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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. "
So they want to extinguish their bad-guy image, and extend an embrace towards the GPL?
Wait, maybe I have this backwards...
It sounds more like Emporer Palpatine trying to bring Anakin over to the darkside.
God spoke to me.
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.
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.
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?
Yeah, Maybe if they want to interoperate better with OSS they should implement CSS 2, or transparent PNGs. Or maybe use ODF in their next word processor. Or fix their broken Kerberos implementation. There's a million things they could do to make it easier for their software to interoperate with GPLd softwaree. Maybe they should release some specs to their API, file formats, and network protocols so that OSS programmers don't have to guess how things are done, or reverse engineer them.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
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
"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?
It is not supprising you have heard the line elsewhere though. George Lucas was never one for highly momentous lines, witness the usually talented Natilie Portman looking like a moron when she says pearls like "hold me like you did on naboo" and "you're breaking my heart Aniken". Hell, the only memorable lines in the 6 movies were Han Solo's which were probably snuck on the script when Lucas was visiting the shrine to himself for his daily devotion.
When Argumentum ad Hominem falls short, try Argumentum ad Matrem
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!
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.
A quick web search would've revealed that MS required vendor fields for authorization. They did not document these fields initially, so you would've had to reverse engineer their implementation. Eventually, MS published most of the details, but did so under a very restrictive license that didn't allow a "competitor" to use them. That means you still would have to reverse engineer those fields.
You can authenticate without the undefined extension, but cannot be authorized to specific resources offered by Windows machines. So it isn't hard for you to authorize *to* a MS Kerberos implementation, but you cannot authorize Windows against anyone else's implementation. You're missing group membership information and the NT ID without using the proprietary MS extensions.
This is a company that choose to ignore the Kerberos V5 spec, which was altered specifically to help them, they lied to the Kerberos developers about following the spec, lied about splitting authorization functionality, and lied about a non-NT version of the domain controller services. They attempted to undermine all existing Kerberos installations by breaking compatibility, and requiring people to run the MS version of the Kerberos protocol to have it work properly with Windows.
IOW, standard procedure for MS: they took the established Kerberos spec, added proprietary extensions to it, and made it not work properly without using those extensions, while ensuring that those extensions are only available under Windows with MS software.