Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft Flirts with Open Source
Vin Daryl writes "ZDNet reports on Microsoft's love-hate relationship with open-source software." From the article: "The interoperability lab focuses on getting products from open-source ISVs such as JBoss, to work on the Microsoft platform, he said. 'For example, we often collaborate with JBoss, but in certain areas we might compete with them. It's competition and cooperation,' Hilf explained. 'Over time, as you see the open-source marketplace maturing and becoming more commercial, I think you'll see more of that kind of dynamics. It's not something that's unique to Microsoft,' he said, adding that IBM and Oracle also compete, and at the same time, cooperate with open-source vendors. "
More like part of their usual "embrace, extend, extinguish" cycle.
Microsoft is welcomed to support cross-platform development (http://wyoguide.sf.net/) so OpenSource developers can easily port their applications to Windows but Microsoft may consider that cross-platform also works in the other direction so commercial vendors are able to port to Linux. Maybe this is a win-win solution for everybody ;-)
O. Wyss
See http://wyoguide.sf.net/papers/Cross-platform.html
I found this claim interesting:
Hilf added that his team has contributed patches to the open-source community, particularly for Samba, which connects Linux machines to Windows networks, the Gaim instant messenger, and the Apache Web server.
Has anyone got any references to support this claim? Were their patches accepted? What did the patches do?
It seems to me that if Microsoft are submitting patches to Free Software projects (Samba is especially interesting), that is a big step forward for them.
Just a follow up comment - it's the same strategy as the Disney conglomerate: take public domain stories (Snow White, Beauty & Beast, etc), produce an instance of it, then heavily protect your revenue stream with hoards of lawyers going after anybody who even thinks of makes anything that remotely resembles your instance.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
If you read through any Slashdot thread involving Microsoft (which seems to end up being about 90% of them in one way or another) you'll find a lot of sentiment (paraphrased) that "Microsoft is evil, eternal, and eternally evil," and, as a corollary, the idea that "Windows has been, is, and will remain FOREVER the dominant operating system for personal computers." Nothing like some worldly, jaded, cynical pronouncements about Everything Forever ;)
;)]
I won't say there's no reason for Microsoft to cling to its current model of software sales for as long as possible -- it's a public, and therefore (by definition) profit-driven company. Investors like stability, and conventional models of making money.
But I believe Microsoft could become the world's largest vendor of open source software (even if wasn't Free software in the RMS sense*), and that surely some wags and possibly some visionaries within the company have been considering what that could mean. * (That's also *possible* but a bigger stretch.)
Microsoft employs several thousand really bright people (and of course some percentage of other people); it has one of the most recognized brand names in the world; it has a packaging and distribution system that gets software moved around the world in little boxes pretty effectively. Point is, Microsoft could move at its own pace to greater inclusion of open source software (as they've famously been happy to use, by using BSD licensed software) without upsetting the balance of the force.
- The Windows operating systems could remain closed, but certain applications get turned into open source projects. For instance, Microsoft Office could be made open source and free for home users, but not licensed for commercial use except through specific (money-costing) license agreements. That's not so very different from how it works now, in that lots of people have "borrowed from work" copies of applicaton software from MS, Adobe, and others -- much easier to enforce expensive license agreements against companies than individuals, both aesthetically and practically. (If AT&T is ignoring their agreement to pay for something that they're using to make money, a lot of people who don't quite *like* Microsoft could understand their pursuing AT&T's agreed-on money; if Grandma Smith next door is using MS Word to tap in her favorite recipes because her nice nephew installed it for her and doesn't realize it isn't a legit copy, that's a lot harder to swallow.)
- The *core* of Windows could be turned into an open source project, while the polished graphical interface remained exclusive to Microsoft as a branding / copyright playground, so few people (relatively speaking) would be interested in using the underlying system without paying Microsoft for the decoration level as well. ["Nahhh, that's impossible!"
- Microsoft could just keep pushing open or semi-open development tools; heck, they could declare Mono the preferred way to develop for Windows, and set up a SourceForge equivalent to encourage new software, proprietary or not, for Windows.
Keep flirting, Microsoft!
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
Besides WiX and other Windows-centric open-source Microsoft software that was already mentioned, Microsoft Research is also the primary party responsible for GHC, the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. GHC is available under a modified Apache/BSD license. Not only that, but their primary platform seems to be Linux (Windows is also supported).
What do I mean?
Why can't Microsoft take one of its pet projects, like Media Player, or Outlook Express, or any other, and turn it into an OSS project. Let the community have at it. There's only so many outcomes:
The community reviews the project's code and either:
--a) Improves it, makes it more efficient, fixes bugs/security holes
--b) Makes suggestions that Microsoft thinks are utter crap
What other outcomes are there? Sure, people might laugh at some of their code, especially if it's really really ugly. What software project's code doesn't become ugly after a bajillion revisions?
Does Microsoft see such an endeavor as stooping to some kind of a new low? C'mon! Or maybe they know that it's not such a bad idea, but they're so afraid of giving up their "trade secrets" that if they went with an OSS attempt that they'd have even less reasons to support their CSS methods?
If Microsoft management wants to generate some goodwill, then the management should open-source old versions of Microsoft Windows that are no longer being sold. In this way, people who have the older computers could easily get a copy of the older versions of Windows.