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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!
Open Source IE. That's what they should do.
Open up the file formats for Word documents so that other programs (e.g. Open Office) can correctly decode the formatting.
Hacking in cheat buttons for pass-through-walls, free points, change speed, etc... Pass through walls was a mistake, though. People went off the map and it crashed. There were some interesting side-effects when the score overflowed, too ;-)
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Microsoft has overstayed its welcome. Their past litany of cut-throat misadventures has piss-tainted this sand-box far too many times.
The only thing that would entice me to contribute to their efforts to get even more richer, and even more powerful, is if they were broken up into smaller companies, their mass wealth redistributed, and Windows gets open sourced.
Honestly, not a flame. I've been completely Microsoft-free for 5 years now, I intend to keep it that way
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
Basically there are only three points
- To push competitors out of the field by offering their products for free. This is a more agressive version of what MS did with Netscape. SAP and IBM are using this to attack Oracle and MS.
- To establish own standards and push competing approaches out of the way. Stuff like TCP/IP and XML come into mind...
- To grab control of a competitor's standard base by offering free tools for a modified version.
That's the main point of the Eclipse project targeted at SUN.
So, OSS can strenghten/enlarge your own market share greatly but I don't see people making money by OSS directly.No, RMS getting donated money to get a shower doesn't count.
1) Microsoft quit funding "independent" bogus TCO research to discredit OS operating systems. Oh yeah, and call off SCO.
2) Microsoft quit attempting to make all of their file formats dependent upon the OS/software that they write. The data is MINE, and I should be able to use other software to read the data. Commit to open file formats and I'd look a lot more favorably on MS.
3) Microsoft quit using draconian EULAs that make me fear that any contribution I made to a MS effort would be locked away for good once MS got a hold of it.
4) Money. Truckloads of it.
Well, maybe not so much 4, but the first 3 would be a good start.
My problem is that I've got such a bad image of Microsoft after working with their stuff for the past 12 years or so that at the end of the day I'd rather contribute effort to a "real" open source effort than anything funded by Microsoft. I just don't trust them to "do the right thing" with anything that came out of an OSS initiative.
I don't see any point in opensourcing any //Pingo
Microsoft software except for Windows Media Player series 9 with codecs, perhaps also
Windows Media Encoder could be of some interest.
--- Linux or FreeBSD, it's like blondes or brunettes. I like both. ---
What I think is distuurbing that they want to askt this question. Just start the project and see who is interested. If it is interesting, people will jump aboard. If not, people will not.
It almost looks as if they know that the OSS comunity will spit them out and then the can play the underdog.
If people are interested, they can first play the nice guy who allowed the OSS comunity what they wanted and then let it blow up to proove that OSS does not work.
This is a win-win situation for them. So my question to them is, if you think that Open Source is so good, when can we help you with other parts that ARE interesting (and who need to be open by European court desision anyway). If you truly believe the project is interesting, it will create followers. If not, it will die a silent dead, as many projects that were started.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
hah, the whole lot should be opened up so that some proper bugfixing and security testing can finally happen, M$ have prooved time and again that they'd rather patch than rework, but if we ever want our weekends to be free from tech support calls from relatives and friends whos spyware ridden pc's won't play nice anymore then some serious code needs to be written.
They'd never do this (opensource the OS) though of course, it would mean everyones suspicions were confirmed - that M$ Windows is infact just one big patch from qdos to winXP and probably LongHorn if that ever arrives too.
but yeah, the only way you could get me to play with any opensource M$ stuff would be if it was the OS itself, anything else i wouldn't waste my time on as the OS is so flakey and bug ridden, why bother developing for it? oh sure 90% of users use it or whatever, but if history teaches us anything its that the majority is usually wrong.
i've implemented a new policy recently, i tell a friend to ditch IE and use firefox after i've rescued their computer from viri/worms/spyware, if after this i catch them using the big blue 'e' to browse the web then i tell them that next time they have a virus/spyware or whatever and they want me to fix it for them i will be charging them for the time as they have not heeded my advice anyway and thats the reason they're in the same situation again is that they learned nothing last time around.
What would be good would be to see the GPL used to cover the 'open sourcing'. The article clearly envisages developments that are not protected against becoming non-free (is that the same thing as enslaved?)
If Microsoft started open source projects, with "real" open source licenses I would be glad to work on them under two conditions. First, the project has to interest me. That's rather obvious that since open source work is volunteer that nobody is going to work on something that doesn't interest them. The second thing is it has to be software I can use. Since I don't run windows there are probably going to be very few MS OSS projects I would work on.
What MS SHOULD do is appeal to all the Windows developers out there. Yes, there are people out there who live in Visual Studio and love windows. They should get these people to fix all the bugs in windows and IE and such. There are people out there, willing and able to do work which the internal MS developers have failed to do multiple times over. Give someone else a try.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
software, personally. However, I am incensed when MS takes open software and "extends" it with hidden code to make it unusable. Remember Kerberos?
Contribute what you wish to contribute, but better yet: open your file formats or allow open formats to interoperate with your preferred file formats.
For me that would more than suffice. Note, however, I am not holding my breath in expectation.
Though I would pay attention if they open sourced
What they should try doing is participating with the community rather than trying to harvest/divide it. Ship perl, python, apache... Work with some of these open source projects. Show this isnt headed the direction of mosaic, embraced and extinguished mit licensed works.
Show this isnt just some game. Otherwise, have fun.
MSFT's culture is bankrupt. They have little to bring to the table. Show they are changing their culture, come out and play.
I think that MS is missing one crucial market that they could be poised to overtake. The Open Source OS market. Think about it, if MS put out a version of Linux that was easily integrated into Windows networks, offered better security, and was less expensive than Windows, they could control the Linux market AND the Windows market. I'm not a huge fan of MS or anything but I think they're truly missing out on a monopolistic opportunity here. Isn't that what they're famous for anyway? As for what would entice me to work with MS? I would like to see an 8 year old kid punch Bill Gates in the balls. That would be worth a small labor contribution to MS. Definitely. -B
60 percent of the time, my comments are right everytime.
Because it is the one area where MS completely and utterly destroys Linux and the one are where Linux really needs to grow up.
Course, it won't happen, ever.
http://slashdot.org/~GuyFawkes/journal
One of the major potential benefits of contributing to open-source projects is that, when searching for a future programming job, one can point to one's open-source contributions and say "Here's some of my code, and people are using it." This works especially if one has contributed to a project with prestige - something that a Microsoft-sanctioned project would certainly have in the closed-source corporate world.
However, it can be difficult to pick out the code that one has contributed from a large project and say, "yeah, download this tgz and look at kluge.cpp lines 377-421, that's my code!" So I would propose, as a carrot to your future open-source contributors, that you design a system that keeps a database of who contributed code, how old it is, and maybe some other statistics about it. You could post a summary page for each contributor with browseable links to the code and statistics.
-Ansel.
G=C800:5
My belief is that this will never happen, because even deep in the bowels of Microsoft they have no complete documentation of the file format. This is the only explanation I have for the lack of compatibility between different platforms, or even different versions, of Word.
Eh, a small slice of the profits they make from selling the fruits of my labour would be nice.
But people happily write code that IBM later sells (or sells support for, at any rate) without seeing a penny for their efforts. Why would MS be any different?
The problem is, you can't do it. It goes against everything you stand for. You don't get it, you never will. There are no angles to be had, no strategies to follow. Regardless of how well-intentioned this guy at MS may be, he is not the faceless company that has implemented horrendous business practices over the last 20 years. Microsoft, you aren't part of this community, don't pretend like you are. We are a cancer, remember? Piss off.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.
As I'm sure many of you noticed, Microsoft has been making some 'Open Source' pushes as of late. They started by creating the CPL, getting it certified, and have now been hiring prominent open source developers to work on CPL.
For those of you not in the know, the key distinction between CPL and the GPL, is that I can incorporate a CPL'ed project into my code, whole, without contributing back, as long as I don't modify the CPL'ed code. If I do, I have to publish modifications to the CPL code in the same way I would for the GPL.
I'm of the opinion that the CPL has two serious flaws:
First, the transparency. How often have we all seen companies violating the GPL? I can assure you, it's a whole lot more frequent than even we hear about. I've known many Windows developers, who had no clue about, or respect for, the GPL, and would download bits of code from anywhere to incorporate if it made their lives easier. (Often because they didn't understand the task at hand, and they just wanted to get it to work.) It's not normally a matter of policy, but I've definitely seen it knowingly overlooked at companies I've worked for previously.
Right now, if we find a company using GPL'ed source, we have a smoking gun we can use to ensure license compliance. When someone incorporates CPL code, there's no way to prove that they modified it themselves, and so CPL compliance is based entirely on the goodwill of corporations, and we've seen how generous that goodwill is...
Second, there's the free rides. The CPL is designed so that companies can take advantage of the work of open source developers without having to compensate them in any way. With proprietary code, developers receive fiduciary compensation, and, traditionally, with Open Source, the developers receive the source for their project, and any derivative works.
With the CPL, companies get a free ride, which in the end screws the developers out of any benefit of their hard work.
Now, the reason why I bring this all up is that, as mentioned above, Microsoft has been hiring prominent open source developers, having them release their source under the CPL. It is my belief that Microsoft wishes undermine the Open Source movement. They hope to get the CPL to be popular, so that they can freely incorporate works developed by others without having to contribute back. They've hired 'evangelists' to show the benefits of CPL, without showing the downsides. (Because, of course, Microsoft is currently releasing software, and they want us to believe that's not going to change.)
So, in conclusion, Microsoft, what I'd like to see is Microsoft projects released under the GPL as well, so that we can see a benefit to the Open Source movement, not just to you.
Don't you need to pay for office to get that COM object? Or pay bigtime to be allowed to distribute it? Lastly, why did you put "open source" in quotation marks?
Why is anything anything?
"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.
Actually, assuming they keep the whole development source open and not just snippets that need to be improved, and assuming they don't yank it out from under us using some ridiculous license once they start selling, there's just nothing wrong with that. "Free" software doesn't mean "free as in beer" and open source doesn't necessarily mean free software either. There's plenty of open source projects out there with non-gpl compatible licenses, but I'd still call them "open".
Of course, the freer the better. That still has nothing to do with whether they sell the improvements in their next version of the product or not, even if it IS GPL. I hope they do since the only way others follow suit is if the model proves to be profitable.
Warning: Opinions known to be heavily biased.
How about the 95/98 operating systems? Sure they're more unstable than a schizophrenic, but they're unsupported now anyway. Plus, XP isn't even based on them, so they shouldn't be releasing any secrets... well, in theory. I'm sure the fact that IE is in there might be a problem, but maybe they could release some of the other parts.
It's scary being a Flash and Flex developer on Slashdot. You guys are unnaturally rabid.
Flamebait.
I don't know about distributing it - you just list Office among the requirements for the application. It's been a long time since I've seen a Windows PC without Word and Excel at least.
Not everyone uses Windows and further, not everyone is willing to pirate Word and/or Excel. If you took out all the pirated versions, I'm sure your statistic would have a few holes. And more importantly, your statistic clearly doesn't stand for the bajillion home users who didn't buy MSOffice because MSWorks or whatever the freebie available was good enough.
'Cos it means different things to different people. Want some MS source code? Just look in Visual Studio, the code for MFC is right there! Go ahead and read it and modify it and whatever you want. But that wouldn't meet many people's definitions of "open source".
Maybe I'm just nitpicky, but "open source" is pretty well understood. It means the source is open. It's "free software" that has meanings that relate both to cost and to freedom.
You've got a low UID, but I'd swear you haven't been here long if your reasoning this poorly.
-N
I've nothing to say here...
I'd love to see Microsoft do one thing in particular (well, two really):
* split the "window manager" part of the GUI into it's own executable
* open source the code for the new exe
Within months there'd be a myriad of different Windows window managers, just as there is in Unix-land. This would also benefit MS by helping users of different GUIs to migrate to Windows more easily.
This is not going to happen. Linus himself already told innumerous times that he thinks this would make unnecessarily hard to change the kernel APIs, and that, notwithstanding the point "2", below, he is not interested in binary compatibility for kernel-space things between versions of the kernel. This is right, and if you did not get it yet, I'll explain it to you: it leads to Big Bad Difficult Bugs, trying to get kernel modules to work in various kernel versions. Many things evolve from one version of the kernel to the next, many assumptions change.
2. and the 'grey' area of binary modules sorted out as well. I dont think it will happen.
This one has already happened, (*) but many people still want to pretend it didn't. Some binary modules are derived works of the kernel, and such, to be distributed at all, they must be distributed under the GPL. Some binary modules are not derived work of the kernel, and as such, they can be distributed under any license that the author seems fit. What determines if a work (in the case, a binary module) is a derived work of another (the kernel) is copyright law.
In the USofA and in Brasil, the copyright law states that a derived work is the result of some non-automated transformation of the original work. USofAn case law established the method of "abstraction, filtration, and comparison" [AFC] to determine derivation of works.
There is a myth, spread by the last paragraph of the "postamble" of the GPL, "How to Apply These Terms to Your New Programs": I will repeat here the position I have after carefully studying the GPL, copyright law, and case law: the GPL regulates the licensing to derived works of the GPL'd work, but it cannot regulate the licensing of encompassing "anthology" works. Linking does not make a work derived on other work: to see if some work is a derived work, apply the [AFC] method. Some (not all) linking, non-derived, non-GPL'd, works can be even distributed along with a GPL'd work, because they would be covered by the "mere aggregation" clause in the 3rd paragraph of section 2 of the GPL.
And one more funny stuff: the section 6 of the GPL states: This basically means that you can't even clarify the license further than copyright law would restrict the rights of the recipient of your work (**), without rendering it undistributable by others (and even by yourself, if your work is derived from another GPL'd work).
But, OTOH, IANAL and TINLA. But I am a paralegal. IMMV and the others TFFLAs
(*) Google for: "linus torvalds" abstraction filtration comparison binary
(**) Google: "hans reiser" derivative plagiarism
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
I'll tell you what you should open source, and why it will benefit MS in the long run.
1) Internet Explorer
IE is free anyway, so there's no money to be lost. But what you are losing is marketshare to Mozilla and Opera-based browsers. This is due mainly to the security problems in IE. You could save developer resources AND marketshare by just releasing the source of IE so that it can be fixed/expanded more easily and quickly.
2) Visual Studio
There's nothing that will get developers rallying around your product like allowing them to customize the development tools they have to use every day. In addition, more people could/would write apps for Windows if they didn't have to spend a bunch of money purchasing compilers that they can get for free on Mac/Linux/Unix. You're already dominating on user-level market share. Having free development tools will undoubtedly convert developers, and the universities that are teaching those developers.
3) MSN Messenger
Instant messaging is a hot topic everywhere. AIM obviously dominates the market now, and open source systems like Jabber are starting to take a small foothold in businesses. A quick way for you to crush all of that is to open source your IM client and it's protocols. It's already in use by a lot of people, but it could be in use by a lot more. In addition, you'll likely get a lot of free ports to Mac/Linux/Unix and draw customer-base from there as well. This will give you more ad revenue, and may also lead to people getting MSN internet, hotmail, as well as purchasing your server products.
4) Virtual PC
I know you guys just paid a lot of money for buying it, but the whole purpose of buying it was to get Mac and Linux geeks to start using and relying on Windows apps, wasn't it? By providing it as open source you'll get faster adoption than ever before, which will only increase the number of Windows apps in use by these non-Windows markets.
5) Direct X
This is likely to be the most controversial one internal to MSFT. I know that a lot of people in MSFT believe that the gamer market is the second biggest reason people are holding on to Windows (2nd to MS Office). You're losing that war though. More and more games are being developed to Open GL and other open standards to make them more portable. Giant games like Unreal Tournament, Savage, and America's Army ship with Linux versions these days. And others like Doom 3 and Neverwinter Nights put out Linux versions shortly after their release. In addition, MSFT has become a huge publisher in the gaming market. Releasing Direct X as open source would allow more of your games to be played on more systems, which will increase the profits of that division. In addition, it may help you to hold on to your lead role in the game technology world, instead of losing it to other open standards.
A lot of people fault you for developing your own standards. If you take some of these technologies, and open source them, you can permanently make them become the standard.
I know that very few people have heard of this, but it was a little program MS made in '95, aimed at kids, that let you make simple movies, using premade actors.
It's 9 years old and still has a community of hundreds of directors. I run a site that stores 1344 movies made with this great little program.
By letting you use premade actors,props, and backgrounds, they shifted the focus on the voices and story. It's basicly a movie prototyping program.
But it still has flaws. It was made right as Direct3D was being released, so it missed the boat. (It's using a software renderer). Some very useful tools were left out (multi-select, texture/model importing, dynamic camera movement) either because they were aiming it at little kids, or because of limitations of the software renderer.
Our community is pretty unknown because you have to own the program to view these movies. With the source we could make a 3dmm2AVI converter and let others view some of the best 3dmm movies without having to buy/download the program. We've got several C++ programs and a dozen VB coders, we could do so much with this program.
It's just sad that one of Microsoft's best programs is almost completely unknown, and the hundreds of great movies made with it suffer for it.
I respond to your sigs
Trust. That's what Open Source software sells to me. I can not trust Microsoft. If they could find a way to sell genuine, believable trust, then I wouldn't care if their software remained closed source.
When I buy cars, houses, groceries, electricity and other services, I am not faced with the kind of EULA that Microsoft would shove in my face. Microsoft sells from the point of mistrust and I have to buy from them from that standpoint. It's really creepy. It's like buying telephone service and having to sign a paper where I agree I won't make crank calls or stalk people or commit fraud using their services. I'm guilty before I can prove I'm innocent.
It bothers me less and less how much "ease of use" I may be giving up by buying open source. What I gain is an incredible relationship, built on freedom, openness and trust -- with a whole community behind it. You can't buy any of that from One Microsoft Way. The members I've met in their "community" are wallet watchers, not trust builders (i.e. most of them seem to defend Microsoft because it affects their income).
Here's what I want: I want to be able to buy a word processor from my favorite word processor vendor that will interoperate with a spreadsheet from my favorite spreadsheet vendor. This is, more and more, what it's been like to "buy" from open source. I can trust that the KDE camp won't work against, but with the OpenOffice.org camp. It would seem they even have my best interest at heart! Go figure. It's a lot like buying from IBM PC compatible vendors. Everything is compatible!
That's how far Microsoft has to go in opening up. In the end, I don't think it's really about how open your source is. It's about how open you are with the community. "Trustworthy Computing"? Ha! Right. That will happen when they get other, eager contributors -- outside their protective moat -- to jump in and help them (with such a daunting task). That can't happen without trust.
Bottom line: Microsoft needs to quit being such a wormhead [a type of fish that takes over whole ecosystems] and start leaving room for diversity. Then I may begin to trust them again.
With the exception (slightly OT) of Microsoft's
efforts with FUD & SCO Group, MS doesn't have
ANY "open source efforts".
Between EULAs, License 6, NDAs, and draconian
other limits on use, Microsoft is not now (and
will never be) a bonafide contributor to open
source. Their licenses are "viral". And F/OSS
represents a philosophy that that is directly
in opposition to Microsoft's business plan.
Using the terms "open source efforts" and "MS"
in the same sentence is an oxymoron.