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Josh Ledgard On MS's Future Open Source Efforts
prostoalex writes "Josh Ledgard from Microsoft, the developer responsible for open-sourcing WiX and WTL, is looking for opinions on what Microsoft should do next in regards to the open source movement that he himself established within the company. "Would you have interest in working on these types of projects with Microsoft? If not, what could entice you? If so, what would be your motivation?", asks Josh." Update: 08/24 19:04 GMT by T : As Ledgard writes on his site, "I am NOT the person responsible for the WIX/WTL projects. I cite them as examples and am working with people who where responsible for those projects to enable more of the same for the groups I work in." Sorry for the misattribution!
Were there any past ones?
It is your personal duty to fight for what is right on a daily basis. Ignoring injustice is identical to approving
He keeps saying that he wants the users to give him feedback on what MS needs to improve and if people would be willing to contribute to the programming, but no where does the software get mentioned as becoming free, or even discounted, but "improved, repackaged, and resold." This seems more like customer service than "open sourcing."
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yes, girls read /. too...
If not, what could entice you? If so, what would be your motivation?
Eh, a small slice of the profits they make from selling the fruits of my labour would be nice.
...or at least give .doc format(s) specifications (if they even exist)
That would be great as it's a well known product that is used by lots of people and desperately needs improving. Since it is released freely anyway, MS arn't going to loose any money making it open-source either.
I wish to remain anomalous
but I'd rather see them pay more attention to open standards, and "opening" their file formats/protocols.
This is what I seem to be reading:
"Wouldn't it be great if you all improved Visual Studio or whatever for us free of charge between releases and then wouldn't it be cool if we kept your improvements and then sell them in our next version of Visual Studio."
I'm not sure that is a standard definition of Open Source Development.
The browser. We like standards compliant browsers. Switch to or adopt Mozilla technology. This is an anathema of Microsoft's strategy of usurption, but if you want to extend the olive branch, it's got to be attached to something we care about.
Seeing as Microsoft essentially stops developing the browser after it's done with it anyway, it might as well take advantage of the free maintenance costs, continual renewal and compliance adherence inherent to projects like Mozilla/Firefox. Instead of a whole team of Internet Explorer programmers, sponsor some open source programmers, as it feels fit.
Also, incidentally and less idealistically, by involving itself in something like the development of Mozilla, Microsoft could garner some support for proprietary technologies, that would otherwise fall upon deaf ears. Control comes with money. If Microsoft is on the outside, they have no control. The ideals of Mozilla/Firefox right now are precisely aligned against Microsoft's dominance; to curb or curtail that alignment requires involvement.
No, really. I don't think that MS needs to release Office under gpl or anything silly like that. If they really wanted to show that they have changed, they should embrace open standards. Free for any to read, understand and implement. They should make sure that these standards were royalty free, that they could be used equally by any and all developers. They should refrain from later extending these standards with closed code. In short - if they cared they would stop being assholes and fight fair.
Not that I expect it to happen... but it is a nice thought.
What I would like to work on is fixing some of the 'standards' Microsoft proclaims to abide. It would allow other products to interoperate with MS software and allow fair competition. But hey, somehow I think that MS won't feel happy for these contributions.
This is a replacement signature.
For so many years, Microsoft has brought useless fileformats to complete with those that already exist. Stop trying to innovate and start supporting the open standards. Did we really need BMP? How come PNG is so lamely supported? How about pushing Ogg Vorbis/Theora with your media player?
Feel ready to own one or many Tux Stickers?
Opensource the API, then you'lll suddenly have a lot more coders working on your system. The way I see it, Microsoft doesn't need to cpmete for customer base any more.
They need to compete for coder base, as we're approaching a time when the system will be sold not on its own merits but on those of the applications it runs. This is already the case in enterprise computing and can only grow.
I have been a user for about 10 years. This ends Feb 2014. The site's been ruined. I'm off. Dice, FU
Yes,but it is an integral part of the Operatng System. If they open sourced that then it would have to include the the whole ball of wax wouldn't it?
As the recent article from ecommercetimes.com mentioned on Slashdot states, Microsoft makes the majority of it's profits by selling Windows and MS Office. Even though it would slightly knock their O/S sales, I think it would be a worthwhile venture for Microsoft to contribute to WINE so that Linux users could run MS products under Linux. It would be a big boost to the WINE project and Microsoft would get product sales in return.
So far MS released source for two bits of technology that is absolutely useless to Linux. How about something useful for a change: doc file format. That would be very useful -- it would allow Open Office to be 100% compatible with MS Office. And you don't even have to release any source, just the specs.
Of course this will never happen because the whole purpose of this "open source" work is so that Microsoft can say "look, I'm supporting these hippies", when in fact what they released has no effect on Microsoft business or Open Source movement.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
hmm there's mozilla... years ahead, only a fraction of ie's bugs, 10M other features, and... open source! so why ie if there's obviously a (much) better choice?
-- Karma: beyond good and evil - mostly affected by posting political
Simple really.
"Wouldn't it be cool if there was a process whereby passionate Microsoft developers could work officially with engaged members of the community to build these missing features on top of the VS Platform, then these missing features could eventually be included as part of an additional install step as a part of the product? Microsoft wins because Visual Studio gets extended functionality between releases, the community wins because these would be provided for free and more officially supported, approved, and tested by Microsoft. Ideally the license would work such that Microsoft could eventually include these as part of future shipping products and the contributors could take the source and use it for their own purposes commercially."
Sounds a little like the process with Eclipse doesn't it? The difference of course is that with eclipse the core is open source (well everything except java but apparently it's possible to run eclipse with gcj). Why would an active community contribute work to a project which is at its root closed source? I still don't think they get it.
sign all current and future patents to the EFF.
But if this guy is serious and he really does mean it and he really does have any say in the company I got 2 simple opensource projects for him. Samba and OpenOffice. If he wants to prove MS can play nice after all get him to work on these 2 projects and make sure they are compatible whenever MS decides to "rework" their code and "accidently" break compatibilty.
When the next windows version does not break samba, when Microsoft Office opens OpenOffice files and vice versa without problem THEN I will be willing to believe MS can be just another IT company and not the IT company from hell.
At the moment it is like a rapist asking what will help to get him accepted back into society. STOP RAPING!
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
You seem to be ascribing the lack of documentation to a Micorosoft corporate policy. But my best guess, based on the incompatibility between Word versions and platforms, is that even inside Microsoft they have incomplete documentation on the file format.
I think this fully vindicates RMS's objections to Open software. It can easily be subverted in the manner that MS are doing: they come up with something entirely self-serving and closed and still call it Open Source.
In contrast they couldn't call it Free Software and get away with this crap because Free Software disdanes the pragmatic crap associated with Open Software (eg Linus' famous "Bitkeeper" defence.
And as an aside to the many posters that have made this mistake. Open Software does not equal software that runs on Linux!
Bad analogies are like waxing a monkey with a rainbow.
I've been a Microsoft avoider (if not basher) for 20 years. But, I think this is a tremendous opportunity for all of us. The only thing I would want to see is a quid pro quo relationship. If Microsoft wants to "bury the hatchet" I'd think a great place for them to start is to open their formats. Once that were accomplished open source developers would naturally support development projects that would benefit both sides. This could be very exciting for us all. (But I am not holding my breath)
When a property developer makes a house, they will often sell the house and the land, but keep ownership of a small strip of land between the house and the street which they license to you.
If you want further access (e.g. for a garage, a second garden path etc.) then they'll happily sell it to you for a huge amount.
Those are called 'ransom strips'. They hold you to ransom for access to your own property by controlling a small strip of land around it.
Microsoft is just open sourcing stuff it has surrounded by ransom strips. The GPL would protect against these tricks, but Microsoft don't use the GPL.
So it's not a real open source effort, its just MS playing its little word, license and patent games.
I'm not asking for a violent solution, I'm asking for a punitive one, so that such behaviour isn't rewarded and further encouraged ...
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
There are a couple of items that would make me want to use open source Microsoft code - and perhaps even target their platform as a primary with Linux / Solaris secondary.
.net - Languages want to be sheparded, but based on community standards and open. What that means is that any vendor can publish a compiler / runtime according to a published spec, and they won't be sued by the sheparding company if they truely conform to the spec. Heck, I don't even mind paying some bucks for the spec certification (ala Java). There's still plenty of money to be made on advanced IDEs, tools, support, training, etc. The language itself is not a profit center.
:-)
These would be:
Avalon - Honestly, I want an open slick UI to program with. Flash and Shockwave do some pretty slick things in an efficient manner (compared to other mechanisms), and I'd truely like to have an open codebase to do the same things on every platform - in any language I happen to be using. I've seen the transition effects it can handle, and it's pretty decent. Let others help update it, and it will shine far faster, and with less bugs, than you doing it yourself.
These next 2 aren't open source, but just open documentation items.
Document formats - All document formats should be immediately opened so that anyone can read / update them. I know this is one of your bread and butter pieces, but face it, either do that, or Open Office is going to cut your office revenue in half.
Protocols - Open up them all so that true interoperability can exist between Windows / Linux / Unix. Show the strengths of your platform, but atleast allow efficient communication with others.
Doing these four things would go a long way to reducing the "evilness" persona that surrounds Microsoft. Honestly, their UI engineers do a fantastic job of pushing the envelope - even if they get their ideas from sundry locations occassionally.
It is easy to use COM to instantiate Word from your own code and manipulate documents throught the API, so ".doc format" is fully accessible and reusable from your own code, just as it would be if it was "open source".
.doc would be good to have, since quite a lot of documents still are saved in older formats.
Which, of course, don't count a bit on any other platform than Windows.
That said, Microsoft claims to offer "open and royalty-free documentation and licenses for the Microsoft Office 2003 XML Reference Schemas." I haven't looked at them myself, but it looks like the real deal. The FAQ states that the "license is not restricted to particular individuals or entities. It is available for customers, governments, academics, hobbyists, and IT companies."
Granted, the download is available as a Windows executable, but I imagine someone will boot up their Windows boxes to look at it.
This is big plus in my book for Microsoft. Still, the specification for good'ol
I agree 110%. One of the more interesting aspects of this discussion is Bill Gates claimed that if programmers weren't paid for what they write then no software would ever be written (remember the open letter to hobbyists in the 70's?). He's never changed his opinion (publicly). But now his company has such a negative image that many programmers, such as you and me, wouldn't want to write software for them even if we were paid. He's put himself and his company in such a negative light that it'll take decades to get away from it - just like IBM.
Developers: We can use your help.
"It is easy to use COM to instantiate Word from your own code and manipulate documents throught the API, so ".doc format" is fully accessible and reusable from your own code, just as it would be if it was "open source"."
Having to instantiate the word processor that originally created the document in order to use it doesn't strike me as 'fully accessible', 'reusable' or anything remotely like open source.
"Gold still represents the ultimate form of payment in the world." - Alan Greenspan, 1999
First thing you have to remember is that this IS Microsoft. They are NOT going to be giving away their cash cows, so completely forget IE, Office, and Windows. It ISN'T going to happen. Knowing the crowd here, there will be a lot of noise, and very little signal! Now that said there are a couple areas that they could:
.Net development and it is good. Having a tool like that under linux to develop against IIS servers... that would be nice.
:)
Development tools:
If you've ever done work in the Microsoft environment, you'll know that the tools are decent. For those about to flame me, don't bother, you haven't really USED the tools. I use Visual Studio for
SQL Server Tools:
Having a true collection of tools such as the client, and enterprise manager, and Query Analyzer would be a nice thing. Again, this may be a pipe dream as it means they have to play nice with linux users, but it could help connect all those PHP sites to SQL Server!
Outlook/Exchange Protocols: Wow.. this would be the cat's meow... being able to create a client that would connect up to the exchange server. Forget Linux.. I would love to have this under Windows!
Messenger:
Create an native API available to everyone for the basic services. I'm in the telephony world and would love to be able to create a client that is compatible with MSN and then connect to my servers for phone calls!
Windows CE/Pocket PC 2003:
You can forget about the windows pirates here! You buy a pocketpc, you get the OS.. that's the way it goes. So, open up the source, let the masters of kernel tinkering in the world play a bit! This could open the way to many devices guys!
Since all of Microsoft's profit comes from licensing closed source software, I guarantee they will be EXTREMELY careful of who works on open source software within the company. If one of their developers contributes to a GPL'd project and then gets moved to a closed source internal project they need to be absolutely certain he doesn't "contaminate" the closed project with any open code. They also need to watch that no one working on a closed project looks over at the open code for ideas. If GPL code gets discovered within any of their closed software, that software can no longer remain closed until the "offending" code is removed. So if Microsoft actually does play seriously with open source, they will be extremely careful of licensing (hence the CPL and not GPL) and code cross-contamination. While they may still end up with some open source software their development won't be very flexible or too open.
Developers: We can use your help.
Stop selecting what you're going to open the source on based on what has the least market impact. Stop opening source under licenses that noone would accept. Stop using open source as an advertising gimick rather than development and community way of life. Open source welcomes alternative competing projects while MS does everything in its power to prevent them. You can't just open the source for 'goofy rarely used tool' and expect developers to turn their cheek.
I applaud Josh and what he's trying to do but he's fighting MS's entire business model and as soon their jaunts into open source no longer look profitable, you can bet they'll drop the initiatives like a bad habit.
LilMikey.com... I'll stop doing it when you sto
I still feel the empirical evidence is the strongest: The lack of compatibility between different platforms and different versions of Word is the proof that there is no usable documentation.
The CPL was not created by Microsoft - as mentioned here, it was created by IBM, and is essentially an updated and generalized version of IBM's original Open Source license, the IBM Public License.
Irrelevant - there's no way to prove that someone has incorporated GPL code into a closed source product, short of obvious indicators like embedded strings, etc. GPL compliance is also "based entirely on the goodwill of corporations". The long and the short of the matter is that a company that's willing to knowingly violate the CPL will probably also be willing to knowingly violate the GPL.
As is the GPL. Neither the CPL nor the GPL are concerned with the origin of software, they're concerned with the distribution of software. They're both designed to ensure that the recipient of a piece of software has access to the source code. That's it. Nothing in either license about compensating the original developers, or having to give back source code to the original developers. Even you recognize this - while it's "traditional" to contribute back changes to an GPL'd project, it's not required. In fact, the FSF considers this kind of requirement onerous enough that they explicitly classify licenses that have this requirement (for example, the Open Public License) as non-free.
...which is bad, why? We're talking about Microsoft's own code, here - it's their choice as to what license they want to release their code under. The CPL is recognized by the OSI. It's acknowledged as a free software license by the FSF, albeit one incompatible with the current GPL because it addresses patent issues that the GPL does not.
In fact, at this point, if there's anyone that's getting a "free ride" off of Microsoft's actions, it's everyone except Microsoft, who now has access to - and can use - Microsoft's CPL software, as is, without any obligation.
Overall, I think this is a positive event. It appears there are OSS advocates (not juse Josh!) within Microsoft who seem to be trying to convince the corporate culture there that OSS is not neccesarily a threat to Microsoft, and they're going about it in a very reasonable way. They selected an existing OSS license instead of coming up with Yet Another License. They released code for a couple of trial projects under this license, and have been following the OSS philosophy of "release early, release often". They've apparently met with enough success with these projects that they feel they have a good reason to actively encourage the release other projects under OSS licenses, and they're asking the community for input on what else to consider releasing
"Great men are not always wise: neither do the aged understand judgement." Job 32:9
1. I'm sorry, last I checked, MS was planning on paying out as much as $75 billion over the next four years between an increased quarterly dividend, a one-time ex-dividend, and progressive stock buybacks.
2. Microsoft is not the largest corporation in the country. The company's market value is $295b right now. This is behind General Electric's market cap of $342b.
Moreover, its enterprise value is only $235b. General Electric's is $669b, Citigroup's is $644.95. These companies also have many times the revenue of microsoft. Enterprise value is calculated by subtracting out cash from and adding in long-term debt to a company's market capitalization. This removes the some of the financial aspects of that valuation and attempts to value the business itself. Clearly Microsoft is dwarfed in this respect by other companies. Again, they are NOT the largest company in the country.
3. Stock fraud is committed by brokers or other securities dealers when they encourage clients to purchase a stock against the client's best interest.
4. Microsoft until recently was paying a lower dividend because it expected better growth prospects and a better alternative use for its cash. This included acquisitions such as its discussions with SAP, and also internal growth efforts such as throwing money at the XBOX and other products (and they are now winning out in that product line). Once some major aspects of their growth efforts fell through, the company revised its efforts and deemed a payout in shareholders' best interests.
Check my sig for how I feel about your post.
Read jack phelps dot net
1. Use the GPL or BSD. Take a stand for license uniformity and standardized open source licenses. This is a problem that I think needs addressing and MS could be part of the solution. DO NOT make up new licenses. If I see a license from MS that I don't recognize, I will click "Cancel" because I assume it is another stupid MS EULA in sheep's clothing. Using an existing open source license is like choosing HTML over something proprietary, RSS over Atom, Unicode over CP-whatever, you get the picture. Stick with what's already popular.
2. Drop your ridiculous anti-GPL stance. The GPL is an excellent license, and especially so for companies like Microsoft because it guarantees that you don't have to compete against your on code in the marketplace based on secrets, but based on better service for customers. However the BSD is good too for those MS customers who are still using the closed-source model. Sure, your enemy Linux is GPL'd, but your GPL attacks don't seem to be changing many minds so please drop the facade.
3. I will only act in my best interests, I do not volunteer time on open source projects because I think they are neat or because I'm altruistic. I need access to the code to customize for customers, to interop with other software or programming languages, or as a form of documentation. If I find flaws or shortcomings in the code I will submit them back to MS only to save myself the trouble of doing the same on the next version.
4. Let's get this out in the open: I would not cry if Microsoft went out of business tomorrow (just like MS would not cry if Linux stopped being popular). So I have little interest in "working together" or "coexisting" other squishy language I see in people's blogs, unless it solves customer needs. Just keep that in mind. I don't *want* to help Microsoft, I just realize it's unavoidable.
Microsoft, if they're really interested in getting involved in open source, should pay attention to some of the things Apple has been doing for the past few years.
Apple hasn't gotten everything right, but they have made a lot of the right moves. They built their system over CMU's Mach kernel, build everything with the GCC toolkit, and bundle a full suite of familiar tools with their products like Perl, Python, Ruby, Apache, Samba, PostgreSQL (it's embedded in their new Apple Remote Desktop), etc. They participate in the right mailing lists, and they generally try to submit useful patches -- even if those patches don't end up being accepted, they're at least putting in an effort to play nicely. They share what they've done with technologies that they either developed in house or adopted before most others, like Rendezvous (or OpenTalk or whatever it is now), Firewire, Bluetooth, 802.11, etc. All of this ends up coming back to them favorably in the long run.
That isn't to say that Microsoft should slavishly copy everything Apple has done, but they should look at how the moves Apple has made have enabled Apple to move farther much more quickly than they could have alone. Once Microsoft understands that, then they can start picking & choosing what they want to open up, what they want to pull in from outside the company, and what they want to leave unchanged. For example, Microsoft probably wouldn't gain anything if they dropped the NT kernel for Mach or Linux, but they might want to consider scrapping the IE engine for KHTML or Gecko if it's really as gnarly as some of the rumors suggest, and a lot of people would appreciate truly open & understandable file formats for Office the way Apple has done with Keynote & XML.
On a different level, the moves Apple has made have encouraged others to bring their offerings to the Mac when they never would have before. Microsoft could do the same. A lot of people would be happy if they deprecated cmd.exe and instead offered up a fully functional bash / ksh / tcsh / zsh shell, complete with all the expected command line tools and system facilities (grep, cron, /etc config files, and so on). If Microsoft made it easy for Linux software developers to port to Windows just by changing GCC's target platform, knowing that autoconf (etc) would work on Windows, they could bring in thousands of developers overnight. Moreover, if they gave away (free beer, but maybe or maybe not free speech) at least a lightweight-but-complete version of their development tools, the way Apple does with XCode, that too would encourage open source developers to start messing around on Windows in a way that they currently do not do.
Microsoft has spent the past 20 years ripping off ideas from Apple. I don't see why they're having such a mental block about doing it again now...
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