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Microsoft Wants Sit-Down With OSS Advocates
bonch writes "Microsoft is reaching out to the OSS community and wanting a sit-down to discuss how to better to interoperate with them. At a conference sponsored by the Association for Competitive Technology (ACT) in Cambridge, Md., Microsoft's Brad Smith extended an olive branch to its competitors, including the OSS community. 'We're going to have to figure out how to build some bridges between the various parts of our industry,' he said. Eric Raymond responds, saying the first steps Microsoft could do are to open their file formats and support open standards."
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.
--sig fault--
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
Mohandas Gandhi
The more you know, the less you understand.
How about following the RFC's to start. Once M$ adhears to the specs in RFC's devolpers will not longer have to alter RFC compliant code to be M$ compliant.
You only live once, so you might as well have fun before you die.
If this is a publicity stunt, someone in Microsoft's marketting department's getting fired. This move won't sway many to stay with Microsoft products. If anything, it acknowledges OSS as a real force in the marketplace, bringing more people consider OSS. Microsoft simply realizes that by cooperating, they can possibly use OSS to their advantage like many others have.
The European Union (EU) is after Microsoft in a big way. The EU wants them to enable operability with other systems. The timing is such that these may be interrelated.
Banjo - The more I know about Windoze, the more I love *nix
Um, yeah. When's that starting again?
Actions always speak louder than words, in both cases.
Why would any company ask its competition how they could get along better, if the real motivation wasn't to be more competitive? Am I missing something?
-- Fratz, human
I dunno, a net profit of 2.56 billion that is almost double the amount for the same period last year is hardly the kiss of death on a company.
Why is it that Microsoft is always on the 'innovate or die' line when they're making billions of dollars? It's all well and good to point out a projection that didn't quite make it but when you're attaching it to a 2.56 billion dollar net profit, it sounds a little ludicrous. You could say that it is a 'sign' of Microsoft's future demise, but people have been pointing out little discrepencies in their profit reports over the last five years and they're still making an incredible profit. Like the game industry that isn't going to suddenly die because of a lack of innovation, I sincerely doubt that there will be the day that Microsoft close up shop within any reasonable timeframe. Look at IBM, they faced one of the worst losses in history and they're still around.
You say that 'it will not pay to stay with the old fashioned business model that no longer fits'. Does 2.56 billion net profit not count as pay?
MS does support open standards. They can read and write to them just fine. They just like to "enhance" them, and "innovate" to add functionality that, sadly, leaves open software hopelessly out of date and incompatible.
If you want full featured software, come over to the dar..., uh, our side of the street.
Behold, this dreamer cometh. Come now, and let us slay him... and we shall see what will become of his dreams.
At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law Close, but I don't think close enough actually invovke Godwin's Law. There might be an applicable corallary. I can't think of one right now...
My days of not taking you seriously are certainly coming to a middle...
but there are a number of people in the community who hold a lot of power to persuade and influence.
Remember, you only need consensus, not unanimity.
"I'd rather be a lightning rod than a seismometer." -Ken Kesey
All cynicism and paranoia aside, if Microsoft is serious about wanting to interoperate (with anybody, not just the FOSS community), here's the input I'd give them:
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Use open standards, and don't try to subvert them with little "improvements" so that they don't interoperate except with MS software any more.
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Don't gratuitously invent your own closed or encumbered standards and then try to get them accepted as industry standards.
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Stop giving the impression (and remember that actions speak louder than words) that your primary goal is to require everyone in the world to use Microsoft software, and to make it frustrating or impossible to use anything else.
My 3 cents.Sure, what could be wrong with that?
Name a good software company that has had a serious relationship with Microsoft as a competitor and has come off better over a 5-year period as a result of trying to cooperate with them (OK, IBM lasted a bit longer, but most are dead).
IBM has demonstrated any number of ways of showing some level of cooperation with the open or free software communities. Apple, too, has earned some good karma, basing their OS and browser on open code and architecture, even if they keep a lot proprietary. Sun has been involved as well, and it hasn't kept them from keeping other things private. So why can't Microsoft think of something like most other major companies have, without calling a conference of competitors that sounds too much like looking for a target to attack, much like SCO's supposed invitation to IBM and the open source community to sit down and work things out?
Stop being so evil. Microsoft has enough money in the bank to be able to afford business ethics and earn trust.
How insincere can Microsoft be? They don't need to sit down with anybody. All they need to do is publish their specifications for the API to their operating system. This claim that they want to 'find common ground' could hardly be more insincere.
When they're ready to cut the BS and be serious, all they have to do is publish their API. After that, let's talk.
Best regards.
You want to work with the Open Source community? Fine. Show us your openness. Tell us about your relationship with SCO. That'll be one big test of their willingness.
And the worms ate into his brain.
-Stop saying OSS is Communist
-Full CSS2/XHTML 1.1 in IE7 with no proprietary extensions
-As stated, open the file formats.
ACs are modded -6. I don't read you, I don't mod you, I don't see you. Don't like it? Don't be a coward.
If you include ignoring the standard definition and doing whatever you please, yes, they read it. By that definition, my toaster reads it, too.
Do you really think they wanted to control the browser market for any purpose than to destroy it, because it was free and open?
Unfortunately for them, even after abandoning their users and code base for several years after they thought their opposition was dead, they find they have to come back to it once in a while.
If they would implement and support W3C and other standards, as well as reputable browser vendors do, it would be a start.
FTFA: "...The [patent] law is fundamentally sound and works well...."
Yeah, it works well if your a member of the Billionare club, Incoporated. For example, ACME Deep Pocket Company is awarded an invalid software patent. Small Startup Company is taken to court by ACME Deep Pocket Company. How can Small Startup Company afford the lengthy litigation costs even when they're in the right? They have to cave in. The legal system supports Might Is Right in this respect.
And they're the only ones that matter to microsoft. Does microsoft care if joe coder makes his own O/S? Hell no. Microsoft cares about IBM, and SUSE, and REDHAT, people who can actually give major corporations support. I hate to break it to you, but your local DMV isn't switching to Gentoo anytime soon, because... taht's right... they want support. And any *open source* company that's offering support has a leader. And THOSE are the only people Microsoft REALLY cares about.
Wanting to meet in order to better interoperate with OSS sounds too vague to me.
Am I being paranoid, or are there hidden motives? What are they?
Is this like the scene in the beginning of Braveheart when the English King invited the nobles to a meeting, and then hung them all?
Microsoft cannot get the OSS community to agree to anything. They can't say: "Do xxx we have a signed agreement from your CEO".
Even Linus can only speak for 10% or so of the Linux code base.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
"If this is a publicity stunt, someone in Microsoft's marketting department's getting fired. This move won't sway many to stay with Microsoft products. If anything, it acknowledges OSS as a real force in the marketplace, bringing more people consider OSS."
Well said. But that's not the end of the stupidity. Microsoft cannot allow this kind of talk to gain credibility. FOSS advocates have nothing to lose and everything to gain by being perfectly frank and honest. Add to this the credibility and exposure they'd earn from being treated as equals by Microsoft, and they'd represent more of a threat than ever before.
These are not marketing folks they'd be sitting down with. FOSS geeks don't come out of the boardroom talking about synergies and new paradigms, they come out saying, things like 'MS has refused to budge on their third-rate security measures, their proprietary file formats and closed APIs. As a result, you the consumer will continue to suffer, in spite of our best efforts to mitigate the damage.'
Microsoft has a pathological streak a mile wide when it comes to partnership and dialogue. IBM, Lotus, Stack Technologies and Novell have all been victimised by their blindly opportunistic avarice. They all left it to the lawyers to do the talking, and never expressed their full and frank opinions on MS' business practices - likely because in many cases it would leave them open to pot-and-kettle accusations.
FOSS advocates aren't (typically) officers of publicly owned corporations, so they don't have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders that requires that they 'play nice'. If they're given a pulpit to preach from, you can count on some fairly frank discussion that corporate powers-that-be would find quite difficult to address. That's why even 'good guys' like IBM tends to avoid open discussion about the principles of Free Software.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
All the Slasdot stories about Microsoft have been very interesting lately, both in their number and in the content of the following posts. First, Longhorn is a no-show--a real honest to goodness flop. It's like Windows XP Plus. Second, someone at Microsoft blew it big time on their earnings projection. They probably have the best accountants and economists in the industry, and they made a mistake. The first time in a long time (ever?) they missed their earnings goal.
So why all the publicity? Their stock is flat, their earnings are no longer in double-digit growth, their future OS is thoroughly unimpressive, their Office suite is prohibitively expensive, they have no diversification that can support their profit margins in the long-term, they are the last to endorse OSS for commodity products, their competitors are innovating like mad, and what does Microsoft have to show for it? Publicity. Keep their name out there while they scramble to stay relevant.
I think Microsoft is in trouble, and they are desparately seeking ways to stay in business for a decade more while their competitors eat their lunch. Unfortunately, there just is no way that Microsoft can compete with IBM and Sun in their current form. Microsoft is too dependent on revenue from proprietary software to continue without complete reform of the company, which includes no longer being the largest software company in the world. I expect to see a period of significant negative growth for them some time in the years ahead.
Support for Linux in Virtual PC existed long before Microsoft bought it from Connectix. In fact, at one stage you could buy it with an OS pack that had Red Hat Linux pre-installed. That is not available now.
And glancing through the web site product specs to research my post, there is no mention of Linux. Since Virtual PC emulates a hardware PC, they'd have to purposely somehow disable emulation for Linux (if that is even possible, it's like Intel making a CPU that wouldn't run an OS).
In other words, I don't think Virtual PC is an acknowledgment of Linux as an alternative OS that PC users would want to run.
The FUD that they pay "research" companies to publish is though...
Companies that have found themselved in competition with OSS have finally started to see value. Not in the OSS, certaintly not, but in the (free, as in beer) developer base. You see, developers that work for free are a finite resource, there simply aren't that many to go around.
Sun caught on to this not too long ago, and psudo open sourced Solaris in the hopes that developers would flock to it, fix it, maintain it, and innovate on it. Sun realized that by open sourcing solaris it could, in theory, triple maybe quadruple its development and enginnering efforts for free! Oh, yeah, and it still owns and can sell Solaris!
Now MS sees that it can kill Linux, OpenOffice and other competetors by drawing it's developer base into the MS flock. I'm not talking about Linus and Stallman here, but I'm talking about the applications developers. People don't run any OS to stare at it, they use it to run programs.
I don't see MS open sourcing hardly anything, but what I do them doing is building an MS type source forge, some sort of MS exclusive [psudo] open source license, and maybe open sourcing it's development tools under that [psudo] open source license. They think they can give away free tools, and sponser a collaboration site and perhaps a few hundred or thousand OSS developers will start coding software that adds value to Windows for free.
I hope they are wrong.
Be Safe! Sleep with a Marine. Semper Fi!
:)
I agree with you that, for example, it doesn't make much sense for a average consumer to upgrade from office 2000 to office 2003. And obviously they haven't had a bump on consumer OS sales, given that Longhorn is still off in the horizon.
That said, these same product lines are still quite succesful in the corporate world. I'm talking the large companies with thousands of employees to deal with. In this envirnoment windows 2003 is attractive, even when linux is free, because it is jam packed with things to help in enterprise wide server administration. Let's not kid ourselves, it takes alot to be a good linux/unix system admin, and you guys can wear that badge with pride. Since the market is not exactly flooded with experts like yourselves, companies like it that a less experienced person can still keep a win2k3/XPSP2 network up and running, and can apply rules to machines company wide, using tools like active directory with pretty UI. Thanks to win2k3 and SP2, which turn off most services by default, and generally are more solid secure products, disasters like code red are much less likely.
Plus win2k3 and Office 2003 both have a slant towards collaboration, which isn't that attractive to consumers but intriguing for businesses. win2k3 has share point, and office has lots of collaboration tools (which will probably expand significantly thanks to the groove aquisition). They are also doing big pushes into the small business market with retail management systems, point of sales products, and even an accounting software in the works.
So it seems that while Longhorn has been in it's long development, MS has concentrated their vision towards the corporate world. This makes it easy to think they are absent from the consumer market, and hence somehow failing. But they still seem to be raking in the dough.
Look, the very nature of "intellectual property" accepts that fact that you believe that it's "OK" to use the coercive power of government to controll waht people copy. So let there be no doubt, we are what we hold ourselves accountable to, and we are far more beholden to the forces that are pulling us apart from Microsoft that the ones that are keeping us together.
One more thing, if it's only about the technology, and not freedom. Then what's to keep Microsoft from offering key people money and benefits to influence the direction of Linux. If they don't see freedom as the end in itself, then they surely won't see anything wrong with that. The fact is, freedom matters, and in the information age the freedom to copy and distribute information that's already out there really matters.
I think it wreaks of desperation. MS isn't the new thing anymore, they are the big bad monopoly. It's not easy to market as the big bad guy, so they want to be seen like IBM,the former big bad guy that's getting attention over OSS commitments. Plus that whole SCO thing didn't crush linux as expected, and longhorn is getting poor reviews. People are frustrated with poor security ruining they computers.
In the past MS didn't even give a phukene reach around as they embraced the competition, and now they are offering to reach out ?
I just don't really care have microsoft reach out. They carved out their solitude with monopolistic practices, and now they can deal with the consequences.
Well, listening to all the blabber here, I know at least ONE side of this thing who is not interested in building any bridges, because it is not even interested in HEARING THE OTHER FUCKING SIDE OUT.
Nice and cozy there, under your rock, ain't it?
This comment does not exist.
and the crux of their woes is a bunch of code that they cannot buy, written by volunteers that they cannot buy (except that asshole from IronPython), presenting their basement-dungeon captive customers with a way out completely unforseen by their corporate planners. and, on the spit-and-polish side, you have OS X available, which is mostly compatible with F/OSS.
their nasty, brutish house of cards is set to come tumbling down. microsoft is dead - fuck microsoft. can $20,000 per month to ralph reed save their souls? or funnel enough money to the corporatist government to eliminate the communist unamerican cancerous hippy competition, perhaps by invalidating the GPL or carefully crafted patent laws?
this is truly exciting. if it didn't directly threaten our computing freedom it might even be fun to watch.
who is she? leave a comment!
Microsoft's problem isn't proprietary software, but rather shrink-wrapped software. There's tons of room for proprietary software in the real world (as far as I know, /. isn't open source) and there are lots of people still making money off of it. The ASP model says that it's not the software that's important, but the service that goes along with it. Ever wonder why IBM is throwing its weight behind Linux? They never made a lot of money selling OS/2, and probably even lost some money on it, but they did make money servicing it after the fact. Kind of like printers - sell the printer at cost and then sell ink cartridges at a big markup. Retailers understand the concept of "loss leader". It's better for IBM to throw a few bucks into Linux and sell support on the back end. The problem is that Microsoft just doesn't get this concept because it's never made any real money off of service. Try looking for service revenues on their yearly reports. It's a real hard number to find, and it's very, very small relative to product revenues.
If you don't want crime to pay, let the government run it.
Assuming that p. L > 0. Your math does not hold water.
Having worked for Microsoft I perhaps can point out what the problem is with Microsoft. They are not about good software,they are about market share. They are not about opening up the world for users, they are about locking them in. They are not about freedom, they are about greed. They are not about free software, they are about software you have to pay them for. The only reason they want to talk to OSS advocates is because they are losing business. I say give them the big F off, I did when I told them to stick their filthy job up their arse and I've never looked back.
Sitdown? We don't need no stinkin' sitdown. You can interoperate with our code a lot easier then we have been able to interoperate with your code. The only reason you can even call it your code is the fact of weak free licences like the BSD and your ability buy code innovated by others.
So now you want a sit down.
GO AWAY!