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Microsoft Wants Sit-Down With OSS Advocates

Posted by Zonk on from the pigs-fly-hell-freezes-duke-nukem-releases dept.

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."

5 of 553 comments (clear)

  1. What?! by hoborocks · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What is this? Could this be serious? They did recently acknowledge Linux as an operating system, instead of a cancer (they included support for it in VirtualPC). A very fine move on their part, but perhaps they are onto the final stage (Denial, Bargaining, Anger, Sadness, finally Acceptance?) Though they are not dying, perhaps they see an opportunity to "Accept" the fact that Open Source Software has been around and will be around much longer than anything else.

    We must be wary though - could this be a wolf in sheep's clothing? Could this be a false branch? Might they trap the OSS developers at the meeting-place and hold them ransom?!

    Who knows...

    --
    AccountKiller
  2. Ho hum, again? by yagu · · Score: 5, Interesting

    And, for my more serious post.... Microsoft has "reached out" before. Seemingly not many remember their big PR campaign when they first released NT circa 1992. One of the big claims, one of the big selling points of their "new technology" (not what NT stands for, btw) was NT's POSIX compliance.... Microsoft purportedly was then about to "join" the open architecture community. They even convinced me to go work for them. But, it turned out they didn't do complete POSIX (only implemented the API, not the User Utilities), and only did the POSIX at all to get government contracts (I know this, I was at an internal presentation where "Margaret" prefaced the presentation with the comments, "We are only doing POSIX as a checkbox, so we can get government contracts..." (I am not making this up.))

  3. Microsoft's knee-jerk response. by rice_burners_suck · · Score: 5, Interesting
    This is either a knee-jerk reaction to their missed projections for the quarter, or this is an April Fool's joke 29 days late. Well, it goes right in line with what I posted in another story about Microsoft:
    It's not a surprise at all that Microsoft missed their quarterly revenue projection. After all, the company is very accustomed to basically controlling the marketplace and dictating their terms upon their customers. The quarterly projections must have accounted for nearly everybody still using prior versions of Windows to be using Windows XP or Windows Server 2003. They expected tons of sales of the newest Microsoft Office. However, many sysadmins and IT departments are wary of further "upgrades" due to the problems posed by them. Many users who have Office 2000 continue to use it because newer versions, despite their glossy advertisements, really offer nothing new for this type of work. Other users, such as most employees at this company that used to use MS Office, are discovering OpenOffice.org and discovering, for various reasons, that they actually like it better. Essentially, many companies are slowly migrating away from Windows and Office, finding that other software out there is quite capable of doing the job without all the hoopla.

    In our organization, spending on software has declined almost to nothing. We no longer buy MS Office products because OpenOffice.org has eliminated the need to do so; all of our critical infrastructure runs on Linux and FreeBSD; and the desktops and workstations that run Windows continue to run the same versions of Windows that originally came on those workstations. Therefore, we use Windows 98, Me, and XP Personal, which came on several eMachines we bought for office use. And the funniest thing is that while the Linux and FreeBSD boxes continue to use the latest stable and release versions of the OS and software, the Windows boxes have not been upgraded, and there are no plans to do so. It would only be costly, and would offer us nothing in exchange. And I believe the same applies to countless organizations the world over. People will simply not continue to upgrade hardware and software forever.

    That, my friends, is why Microsoft missed its quarterly revenue projection.

    I'd say that pretty much sums it up. Microsoft has finally realized, after I don't know how many years, that it will not pay to stay with the old fashioned business model that no longer fits.
  4. Holy Disengenuity Batman! by lheal · · Score: 5, Interesting

    What a load of baloney!

    Microsoft wants to interoperate? Go ahead! Just quit *not* interoperating.

    Microsoft wants to reach out to the Open Source community? Uh, they really don't get it, do they. There aren't any leaders to reach out to! There are leaders, but it's not a labor union or a PTA.

    We'll judge you by your actions, not by what you say to our leaders.

    --
    Raise your children as if you were teaching them to raise your grandchildren, because you are.
  5. "A Rising Tide... and Barriers to Entry" by mcdtracy · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Microsft has been characterized by their actions over the years as predatory... even when it hurt the bottom line. They would target and squash a company just because they could... because they relished a cutthroat style of competition to get motivated.

    If I could get an ear within MS I'd try to get them to admit to themselves that the Internet made them more money and the Internet was entirely structured from Open Standards... ethernet, TCP/IP, sockets, HTML over HTTP and on and on... They profitted enormously from NOT fighting these standards... no dial-up MSN only.

    The reason for this is the Rising Tide effect.
    More investment is poured into a market and most companies benefit in some ratio to their marketshare... there's some shifting but the big winners accelerate adoption and don't fight the new standards that are causing the explosive growth.

    Microsoft saw the benefits and only tried minor hacks to the standards (DHTML for example).

    When microsoft realizes that having your only significant competitor cost almost nothing they should have the next big Eureka moment. The way to destroy the Sun, HP, and IBM Unix businesses is to accelerate the enterprise adoption of Linux.

    Oracle got it... if they spend less on Sun, HP and IBM hardware they have more budget for our products... duh. IT budgets are finite... growth comes from getting more of the budget.

    Sun, HP and IBM could be effectively driven out of the Enterprise software business. Enterprise deployments of big applications goes crazy based upon new cost models and Microsoft's boat rises on that new high tide.

    The logical extension is commercial Linux versions of their higher margin products (MS SQL, Visual Studio) and even more growth as a company when
    the only other significant alternative is an OSS project with little revenue to help it compete for Enterprise requirements.

    That's what I might tell this guy to explain to Bill gates and Bill of course would sob gently...
    "You mean we've already won? There's no one left to kill? Just mine the veins we already own?."
    Well... there is Oracle still.

    Bill will likely develop an interest in politics where dirty tricks still mean something.

    McD