Yes such arguments are silly. Yes, they can be debunked. But every minute doing the latter is a minute not spent on promoting Linux.
Linux user since early January 1992.
Her boss will find it much better that she can't use company time to play "Hoyle Card Games", organise her pictures and manage her finances.
On the other hand, not having to pay for the next Windows and the next Office on your wife's workstation may really call her boss attention.
Nobody is talking about personal machines. Those will follow in some years, with the growing demand by corporate users to have exactly the same tools at home.
I guess mileage may vary. We abandoned Citrix/winframe years ago and never looked back. As a means of sharing or forwarding apps across an international VPN, it totally sucked^h^h^h^h^h^hrefused to work properly for this corp.
I could use stronger words to describe how much I dislike all Citrix products, but I've used the word "sucks" too much recently. My New Years resolution was to stop saying
- sucks
- it's all good
- believe it
this year. So far, so good.-- clvrmnky
Yes, it is true, Microsoft actually did write these memos.
They were written by a group of individuals in the DTPOSF department (Distract Those Pesky Open Source Flunkies) and leaked to Slashdot for the purpose of slowing down progress.
By getting all of us to stop what we're doing, comment on how stupid they are and how much they phear us, they have accomplished exactly what they were organized to do - distract us.
So quit your gawking and get back to coding, we have an empire to destroy...
---
Dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with Windows(tm).
It may take a few more steps to work on Debian, but it would still run just fine.
And, of course, Debian (and other unsupported distro) developers would use the tried-and-true trick of making an "installer package", which runs the MS install software and then automatically performs whatever tweaks are necessary to make it go. The result would be:
The installer would prompt you to insert the MS CD and in a few minutes you'd have a working Office X11 install.
I predict that such a package would hit the Debian unstable repositories about two days after MS released Office X11.
MS can pick one distro and support only that one; it won't slow the rest of the x86 Linux world much at all.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Ladies and Gentlemen, this is an example of begging the question: the real, properly-used description.
"Linux is not mainstream because Linux is not mainstream."
Of course, in the process of begging the question, you have thrown up a nice shiny straw man too.
The original statement was "there are no user level applications to speak of," which is clearly bunk.
Thanks for playing.
LadyStar - Your Magical and Mysterious Adventure Awaits
the product will be pirated on a massive scale (or copied in an infringing manner) from the very instant it is available.
And this is different from the Windows version how?
I built a machine for my brother-in-law for Christmas and installed OpenOffice.org on it, rather than an infringing copy of Office (yes, I have a copy of Office XP, purchased for $2 by my brother in Macedonia; no, I don't use it). I pointed out that OpenOffice.org does everything he needs, can read and write MS Office files and should work just fine. He called his brother and got a copy of MS Office to install. Why? Not because he found OpenOffice.org to be inadequate -- he didn't even try it -- but because pirating MS Office was so trivially easy and such a normal thing to do that he thought the idea of even trying to use something legal was just silly.
The fact is, home users almost invariably steal their software, and business users generally pay for it. There's no reason to suppose that the underlying operating system platform would have any effect on this state of affairs.
Note to ACs: I usually delete AC replies without reading them. If you want to talk to me, log in.
Cost will keep corporations from doing wide spread deployment of Citrix. Cost of servers. Cost of licenses for Citrix. Cost of licenses for Terminal Server. Microsofts licensing scheme is per user, so even if you have 20 users running Excel off a Citrix server, You still pay for 20 copies of Excel. Or worse, you have 50 users authorized to use Citrix, but have a limit of 20 connects, I've seen some agreements that lead me to believe that MS wants to have a license for all 50 users, even though only 20 could use it at once.
Citrix is good for some situations, but as a general replacement for all corporate use, it is to expensive.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
This Ghandi quote seems like a prudent way to start the article. many self confessed geeks see the OSS cause as a revolution of comparable importance with revolutions of a more conventional political nature. Micro$oft can be seen as the established power structure which has grown greedy and corrupt, and OSS is the 'will of the people', wishing to wrestle it'self free from tyrany.
It is easy to get caught up in the spirit of jihad, but if the 'war' against Micro$oft's monopoly is to succeed then such an endulgance is counter-productive. M$ is just another corporation going about it's business. I expect that many of it's employees truly believe that they are making the world a better place. The fact that many people disagree with M$ can be countered with the standard corporate arguments: 'we generate wealth for all', 'we drive innovation', and 'you are all un-American commies and terrorists'.
It appears to me that the struggle between OSS and proprietary software is just one of the front lines in the struggle between corporate consumerism and everything else. When an entity as large and powerful as M$ begins to take the threat seriously one can expect things to heat up. Already we see M$ and others bending the machinery of states to their will, such things are done in the name of freedom, security and prosperity. It is tempting to ask: whose freedom, security and prosperity?
I guess this is turning in to a bit of a rant, so I'll wind it up now. As the article states we have moved into the 3rd stage (see above quote) of the struggle. Don't be tempted into thinking that OSS is therefore halfway to winning. I think we can expect future Skylarovs to be imprisoned, more DMCAs and some laughably draconian laws enacted in the name of freedom on the behalf of the corporate opressors. This is as much a struggle of ideologies as of competing technologies or development models, and one the general public is totally unaware of. I think OSS will win the day, but it will take decades and participants on both sides will suffer.
Disclaimer: I am not a communist, terrorist or anti-capitalist. Any opinions expressed here are just that: opinions. If you don't like it then reply or mod me down
"Oh! Oh! Br'er Bear! Don't! Don't throw me in that briar patch!"
Gee, it's convenient for a company facing a court decision on anti-trust grounds, and a decision on whether or not to be independently pursued at a state level, to have this big, scary, Linux monster under their bed. Isn't it?
-- Terry
This is the eighth leaked letter concerning reactions to OSS! If MS is not using these letters to carefully manuever the public, they have all got to be totally stupid. For us to believe that they aren't would make us even more so.
Here is the introduction:
-----
Everybody remember the Gandhi quote?
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Gentlemen and ladies, this newest leaked memo from Microsoft confirms that we are advancing through GandhiCon Three. As usual, highlights are in red and comments are in {green, also bracketed for the color-blind}. Also as usual, the memo is otherwise unedited and exactly as I received it, with one exception: in the text version I was sent, the last bullet item was inexplicably positioned after the sender sig "Orlando".
Some analysis follows the memo.
-----
Gandhi's words *are* wise, but the problem it that we (the OSS community) are the ones who are laughing. We're so secure in the fact that OSS can't be touched in the traditional method that we're just sitting back and taking every inch of their retreat as a victory. But it's a tactical retreat! Clearly MS is doing something tricky with palladium, and the gods know what else. I'd be not so quick to dismiss the "inexplicably positioned" bullet item, nor would I say the "then we win" step is so near.
I don't mean to sound paranoid or anything, but it's bloody foolish to be overconfident.
have any of these things really been creditible after the first one? ESR is once again leading everyone around in circles. ESR wants to be king of a new world order, but his problem is that there is no new world order. So he is trying to create a us versus them world, so we will all rally behind him.
====
Crudely Drawn Games
Well, there are two separate issues here.
The first is that Microsoft most likely would not rewrite Office for Linux, ever. It simply costs too much. Office X by the way has not been very profitable, in fact, it may not even have been profitable at all, I seem to remember Microsoft bitching at Apple telling them to sell more copies of a competing OS just so they could make back what they spent on it.
It's also kind of a moot point, as Office already runs OK on Linux via Wine. If Microsoft wanted to "make" Office for Linux, all they'd need to do is ship binaries compiled with WineLib. A weeks work for one or two people, at most. Of course they'd probabably want to improve Wine if they were going to do that, which is fortunately now LGPLd.
In short, I think it'll be a cold day in hell before Microsoft release Office for Linux, but even if they don't, it doesn't matter, because you can just buy the Windows version and use that. Office X is certainly good, but it shows what Joel Spolski has been saying for some time, namely that rewrites rarely pay off. This all assumes MS can keep their lead on Office suites of course. OpenOffice isn't as good as MS Office yet, not by a long way (he says as OO segfaults on him yet again [sigh]), but Office hasn't really changed a great deal lately. It's not inconceivable that OO could catch up.
What do you mean? Am I claiming that Linus Torvalds (or whoever you imagine to direct "the linux community", the Linux analog of Bill Gates or Steve Ballmer) directs his employees to participate in public forums to post derogatory comments about MSFT products at his expense? No, I'm not claiming that.
You missed the point of my observation that a corporate entity (MSFT) conducts organized campaigns of misleading the public by hiding the origin of the "public opinion poll" or "grass roots campaign" or "think tank whitepaper".
Sure, the linux community does all of the things that MSFT does - but on an individual-by-individual basis. I've posted pro-linux articles in public forums. I've written anti-MSFT whitepapers. But I've done it by myself, on my own time, I wasn't paid for it, I haven't claimed to be someone else, I didn't copy any PR firm's talking points, and I haven't claimed any kind of authority based on lack of bias, as the Gartner and Alexis de Toqueville whitepapers claim.
That's the real point of my laundry list of shilling and astroturfing. MSFT, directed by upper management, puts out all kind of pro-MSFT material, whose origins are deliberately obscured. By pretending to come from Joe Sixpack or from think tanks, MSFT progaganda gains a mantle of legitimacy that it wouldn't possess if it openly acknowledged its origins.
Quit playing Monopoly with Bill. Switch to one of many non-Microsoft products today.
> Not to mention the shill MVP's in the MS newsgroups...
Oh, jeez, give me a break. I'M an MVP, and I post regularly in the microsoft.public.* newsgroups.
Does that make me a shill, an astroturfer, a paid stooge? Does it hell. I like using Microsoft products, and I enjoy helping out other people who might be having technical problems. I personally find Windows far easier to use than any GNU/Linux distribution I've ever tried - and believe me, I've tried and used quite a few, from RedHat 5 right through to Mandrake 8. I'm no point-and-drool novice when it comes to computers in general either, having worked with them since 1982.
On the other hand, no, I don't like some of Microsoft's business practices. Some are malevolent, some are just plain stupid, and some are a combination of the two - for example, I think they're cracking down on casual copying at exactly the wrong time, just when they NEED all the grassroots goodwill they can get. I don't like the way that XP seems to be aimed at the average sereotype AOLer, with its pre-school GUI and patronizing interface assumptions. I don't like their strongarm attempts to foist MS Media Player on everybody as the One True Playback Solution (with friendly DRM which everyone must grow to love). Above all, I am no unthinking Microsoft fanboy, and I deeply resent the implication.
Please, get it into your head that a lot of people use and endorse Microsoft products because they LIKE them. Sure, there's some astroturfing out there, but when faced with a co-ordinated campaign of negative coverage from their enemies, can they really be blamed? You think Apple, Sun and their ilk aren't stirring things up against MS in the background and rubbing their metaphorical hands with glee? Is the common Slashdot position, of "if you don't like OSS and you persist in liking MS you must be crazy / corrupt / singled out for scorn" really so superior?
Look, I don't dislike Linux or OSS in general. It's just that right now, with the current state of all software offerings available, MS products suit my needs the best. Always, I try to keep an open mind, which I must say is more than many on this site seem to do.
Facts:
Linux keeps getting better.
Windows keeps getting better. (Technically, not counting the EULAs)
Is the gap closing? I don't think so. There's still way more software and systems being created for Windows.
But Linux is doing something else, for users that don't need any exotic software. Do you need a server? Do you need a simple browsing/e-mail/basic office pack desktop? You got it. Maybe next year I can add a couple more things to that list. Maybe a few more are good enough now already and I don't know about it or agree.
In Windows, you choose between different software with different cost. In Linux, most of the tools people use are free, and there isn't many commercial counterparts. That means that those that *do* use Linux use it because it *already* does what the users want it to do, for free.
That's what spooks Microsoft. It's not that people switch. It's that they don't really have anything to offer to get them back should they decide Linux is "good enough" as it is. Any business would. And should.
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Good point, but how many of these apps spec out particular browsers running under Windows (or worse, MSIE only) as the only "supported" configuration>
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Why don't we pass a law. Make it so if any business is ever accused of anything, that business won't be allowed to defend itself. Anything it would say would be tainted by its own self-interest, anyway, and made to sound better by the money they spend saying it, so that means nothing they say could be true. So we'll just declare it guilty and fine the crap out of it. It'll save so much time, and then we can be sure that there's no shilling going on. Besides, they're rich, they can afford to have the crap fined out of them.
(That was sarcasm.)
...is the one when Slashdot has the guts to say NO to Microsoft Ads(vs.Net) !!!!