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Microsoft's Mundie to Continue OSS Outreach
Techie writes "In an interview with eWeek Craig Mundie, Microsoft's new co-head-honcho and chief research and strategy officer, says he plans to continue to push the Redmond software titan forward with its goal of greater interoperability with software licensed under the GPL." From the article: "Even in Bill's own public remarks, he pointed out that he thought his iconic status and the way that was reported tended to overemphasize his role in the company's innovation and execution. This is really a transition that has been in the works for a couple of years, with a couple to go before, and we will see the emergence of a lot of great talent that has today been portrayed as all Bill. This is a company with, in many cases, the best people in the world. "
Its a trap!
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
So they want to extinguish their bad-guy image, and extend an embrace towards the GPL?
Wait, maybe I have this backwards...
Isn't interoperability more a question of standards compliance than licensing? Or did eWeek's question pertain more to 'general interaction', as if Redmond needs to be more aware of the existence of, say, Ogg.
Get thee glass eyes, and, like a scurvy politician, seem to see things thou dost not.--King Lear
Don't trust anything Mundie says about F/OSS any farther than you can spit. Just a short time ago, Mundie was Microsoft's anti-open-source poster child. Now he's pulling an olive branch out of his ass. Either he's lying through his teeth, or he's talking out of both sides of his mouth.
Microsoft's sins are legion. They have a hell of a lot of work to do before they should expect anyone with a brain larger than a peanut to trust them.
"..This is a company with, in many cases, the best people in the world."
Are you serious? The best people in the world?! Oh, really? And you're the one who defines what makes someone / some group of people "the best in the world"?
I think they are realising that OSS isn't going away, each year it continues to get stronger and because of its structure they cannot aggressivly compete against it in a traditional sense.
We are already seeing huge benefits of OSS and what it can achieve and I think Microsoft have realised if they are going to have any future in it they need to work with it to some extent.
Hell just froze over.
I am neither a programmer nor a lawyer, so there may be some nuances I'm missing, but here's how I see it.
- FLOSS reveals everything there is to know about how it operates and interoperates.
- Microsoft reveals as little as possible about how it operates and interoperates.
- Microsoft has a high-profile, highly-paid person trying to figure out how to make the two work together. So far, this appears to be quite a challenge for them.
Unless I've missed something crucial, Microsoft will never fix this problem to everyone's solution. The problem isn't in their software. The problem is in their business model. But they can never admit that, so they'll go on trying to figure out which size wrench to use to hammer the light bulb into the socket.
What if I do the same thing, and I do get different results?
IBM was the Microsoft of it's time and now it's a darling of geeks everywhere. All companies eventually have to learn to transition from being an entity that makes standards to merely contributing to them. Microsoft will learn this lesson albeit the hard way but they will learn.
Then in the future we can adjust our ire towards future threats like Apple for closing Darwin off to development and Google who is probably amassing more power than any one company should.
-Posix compatibility for threads
-Posix compatibility for files
-Signals and fork
I put signals and fork on the same line because they would be nice but not totally necessary. I understand that Windows doesn't work the same way as Unix for such things so it might be difficult to implement them.
I think that support for unix threads and files would go a long way towards not requiring that applications have a custom portable library for Windows VS others (linux, unix, mac). How many ported applications use the old posix compatible functions on Windows? Probably a ton.
In a related announcement, Microsoft announced that Raynard D. Fox will be their new Executive Vice-President for Henhouse Security.
Ok here's a tip I got from my karate instructor, when someone's spoiling for a fight and are clearly about to start flailing, ask them a question, something dumb, irrelevant and obscure. When they take their eyes off you to think about it (and yup, people do exactly that when they're thinking, one of the reasons mobile phones are so dangerous in cars) you kick them in the balls and run for it.
The moral is watch what people do, don't listen to what they say.
The guys at the top of companies are all politicians, they tell you what you want to hear while continuing as always.
Deleted
That is correct. To make it easier to defend your position, often a company will have one group read the protected code and write a spec. Then a second group will code the spec. This is quite common.
So why is it then, that the latest Vista beta (2) does not support SMB 'Slow Query' (which works well with Samba), only Fast Query (which only works with the very latest versions of Samba)? Too bad for all those people who have ethernet connected Hard Drives running Samba which don't support firmware updates...
This is a company with, in many cases, the best people in the world.
... maybe not so many now that Google is on the scene. The problem with Microsoft is how little the use of that talent translates into actual products. One has to wonder if the reason that Microsoft keeps so much highly-paid intellect on staff is more a matter of keeping those brains away from the competition (or from becoming competition) than for developing new products. They've used that principle in their lobbying efforts in Washington: hire everybody who's anybody and make sure that nobody else can have them. A Microsoft spokesperson once called that "sucking the air out of Washington."
The best people that money can buy, certainly
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
It's not unlikely that MS has been waiting for F/OSS to die only to watch it grow stronger. MS may now see F/OSS as something it must embrace, (images of a giant anaconda). Bill Gate's impending retirement as chief architect may in part be a way to remove himself (perhaps Ballmer will follow) as a way to distance MS from his and Ballmer's past attacks on F/OSS as a commie plot. Both men may have too much of an ingrained distaste for interoperability with F/OSS.
As Chairman Gate's will have a duty to steer the company in the direction of greatest profit, and given the entrenched position of F/OSS, that direction will require MS to work toward interoperability with F/OSS.
just my loose change
"Academicians are more likely to share each other's toothbrush than each other's nomenclature."
Cohen
The only microsoftie I have personally seen trying to do something right with open source is Bill Hilf (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Hilf) I know because I use to work on his Linux team. I guess it's good that other microsofties are dog piling on his work but hope he gets the credit. guns and admin
That's MISTER disgusting nerd to you.
1)Let others innovate
2)Copy innovation
3)Market more to establish market share
4)Dominate emerging standards
Having a working relationship with the open source community just makes it easier to do this.
I am a concerned citizen of Skylar Durden's Ivy Nation against Ann Coulter's Adam's Apple.
There might be a different reason Gates is quietly retiring. Even more than open source software it is the commoditization of hardware that will increase price pressure on the OS, and this is a trend that even M$ cannot fight. They will have to somehow justify the fact that the OS represents 20% of the price of a desktop (and an even larger percentage in the future), and I would like to see Mundie doing that. Maybe Gates prefers to hide now so he won't have to be around when this question will be asked by a large enough number of people.
I think this is one of the main reasons M$ is pumping up the minimum specs for a computer to run Vista. More expensive hardware will make their OS cost a smaller percentege of the final price of a new coputer.
"Isn't interoperability more a question of standards compliance than licensing?"
Standards often include patented features. Most standards bodies require a minimum of RAND licensing. RAND is not sufficient to allow GPL implementations, however. Microsoft has a history of crafting licenses and patent grants that preclude GPL implementations.
The benefit of open standards comes from opening up competition, by removing standards compliance from control by a sole source. In the current market, Microsoft can crush any competitor that uses the same business model as Microsoft, so 'standards' that may only be used by similar commercial enities don't offer real competition. Only Free software, supported by a business model that can't be crushed by Microsoft, has shown a serious threat to Microsoft's domination. Yes, Apple, Sun, and others have had an impact, but they are vulnerable to changes in management direction. Sun may have saved Java from Microsoft, but they could turn around and sell it to Microsoft. I don't expect that to happen, but it's possible.
Interoperability with standards isn't enough. The standards need to be open, too. There's a lot of professional PR doublespeak about what 'open standard' means, but I rely on one test: can someone write a GPL implementation that complies with the patent licenses?
I tell you what. If MS puts their patents on the table and removes their support of SCO and copyright liability, then I'll consider talking. Until then, forget it, actions speak louder than words.
You wrote:
- Microsoft has a high-profile, highly-paid person trying to figure out how to make the two work together.
What would be more accurate would be:
- Microsoft has a high-profile, highly-paid person trying to figure out how to make the press and public think that the two work together.
This is a much easier job.
I'm not sure what all this "outreach" is supposed to be about. FOSS licensed software is there for all to use, including Microsoft. FOSS developers are making enormous efforts to accomodate Microsoft already, to interoperate with Microsoft software, and even to reverse engineer Microsoft's protocols.
.NET, and SMB to the public domain (so that people can create interoperable implementations without nagging legal questions), and document and stabilize formats and protocols like those used by SMB, Exchange, Office, Sharepoint, and others.
If Microsoft wants even more cooperation from FOSS developers, all they have to do is dedicate patents in areas like FAT,
So, open source is already doing all it can do under the limits that Microsoft itself is setting for open source. If they want open source to support Microsoft products even better, it's in their hands.
Please explain the relevance of this comment to anything else in this story or in any other comment?
Microsoft declared _war_ on Linux, the GPL and anything else that threatens their hegemony. And we're just supposed to smile and say thank you when they want to "increase interoperability" between Windows and Linux? After all the bullshit they've pulled? This is a war, and if Microsoft wins, we're screwed with DRM, formats that change year after year, and more monopoly tactics that wipe out budding technology like Ballmer steps on an ant. There's a reason why Penguinistas don't like Microsoft and it's because we've seen what happens to Microsoft "partners." It's like watching people get tossed in a tank of sharks and then being asked if I'd like to go for a swim in the new pool.
Craig Mundie is an ass.
Hey Craig, how come I can't get Word Perfect for Linux anymore?
--
BMO
Its a trap!
"... Get an axe!"
If you need to know the source, then rent or download Army of Darkness for crying out loud. And I don't care if people on Fark never quote that movie. It's the perfect reaction to M$ strategy.
I have nothing to say.
The emporer had force powers that allowed him to control weak minds and shoot lightning from his fingertips. Microsoft has money and a bunch of software that works sorta, most of the time, in some ways, if you don't try to do something important with it. I guess they both have covert control over the senate, but if MS was designing the death star, the rebel alliance wouldn't have needed to fly through the exhaust tunnel, or hit a thermal vent the size of a "womp rat" because the reactor would have been put on the outside to remain compatible with deathstar 98 and to allow a certain class of star destroyer to dock that hadn't been used for ten years.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
Several techniques to waste your time
... FROM Chairman TO Chairman.
1. Speculating WHY / WHETHER REALLY Microsoft is suddenly cosying up to Open Source and GPL.
2. Speculating WHY Vista is getting delayed.
3. Speculating WHY DNF is getting delayed.
4. Speculating WHETHER Gates really stepped DOWN
5. Speculating WHETHER Ballmer might get promoted to Chair-Man.
6. Profit! (Note... this list is always Profitable for Microsoft - not you. One last time... Misrosoft is not a philanthropic organisation - Gates might be one individually. MS is answerable to it's shareholders, and it's only motive is MONEY, not shipping Vista, developing a better Office, kicking Gates, or rewarding Ballmer.
7. If we want to spend your time PROFITably, I guess we can simply skip such articles, and start using REAL open source apps, or writing more code under the GPL.
Such articles are a real waste of time, IMHO.
If you keep throwing chairs, one day you'll break windows....
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Ok here's a tip I got from my karate instructor, when someone's spoiling for a fight and are clearly about to start flailing, ask them a question, something dumb, irrelevant and obscure. When they take their eyes off you to think about it (and yup, people do exactly that when they're thinking, one of the reasons mobile phones are so dangerous in cars) you kick them in the balls and run for it.
All that leadup in your story and you didn't give us a good question? I was severely disappointed."What is the weight of an unladen swallow?" If they ask african or european, just fight them, they're a wimp.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
No, you aren't plagiarizing in that case. That's what the phrase "your own words" means -- you own the words because you wrote them yourself.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
For a long time, we've had the evidence that their code has deficiencies.... glaring ones. The closed source model bites for numerous reasons, including masking the quality (or lack thereof) in code, algorithms, and so on.
What if MS coders across the world did F/OSS code? Is that competition for all of the coders that can lay claim to kernel trees before 2.2 in Linux? Or those that can do a conditional compile for another processor/platform other than Intel/AMD/Via?
What if those coders were actually good? Or what if they were bad? What happens when an army of formerly (actually currently in the closet for the most part) closed-source coders start contributing to the GPL? Do we care what Craig "The Fibber" Mundie says an any way? No. We get potentially great code contributions with Microsoft sanction, and perhaps even blessing.
So fornicate Mundie, and let him incentivize coding under the GPL. It's a PR move any way..... so nice, too, that eWeek swallowed it whole without a challenge.
Sheez.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
When Linux was only a tiny or isolated part of the OS market, it's was to MS's advantage to do everything they could not to recognize, support, or interoperate with it.
But as Linux reaches a significant size, MS's lack of interoperability becomes a liability. People start not bothering buying Windows licenses because it doesn't work well with their favourite OS (e.g., read and write common file formats), despite the fact that Windows may have functionality they would like to access.
As Windows begins its descent from dominance, it will be forced to start "playing well with others".
This prediction is worth everything you paid for it.
It's been good for business elsewhere, it'll be good for business for them.
I don't see this as any more shocking than Apple or IBM embracing open source, and MSFT's technologies have been increasingly more accessable to developers.
Stoop to childish namecalling and whining, but it's not your decision, it's theirs.
MSFT's stock has been slumping hard lately, it might be a good time to pick some up.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
I love the responses to this article. No matter what they do everyone hates MS. If they had announced that they weren't going to be compatible with OSS eveyone would have, justly, been accusing them of being evil. However instead MS has agreed to at least interoperate with OSS, and yet everyone still accuses them of being evil (not in general mind you, evil on this specific issue, i.e. They are going to corrupt the standard!). This indicates the many people's opinions about MS are not based on the facts (although most of us knew that already), and thus are best described as irrational.
Philosophy.
Microsoft could have interoperability with FOSS overnight for a cost of Bill's pocket change, if they wanted to.
It is simply that they don't want to do it and for reasons which make no sense to anyone but them.
interesting that BillyG announced his retirement around the same time that M$ started to talk positively about interacting with GPL'd software.
I wonder what the real story is behind both these moves...
Or maybe MS certified VPC for Linux, that would make "Windows Software interoperable" with GPL stuff.
They really isn't any mention about "documents", "media" or "data", and I don't think that is their intent.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
... because M$ pays you, or because you hope that if you kiss their asses long enough maybe M$ will notice and pay you ? Since you are doing the asskissing for free, what incentive do they have to pay you in the future ?
Remeber: Just because you are ignorant it does not mean that you are not wrong.
I don't care what ANY large company says, they are in the business to make money for both their Upper management, and their stockholders. IBM, Sun, Cisco, etc...All of them are saying something about opening up their source in one way or another, but in the end, they are doing so, because they have some grand scheme about how it is going to make them profit in the end.
Underpants Gnome theory, Step#3 - Profit.
There was an article posted here last week about how Bank of America was outsourcing IT positions, and making the employees being replaced train the Indian/whoever replacements.
I emailed BofA, and asked them why they would give away all of my financial and personal information...There response, was...To make money for us, and our stock holders...it all comes down to some douche bag in an ivory tower making decisions based on how much he wants his bonus to be this year.
My 2 cents.
----- I have bad karma for a reason! -----
From the summary:
[Bill Gates] thought his iconic status and the way that was reported tended to overemphasize his role in the company's innovation and execution.
Haha. Did someone here think that Bill Gates was intimately involved in all of Microsoft's wonderful innovations? Anyone?
I hear this all the time, and I've come to the resignation that it's just a fact of life that people want to think this way, but frankly it's bullshit.
I am a senior editor at InfoWorld. I can tell you unequivocably that the editorial staff at InfoWorld is not in the business of sucking up to advertisers; indeed, we are not involved in the business of procuring advertisements in any way. Any reputable publication has a "church and state" policy with regard to sales and editorial. InfoWorld does, and I have no reason to believe our distinguished competition at eWeek is any different. (Of course, they're not as good at their jobs as we are, but they're not crooks.)
At InfoWorld we are also not in the business of repurposing press releases, nor do we accept any so-called bylined articles contributed by vendors. Any "advertorial" is clearly marked as such -- it's the rules.
Editorial staff at computer journals do nurture relationships with major technology vendors but that's because it's necessary to what we do -- which is report on IT. We may not print answers to the "hard-hitting questions" as often as you might like. In many cases, however, the reason you don't see answers to those questions in print is because the person we ask refuses to answer them.
You don't have to believe me, of course. But come on -- do I walk around saying programmers don't do anything but eat Cheet-Os, drink Mountain Dew, and add bugs to software?
Breakfast served all day!
There is a direct proof indicating that the bullshit SCO lawsuit was brought into being directly by Microsoft. That lawsuit was not just Microsoft "competing to win", it was Microsoft attempting to wipe Linux off the map permanently via the courts instead of the market.
If you honestly expect people are going to forgive Microsoft for this kind of bullshit because their new asshole-CEO has decided that co-operation is now a better plan, then you and Microsoft have another thing coming. Don't get me wrong, I fully support the idea of interoperating with Microsoft products, but my goal is to do so in order to eventually eliminate them, the way they have (and no doubt continue to) tried to do to us, with the difference being that we WILL win WITHOUT pulling any unethical or illegal bullshit stunts like the SCO lawsuit or the Stac theft.
For everyone who isn't aware, it's called cleanroom software engineering, and it does a good job of avoiding copyright issues with code.
I pretend to know more than I really do by mooching off google and wikipedia.
With some groups, I'm willing to extend trust. MS, however, has a track record. They will need to PROVE that they are trustworthy before I will trust them. Even then it will be an iffy kind of thing for a decade or so.
But proof comes first.
1) Stop campaigning for closed standards. This is the first step towards earning trust.
2) Stop attempting to corrupt existing standards. This can be done simultaneous with 1.
3) Stop spreading FUD. If you continue to act like an enemy, there's no way I'll be willing to trust you.
Those steps are negative, but essential. Until those conditions are met there is no possible positive action that I would trust.
4) Do something positive. There are lots of options here, but if a government forces you to it, then it doesn't count as a positive action from you. Merely neutral (at best).
Possible examples of positive actions are:
1) Pushing an open standard, and adopting it in your own programs.
2) Opening the file format specifications beyond what the EU is demanding. (Alternatively, creating a new Open file format specification and adopting it...but this is 1 again.)
3) Releasing a version of MSWind that doesn't automatically remove the ability of other OSs on the same drive to boot. (Yeah, Linux isn't so good about this either. SuSE seems to do this, but most distros presume that they are the grand PooBah *AND* the Lord High Executioner wrapped into one bundle.)
4) Other. (I said there were lots of choices. There's really too many to enumerate.)
But proof comes before belief.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Snort. Gee, I don't know why anybody would ever be suspicious of Microsoft.
.
Go read those papers, the "Halloween documents." They aren't just random FUD, those are internal Microsoft documents stating exactly how Microsoft intends to destroy OSS.
"Embrace, extend and extinguish" isnt' a summary that was randomly invented by OSS paranoiacs, according to sworn testimony the phrase came out of Microsoft VP Paul Maritz' mouth in Intel's meetings with Microsoft
So we're supposed to not be suspicious when they announce that, gee golly, they're serious about embracing?
You're either a fool or a shill.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
I wouldn't say that we know for sure that Microsoft is playing nice; I am saying that we have to admit that there is a possibilty. It is more foolish to insist that you opinions on Microsoft are right and need never change no matter what Microsoft does (assuming that they actually work on comparability and not just release press statements).
Philosophy.
The prequels were horrible, and a waste of money.
The story was lame.
Let's stop these Star Wars analogies.
Yeah - right around the time when Monkeys come Flying Out Of My Butt.
OK- I can grant that the best people in the world work there. But they sure aren't doing the programming. proof?
1. Vista
2. MS Word
3. IE
4. fill in the blank: _____________
MS makes horrible software, a nasty OS, Arf. Please, God, make it go away.
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
A nice start would be allowing redistribution of MSVCP71.DLL and MSVCR71.DLL as part of GPL applications? Python 2.4 switched to a newer Microsoft compiler and requires these DLLs on machines. Microsoft provides free compilers - see http://wiki.python.org/moin/Building_Python_with_t he_free_MS_C_Toolkit However the C libraries that the compilers use can only be redistributed under terms that preclude GPL licensed software, although some debate the interpretation.
Consequently that means that people who have GPL licensed Python apps can't move to Python 2.4 or newer because of Microsoft's licensing.
By your logic Microsoft will beat NASA to mars, be around for 5000 years and then still be at the top of its business. Well that should teach them.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
what MS would do is: 1.- use open source (and even release SOME code) to make comunity help in the war with google, 2.- then they will begin sending really cool patches to strategic projects 3.- then they will finally begin to implement their own patches version under its closed sourced software and improve and fix bugs remaining it closed sourced. 4.- kill OSS by leting patches and projects which with the time would be more MS dependant (because of money) unmantained and die. 5.- after 5 years those OSS helped by MS and google would die :) in that way.
6.- MS releases Singularity kernel, compatible with linux structure and file systems as main features
Isn't this they guy who said Linux was the resurgence of communism? As if what they SAY about "working with the GPL" has any relevance to reality. None of their past actions show this to be anything more than lip service. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
You must be hiding the good articles, because you're not publishing them. This interview is nothing more than a puff piece. When you start publishing articles that don't look like warmed-over press releases, and asking intelligent interview questions, then we'll believe you. When Microsoft spokespeople utter blatantly stupid blather like "we want to reach out to the OSS community more!" why aren't you asking the obvious questions, like "What's stopping you from being a good OSS participant already? Open up some of your document formats, quit playing games with networking protocols and XML, quit your dirty tricks with ODF, and quit spreading misinformation and lies about FOSS. You know you don't need an invitation- just join in, honor FOSS licenses, and quit trying to own and control everything."
If your interviewees refuse to answer the hard questions, why don't you make that part of your article?
You're just industry lapdogs, not journalists.
we will end no whine before its time
Evil Microsoft agrees with many others though...
In the latest bit of news we once again find our villain, Microsoft, but this time they are not trying to destroy the world, but instead are joining the fight alongside many on the good side of Open Source.
Ok, drama aside, there is a fundamental issue here that should be revisited, and that is the restrictions of some of the rules of what we call Open Source and the definitions we abide by.
The GPL has flaws, and as much as we would all like to protest, these flaws may be the undoing of Open Source, or at least be a limit of its success.
I won't dive into the GPL for my post, but rather encourage everyone that has not fully read what the GPL requires 'fully' or understand about the GPL beyond the hype of what we 'think' Open Source should be. And I am using GPL as an example, pick one of the other Open Source licensing schemes and you will find a lot of the same 'restrictions'.
Microsoft's opposition of Open Source has NOT been in the grand 'ideals' of Open Source, but instead of the 'strict' licensing that Open Source is weaved around.
Even Linus and other leaders in the Open Source community have voiced their concerns about license restrictions being 'tied' to Open Source and how it will in the end 'curtail' the widespread adoption by 'binding' contributors into Licensing issues that should be 'abstracted' from what we define and know Open Source to be about.
Microsoft is a company for profit, but also because of the things like the GPL, Microsoft WILL NEVER turn over source to a licensing scheme like the GPL. That is why you do see Microsoft have many 'Open Source' publications of a lot of their software, but yet NONE are released under the standard Open Source licensing, like the GPL.
Open Source should be defined as truly 'Open' and not something that is bound to these types of licensing and restrictions. They are a guise to 'protect' the originators of the code, but in the end 'limit' the code from EVER being used by many people and companies.
Maybe what MS is saying is not so wrong at this point, but more of an awakening that needs to hit the Open Source world and 'redefine' what Open Source really is without the ties to GPL and other license restrictions.
We look at companies like Microsoft and are angry that they implement their 'own' technologies instead of using GPLed code that other people are using. However for them to use the GPLed code, they would have to give up source and technology that is not necessarily something that should be public domain. This is where GPL and Intellectual property don't mix well.
So the next time we complain about 'kerbos' or another technology not using the common 'Open Source' version and instead a MS implemented version, we need to ask ourselves, how is the GPL really helping us? If the GPLed versions were 'easier' to use, companies like MS would not have to reinvent compatible technologies.
Here is another example, SAMBA FS techniques are created from MS code and technology, that is something anyone can implement because MS DOES provide the 'source' and mechanisms in use, yet nobody sees this as Open Source, even though it actually is. MS even works to ensure SAMBA compatibility, Vista's Fast Query problems are good example of where MS is concerned and working to resolve any SAMBA FS issues.
MS took a bold Step with Windows 2003 Server Clustering technologies to implement a GPLed portion for interoperability and compatibility with the current communication technologies already in place. It was a very 'fine' and hard line for them to use this GPL code (which does benefit the Open Source world and consumer as it offers compatibility and interoperability that we all expect), but at the same time the trouble to add this GPLed technology on to Windows 2003 Server was a licensing nightmare for Microsoft and had to be 'kept' independent of all 'intellectual' development at Microsoft not to 'risk' violating the GPL.
This makes it a tough
If Microsoft is a company with the best people in the world, how come they don't have the best products in the world?
Beauty is in the beholder of the eye.
While the AC put it so un-eloquently (sorry to all you grammar nazi fucks if that isn't a word, but you know what i mean don't you?), it had a good point. Any jokes like this or smack talk about Linux or Apple, are modded troll, flaimbait, while jokes against MS are funny. Why don't you just stop lying to yourselves and create a mod named: (Score: +1, So true. MS is just not as stylish and geeky enough for this site, while at the same time holding too much of the market share to be considered counter-culture, so if we act like we like it, it totally undercuts our vision of ourselves being geek-chic). Yeah, I know, (-1: Troll). Thank-you, may I have another. BTW, don't even think about modding me up to make yourselves look good either! ;)
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1978009,00.as p
n freedom.pdf
Microsoft executives have recently said they are committed to a greater outreach to the open source community and to make Windows software interoperable with that licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Is that a priority of yours and something you plan to move further forward?
I have been one of the principle people architecting the way we are going to step up to this bigger question around interoperability, and that will certainly be a focus of mine going forward, along with Bob Muglia.
You can download a copy of "Free as in Freedom" from here. I believe it's published under the FDLicense
http://www.grimstveit.no/jakob/files/text/freeasi
Download that PDF and search the term "Mundie"
You'll quickly find this on page 6
The subject of Stallman's speech is the history and future of the free software movement. The location is significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior vice president
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Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting the General Public License, or GPL,
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a legal device originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox laser printer-the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. In simplest terms, the GPL locks software programs into a form of communal ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons"-through the legal weight of copyright. Once locked, programs remain unremovable. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection-even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code.
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For this reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the GPL a "viral" license, because it spreads itself to every software program it touches.1
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Slashdot says
Microsoft's Mundie to Continue OSS Outreach
When you read about what he said in his speeches, do you really think this guy is going to carry on much of anything for FOSS or OSS integration?
It's all about talk, and show, and complacency for them. There is no substance to it.
Now you're talking about a different topic. The grandparent was saying that computer journals write what they write because they need to woo advertisers. I'm saying that's false; that's not the way it works. You, however, are saying that tech journalists write what they write because they are ignorant. That might be true, but it's a different argument.
Are you really asking a question? If so, are you willing to listen to me if I answer it?
As an editor at InfoWorld, I commission a great deal of work from a broad variety of resources (writers). Like you, the tools I use depend on the job at hand.
If I need somebody to go out and conduct a bunch of interviews (like TFA, but let me reiterate that TFA is not an InfoWorld article, it was published by eWeek) then I hire somebody who is fundamentally a reporter. I need somebody who knows how to reach somebody on the phone, ask some questions, and transcribe the results. A lot of people with deeper technical background won't do that. Believe it or not, they talk tough (like the grandparent) but when the chips are down and they have the floor they not only fail to ask "the tough questions," in fact they often stare at their shoes, fiddle with a pen, and say nothing. I do not exaggerate; some of my writers, though they are highly competent and intelligent people, would need threat of guerilla dental surgery in order to actually call somebody on the phone and get a quote. So I don't use them for those types of articles.
On the other hand, if I want to commission an article about next-generation SAN systems, I want somebody who knows something about storage. If I need an article about server virtualization, I want a writer who knows something about that topic. I draw upon the resources at my disposal.
I personally have a technology background. I'm not a hotshot systems guy by any means, but I have administered Unix and Linux systems, have managed development teams, and have programmed in at least a half-dozen languages -- including Forth and assembly language, just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about. I'm not a DBA but I've worked with relational databases. I've written public domain software that's lost to the sands of MS-DOS and I've made my own minor contributions to open source projects. Believe it or not, when I was about 17 I even wrote a couple early computer viruses.
I admit that I am atypical of the computing press. There are not many people working full-time in this field who have credentials similar to mine -- I know this just based on the resumes I've seen. However, that's not to say that there aren't sharp people out there. You may be familiar with Jon Udell, who is a tremendous resource for InfoWorld. I work with a guy named Mario Apicella, who knows more about storage than anyone I've met. Oliver Rist writes regularly for InfoWorld about Windows, yet his writing i
Breakfast served all day!
But he isn't insisting on that, he's saying he's right to be suspicious of a company that has such a bad track record. Trust has to be earned, and although the words are positive, let's see how the actions pan out.
SMB:
1) is an IBM product (fromIBM specs)
2) MS-specific hacks have been reverse-engineered, NOT documented.
Given these errors, is it worth reading the rest of your ramblings.
1) You can innovate in an open enviornment, too. The open source community isn't just coping MS and Apple, you know. (HINT: UNIX has been here longer than both MS and Apple.) And the STANDARDS need to be open, or they aren't really STANDARDS, are they? (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standardization)
n d_extinguish)
2) MS is welcome to build on existing standards - IF THEY TELL US WHAT THEY'RE DOING. Heard of Samba? Heard of "embrace, extend, extinguish"? What MS does is take something that exists, twists it to their specific needs, and usually makes them totally incompatible with what everyone else is using, causing the open source community a TON of work in reverse engineering their changes so we can all work together again. Besides, MS isn't really known for innovation anyway.
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace%2C_extend_a
3) There's a difference between real benchmarks and obviously unfair reports done by a company that gets paid by one of the competitors. Yes it's obvious that MS wants to make money and the best way to do that is to eliminate the open source community, but if they expect to be believed with regards to wanting to improve interoperability, they have to stop spreading obvious FUD. Otherwise it's clear they have no wish to do anything other than crush Linux before it gets any bigger. They can still advertise, but talking about wanting to improve relations while throwing anti-Linux campaigns isn't going to look very good.
The interoperability of which they speak does not refer to the ability to add linux comoponents to a windows eceosystem. It is the other way round. In order to add value *to the windows components*, those components must interoperate with linux. Microsoft are not seeking 2-way interaction to make things easier for linux users, they are looking to be able to sell windows licenses in whatever environment, and present that as a value proposition to the customer. eg. On MSDN there are lots of tools and articles about "How to migrate Sybase data to SQL server". There is no help about going the other way.
When refering to pulling something out of somebody's ass, stick with immaterial things like ideas, numbers, statistics and such
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Posts about people pulling material things out of their asses, such as olive branches, baseball bats, cars, factories, bridges, PR representatives and lawyers have the nasty effect on some of of us of, even if only for a second, making our imagination conjure images worse than goatse
Please don't.
Parent post sums it all out perfectly. Thank you greenguy for posting it.
I hereby declare this discussion closed.
J.
Please use correct terminology. The GPL is FREE SOFTWARE, not OSS.
Trojan Linux? Polluted Linux? Poison Challice Linux? Suicide Bob Linux? Black Hat Linux? L-Pill Linux? Chernobyl Linux? OS/2 Warp Linux? Dr. Dos Linux? Netscape Memorial Linux? Penguin Stew Linux? We all know how MS likes to compete. The name should fit.
"No fear. No envy. No meanness." Liam Clancy
What a pack of shameless liars. When M$ says "outreach" I know they mean it as in "fund SCO's antics against the F/OSS community".
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. I haven't used a M$ product for more than a decade, and I hope to never use their software again for the rest of my life.
Microsoft's past track record is one of frequent lying and treachery going back over twenty years. One press release from a man who has been appointed their attack dog on FOSS in the past does not suffice to erase this. It isn't even worth entertaining at this point. No it isn't. And we are entirely rational and fair to judge this man and his company on their past words and deeds.
If MS earnest spends several years actually trying to interoperate and interact with FOSS in a civilized way THEN minds will start to change and their press statements will get more than a cynical hearing.
Words from MS won't cut it in the face of their past deeds. Only sustained new action to match their new words will change minds.
I think you missunderstood the meaning of M$ "outreach". What they really mean is do whatever they can to keep it out of your reach. This includes pretending to be friendly while screwing you harder.
The write up is essentially a FUD piece designed to cast blame on free software for interoperability problems. Anyone who knows the first thing about programming will know that the problems are all created on the closed side. The idea that they can't even look at free source code because of "legal issues" is a laughably stupid part of their FUD campaign. Anyone with any memory will remember Microsoft Unix interoperability from the 90s and how that went. Their attitude towards free software is well reflected in their funding of the SCO fiasco and their continuing "Get the Facts" nonsense.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
1) SMB was IBM, but the FS implementation that is being used by MS is an extended version of SMB, and it is called CIFS.
= /library/en-us/cifs/protocol/smb_header.asp
2) I find it hard to believe that people would take time to reverse engineer the MS CIFS protocol considering full specification, documentation, packet information, code samples, and even a free usage license is available from Microsoft directly. (Again an example of 'exactly' what I was talking about, as it is 'open' but not wrapped in a GPL or other standard open source license, but a free usage license instead). - And actually more 'open' than most open source in its source disclosure and usage allowances.
If you still think people had to reverse engineer 'anything' of the CIFS technologies from Microsoft just go here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url
As you will notice EVERY BIT of information and the license to utilize the CIFS technologies is fully available for free from Microsoft, no reverse engineering required. This information has been available for years and years, and running this technology on non-MS OSes was considered a bit doggy as the original MS Source usage license was for MS only OSes. This is also why MS updated their policy and created a usage license 'specifially' to ensure the usage license also extended to people using this technology on non-MS OSes and non-MS environments.
MS very much supports CIFS technologies in use by projects like SAMBA, or MS would not give a rats butt about Vista potentially breaking them by defaulting to Fast Query.
I need somebody who knows how to reach somebody on the phone, ask some questions, and transcribe the results. A lot of people with deeper technical background won't do that.
.02
In all too many cases though, it's like sending a reporter to cover a baseball game who doesn't understand the rules of the game. You get back this story about how colorful the uniforms are, what a beautiful day it was, and, gosh, look at the great value that the home team has provided for the attendees.
My main beef with information technology journalism (which admittedly I practice) is that it is horribly one-dimensional. Too often stories are generated from public relations pitches, rather than by listening to the buzz happening out in the community--through mailing lists, user groups and blogs (In other words, understanding the whole game).
At their worst, these pubs see their readers as little more than consumers. Too many stories are low-key sales pitches, their intent obscured by the pub's spin of "providing value to the reader." Companies are quoted first, then analyst and, way at the bottom, actual users.
When was the last time you saw a tech pub cover, say, a raging controversy from a users group or from a mailing list of experts? Or from an academic paper? Most pubs run case studies and quotes of actual users, but those are carefully vetted by the company they are speaking for beforehand. What tradeoffs did these users get in exchange for speaking to the press? Why is there is no disclosure here?
InfoWorld is actually better than most pubs in both getting writers with technical expertise, as well as tracking down actual users, but it is still susceptible to hype (Its coverage of SOA, I thought, crossed the line from journalism to advocacy). Covering the industry != covering the chief companies of that industry.
My
joab
Mundie can say whatever he wants. Every single MS product is moving in the opposite direction of OSS. More specialized, more certified, more closed. And they're on the cusp of controlling the development of PC firmware outright.
Open? I believe it not.
While the AC put it so un-eloquently (sorry to all you grammar nazi fucks if that isn't a word, but you know what i mean don't you?), it had a good point. Any jokes like this or smack talk about the USA, are modded troll, flaimbait, while jokes against France are funny. Why don't you just stop lying to yourselves and create a mod named: (Score: +1, So true. France is just not macho enough for this site, while at the same being too right about Iraq to be considered counter-culture, so if we act like we like it, it totally undercuts our vision of ourselves being macho. Yeah, I know, (-1: Troll). Thank-you, may I have another. BTW, don't even think about modding me up to make yourselves look good either!
When Windows 2000 launched, I was working at Microsoft's technical support. My organization handled all the inbound technical support calls involving Windows 2000. Over the next couple years, I worked at different tech support departments involving SFU, etc. The fact was, it was not that hard to authenticate Windows 2000 against MIT Kerberos. Nor was it that hard to authenticate Linux/UNIX users against Windows 2000's Kerberos implementation using the MIT Kerberos clients. NSSwitch was still an issue that Kerberos was never meant to address, however.
Yes, there were some bugs (for example http://support.microsoft.com/kb/276304/en-us), but for the most part it worked OK.
I closely followed efforts on the part of Microsoft Consulting Services to create interop solutions for customers involving AD integration for Linux hosts. The only real problem here was that although the solution was straightforward, nobody at PSS was willing to support it when something went wrong.
I can remember how excited people on the SFU team were when the MIT Kerberos implementation first allowed one to use SRV records because this made interop quite a bit easier.
The result of many of the earlier efforts have been projects like IDMU, which is quite good actually.
If you review my history, you will see I don't like Microsoft, and I use Linux exclusively, but falsehood need to be addressed.
LedgerSMB: Open source Accounting/ERP
Well, usually there are no "tradeoffs" other than, like you say, the quotes are vetted by corporate PR before we are allowed to print them. And the result is that, inevitably, the case studies end up being a little lame. The PR flacks are there to serve their companies' marketing departments and if something starts to look curiously like it might not actually be marketing, they get nervous. Veer too close to asking "the hard questions," as the grandparent suggested earlier, and you're pretty likely to have the case study participant pull the plug at the last minute, leaving you with 2-3 pages of printed matter to fill. The only real exceptions are government agencies, where often you have people who, despite being anonymous civil servants 364 days out of the year, really do view their jobs as providing a service for the American people and they want to get the word out about what they're doing. (I sort of know how they feel.)
Unfortunately, some of this is due to the habits of news reporters. As you probably know if you work in journalism yourself, news guys write in what is known as an "inverted pyramid" style -- big facts up top leading down to the smaller details at the bottom. If you're writing your news story about a new version of IBM WebSphere that's supposed to ship this week, then that is the big fact. You have to put it first. Only then can you move it along to customer or analyst quotes. The trick to making a story not sounds like a sales pitch is to find the right ones. And I tend to agree that trade pubs tend to rely too heavily on analysts -- often they really don't have anything particularly insightful to say, and occasionally they're in the vendors' pockets anyway -- but readers do expect those quotes to be there, analysts in theory are aware of the representative opinions of customers and, more importantly, analysts will actually pick up the phone and give you a quote to put into print without a lot of runaround (unlike, as I mentioned before, most customers).
I hear you and I appreciate the feedback. Between you and me, I agree on the SOA coverage but we do have some folks on staff who are strong advocates of it. I'm not typically all that involved there.Breakfast served all day!
Look for any Microsoft license on serious new open source technology to be more restrictive and viral, not less, than the GPL.
There is a lot of silliness like this post claiming that Microsoft would somehow be more open to open source if only the GPL were not so viral.
The fact is, Microsoft would be far less inclined to release code that could be trivially redeployed against them by rivals using licenses less-viral than GPL.
The only situation where having a less viral license helps them is when their rivals release code not protected, they can then redeploy it against them without giving anything back and even kinking it so that the interoperability is destroyed.
Every serious software producer who is actually going to distribute their own produced code under some sort of open source license suddenly realizes that the minute they become serious open source players, having a broadly-acknowledged open source license works for them and protects them. It only works against those who intend to exploit the system.
Indeed, the trouble comes along with software PATENTS.
This, I can easily see. :-)
Your comments have been most informative and worth reading. Thanks a lot for taking the time to respond to a random irritating flame in this forum. I learned a lot.
In my opinion, I think the base problem is people's current attitudes towards their workplaces combined with a broken incentive structure in the publishing industry.
For the first, people need to start seeing corporations as a form of governance, who's activities need to be viewed with the same level of suspicion and scrutiny. People need to feel proud to say real things about the companies at which they work instead of scared and vaguely dirty.
For the second, while the pernicious effect of being sponsored by the very people you report on is well recognized, the pernicious effect of being reliant on them for the material you publish isn't. If it becomes known that you would rather publish things that contained bias rather than not have anything to publish at all, that becomes a lever that can be used to affect the slant of the articles in your magazine.
The first and the second force combined make sure that nobody ever steps forward with the real story, and the reporter never looks very hard for it.
I too have noticed a tendency in the trade press to post advertisements as news. I also had a fairly simple-minded view of why this was the case. Thanks for educating me.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
"As you will notice EVERY BIT of information and the license to utilize the CIFS technologies is fully available for free from Microsoft, no reverse engineering required."
This is completely untrue, as I'm sure you know. I could enumerate all the still-unknown parts of CIFS, but I don't normally engage with trolls unless it's to point out when they are spreading lies, which is what I'm doing here.
Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.
So you are publically admitting your team has illegally reverse engineered CIFS technology?
Thanks for the post...
There are many parts of the world where reverse-engineering is legal. Even if Jeremy's post is indeed an admission that the SAMBA team has reverse-engineered CIFS, it is most definitely not an admission of any illegal activity.
Now you're talking about a different topic. The grandparent was saying that computer journals write what they write because they need to woo advertisers. I'm saying that's false; that's not the way it works. You, however, are saying that tech journalists write what they write because they are ignorant. That might be true, but it's a different argument.
I don't agree. I think the GP was saying that tech journals are unreliable because of 'X'. You responded that we on the outside cannot know if 'X' is true. I responded that tech journals may not be unreliable because of 'X', but regardless are unreliable because of 'Y'. IMO, the core matter of inquery is, "Are tech journals unreliable?"
Are you really asking a question?
Yes, though I admit I am starting from skeptical.
If so, are you willing to listen to me if I answer it?
Always - what other rational reason would I have for posting here? (though I know there are a great many people here who are not rational)
I need somebody who knows how to reach somebody on the phone, ask some questions, and transcribe the results. A lot of people with deeper technical background won't do that.
Very agreed that reporters have a tough job - one that most techs cannot do. It is unfortunate. I'm not saying you're bad, you may very well be doing the best job possible.
I personally have a technology background. I'm not a hotshot systems guy by any means, but I have administered Unix and Linux systems, have managed development teams, and have programmed in at least a half-dozen languages -- including Forth and assembly language,
Sounds like you are pretty well qualified for your position. I think that most of your reporters are not so qualified, and I'm betting it has been years since you were in the field. By necessity - your current job is a full time thing, and your reporters are literary professionals. Not a bad thing. Just a fact.
How could it be solved? I don't know. Maybe the answer is to cultivate more relationships with practitioners than with corporations, like ACM does. Maybe the answer is to have pseudo-practitioners on your staff, like Consumer Reports does. But what would that acheive? There is a bigger market for popular tech journals than for Communications of The ACM and for Popular Science than Consumer Reports. Advertisers are more attracted to that bigger market.
Which is an interesting way to tie it back to commercial journalism. Which was the GP's position.
However, that's not to say that there aren't sharp people out there. You may be familiar with Jon Udell, who is a tremendous resource for InfoWorld. I work with a guy named Mario Apicella, who knows more about storage than anyone I've met. Oliver Rist writes regularly for InfoWorld about Windows, yet his writing is witty and engaging and he cuts Microsoft no slack -- and he's a practitioner in the field.
Perhaps InfoWorld is the most credible in an incredible field. Perhaps InfoWorld is even credible. Perhaps it is unfortunate for InfoWorld to be tarred with the same brush as PC Magazine. But then again, maybe not. Even amongst full time technologists there are a great many people who believe white papers. People who do the work full time, and only stand to influence the decisions of a single company. How much more malleable is a person who was once a practitioner but is no more? How much more propaganda is targetted at a person with the ability to affect the decisions of hundreds or thousands of companies?
Again, this is not to say that it is bad. It is by necessity. It is.
Moreover it is not to say that you are not writing truth. You may be. But how can we know when you are? It is a tough question, one which you are vastly more qualified to deal with than I. For now, the answer seems to be, we cannot.
That may be true, but nobody ever said InfoWorld was an information science magazine, nor eWeek, and if that's the misconception you were laboring under then let me
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
Besides, your comment makes no sense.
- Vista is big, and compared to other OSs bloated, but so are current big Linux distros compared to Linux of five years ago. FC4 has effectively higher requirements (you REALLY want 256 MB system RAM) than XP (not strictly necessary of course, but in general use). Of course, 256 is no problem these days... but hat wasn't always true. We already have computers selling with over 1 GB or RAM; is 512 really going to kill you? As computer tecnology moves forward, OSs get bigger, demand more resources, etc. because if they didn't they would effectively had to stagnate. Or is it something else about Vista? The only point you can fairly peg on the developers at this point is the release schedule, and Vista IS a huge project. You'll probably bitch after it's released, but... even if you have legit grievences then, you can't pin them on the beta code. Things like DRM aren't the engineers' faults at all.
- Word? Maybe you hate the format, that at least I could understand, but Word (Office in general) is extremely capable, very very fast, fairly light on resources, and -- with Office 2007 -- has very nice and innovative interface. Please... OO.o is incredible, but still undeniably behind.
- IE, in its earlier days, really was a great browser for the environment of the time. Today anything before IE6SP2 is far too insecure to be let out, and even 6sp2 is still much too weak for comfort, but IE7, and especially 7+, are quite acceptable to me. I've gone to sites that will attack IE, and the worst I've gotten was a Protected Mode-triggered query -- on exactly one of these sites -- that was quickly denied and ignored. CSS support is a work in progress, but already better in many places than early versions of Fx, and getting better with every release. They have the best of many different browsers, plus innovations of their own, and while thye might never win back the 10%+ that switched to Fx, they might at least stem the flow. Oh yeah, it's much less of a resource hog, too.
Sure, MS has released some bad software, but please... it's silly, blind, and closed-minded to declare it all bad.There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
There are many parts of the world where reverse-engineering is legal. Even if Jeremy's post is indeed an admission that the SAMBA team has reverse-engineered CIFS, it is most definitely not an admission of any illegal activity.
I think the point I was hoping he would admit is that it was NOT CIFS where reverse engineering was needed, as it seems to be 'fully' documented as I stated, and the need to reverse engineer it specifically would be unnecessary.
Also I was expecting if I am wrong about the CIFS, that he would further explain what the SAMBA team has reverse engineered specifically with regard to CIFS and what portions of the MS source and documentation on CIFS has not been provided to them, as our company has not found anything lacking in the CIFS information provided by MS.
If there are things truly missing from the disclosed and free usage source license from Microsoft on CIFS, this would be the time for him to step forward and let us know so people like myself could make specific requests from MS to provide this information.
I truly think that he may have over spoke and their reverse engineering was not specifically on CIFS but in other functions that their product provides like Security and Active Directory Emulation, which for security reasons alone are not fully documented, even though all of the interface mechanisms for them are.
However there truly may be legal reasons why he would not want to disclose their work in these areas as some of it is intellectual property, and it could be in violation of their free usage licenses they already have with MS - Which they do have. (Also, this is illustrating my original post where GPL and intellectual licenses don't mix, which is what MS's contention is with most Open Source licensing schemes.)
I also found his response quite rude to deem my post as a Troll and call me a liar, for which I am not nor trying to be. If I am wrong about my CIFS example, he could have responded in a more professional manner and actually provided the information any of us would need to see where MS has not fully disclosed everything about CIFS.
Instead of being deemed a troll by him, I could possibly be an ally or an additional voice to get MS to open up whatever they have not about CIFS, in turn helping the SAMBA project.
i'll use linux/freebsd any way your windowze sucks! will never use vista! let it crash! (and move to trash)
I figure this thread is good and dead at this point, but after the fact I wanted to let you know that I read your comments and I think they're reasonable concerns. In turn, I appreciate you listening to what I had to say.
My point, mainly, is that I'm trying and I know a lot of other InfoWorld staffers are, also. There are a lot of pressures in this business that steer you one way or another and it can sometimes be difficult to balance them all. To say we're all just stooges is a little unfair.
That said, Slashdot still links a lot of InfoWorld stories, which means it's always possible to pick out the stuff we publish that you're interested in and ignore (or openly criticize) the rest. I think a lot of this "revolutionary world of new media" stuff is a bunch of hype, myself, but this is one way in which the readers surely come out ahead.
Best, Neil
Breakfast served all day!