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Mozilla Developers Invited to Redmond
savio13 writes "Sam Ramji, Microsoft's director of its Open Source Software Lab has invited 4 Mozilla developers to spend 4 days with Microsoft's Vista Readiness ISV team. The invite can be found on mozilla.dev.planning and was posted on Saturday (Aug. 19). Schroepfer replied by indicating that Microsoft and the Moz guys are already in contact via email and will follow up on the offer there. This is interesting because Sam posted the offer in a public forum (and indicated that he'd sent a PM, but was posting in case they had an @microsoft.com email filter). Sam also made a point of stating that the Vista ISV Readiness offer is typically only for commercial ISVs."
But seriously, I think that Microsoft is trying to get third party OSS browser support for Vista so that they can announce it as a feature. "Look, we have great support for the BEST free browsers out there! We are cool and friendly!" It has become obvious to Microsoft that OSS is not going away and that they need to embrace some of the popular choices in an effort to stem the flow away from Linux, etc. Seems pretty obvious to me.
My humor is probably your flamebait
Not to get too serious here, but this is a perfect example of a situation where MS can't win. Invite the folks up? "It's a trap! They'll steal your code, kill you, etc." Don't invite them up? "When is MS going to treat OSS developers like any one else, Firefox has many users, they should get the same respect as any other org."
Ah slashdot... can't live with it, pass the beer nuts.
Never. Too much NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome for that. I think one of the other posters is right. FireFox is getting popular and if it doesn't work with Vista (either intentionally or not) they will get tons of complaints ("Vista broke my InternetFox thing", "They are trying to crush FireFox", etc.). FireFox is so popular that they have to make sure it works. The only difference between it and some other program they'll do that for (Sims/Sim 2) is that FireFox is FOSS so we hear about it (where they have done this with Sims/Sims 2 and we don't hear a peep).
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
This is sad. This comment is not a troll, not a flamebait, just an observation.
Microsoft has taken some serious steps to clean itself up over the last year or so. As a Linux/Apache/PHP/Python/Perl/MySQL/Postgres evangelist, I always root for open source, but I respect Microsoft's omnipresence in the tech world.
That said, it's really sad to see that 98% of the comments here are based on distrust, hatred, and bad jokes. This is a huge move: Microsoft, for once, finally understanding that open source has a place and that NOT working with them spells trouble for them.
So, please people, retire the lame wisecracks. This is one of many times you'll see Microsoft bent by the immense power and will of open source!
Pretend we're talking a year from now and MS is trying to roll out Vista and the 40% of the population that will be using FF by then balks because FF won't run properly.
It may not be a representative sample, but all of the big corporations I have worked at or visited seem wedded to IE. Since corporations are going to be the slow movers on the Vista transition I think it's unlikely to be the explanation. Keep in mind, consumers are going to get Vista shoved down their throats because that's what will come installed on new machines.
The more likely reason is anti-trust. Microsoft is finally getting some serious competition again in the browser arena. Microsoft will have a tough time explaining things if Vista comes out and Firefox, the arch-rival to IE, doesn't work. Microsoft long ago lost the benefit of the doubt with respect to anti-trust regulators.
The benefits far outweigh the costs of helping the Firefox team out for a few days. In other words: CYA.
There's a simple explanation: it's probably NOT working well, and they want to have a heads-up on what kinda complaint level they'll have. OR, they want to make sure to "break" certain firefox features so that IE looks better.
This is possible, but I don't think it is likely. I suspect the issue is slightly different. Vista's biggest competitor is going to be earlier versions of Windows. Many corporate customers are still using Win2K and many are also using Firefox. Why would they upgrade?
The Firefox crew is pretty sharp but they are techno-junkies. So MS invites the Firefox guys to see some of the whizbang new features of Vista that they can integrate with Firefox to make it better. Maybe they can even get these guys excited about the potential of something. The hope is that the Firefox people will add some feature that will motivate people to want to upgrade to Vista. Even if they just get a feature built into the core tree, maybe the older versions will become unsupported more quickly and for security reasons people will need to move to Vista to have a secure browser.
Remember, MS does not sell IE. They sell a bundle of IE and Windows. Every Firefox user on Windows has already paid them for IE, so using Firefox does not really cost them anything other than a minor strategic bump right now. People not upgrading to Vista costs them hard cash, plus a number of strategic bumps when they don't adopt all the new lock-in anti-features in Vista.
In my opinion, I think that Microsoft seriously does see the hand-writing on the wall and they do want to do more to ensure that their OS supports the programs that people want to use. Microsoft is going to trumpet their low support costs and ease of managability (think SMS, Group Policy, etc). They are going to trumpet the fact that they are the standard, and they are going to portray any group who doesn't want to work with the standard as being back-asswards and wasting time unnecessarily reinventing the wheel.
On another level, Microsoft is trying to avoid what happened to Novell in the 1990s. Netware was a great operating system but it got to the point where they barely had any third party support. The same thing could happen to Microsoft if enough developers decide that using Microsoft dev tools is a PITA and if enough developers decide that coding to the Microsoft OS is a PITA. The one incentive that Microsoft has left is their market penetration. They can still play the economic card, and that card is, "If you develop for the MS platform, you will have a market share of XX. And by the way, that market is already used to paying out the nose for software, so you stand to make money. Now do you want that, or do you want to go to the OSS world where everyone is doing it on the cheap with razor thin margins?" And if you think about it, that's a very strong position to come from. If you're trying to make money, do you want to go with the company that has already made itself (and numerous third parties) griploads of cash, or do you want to go with the other guys who are trying to redo what Microsoft has already done, but do it "less expensively and better"? I'm of the opinion that unless the OSS world comes out with some killer functionality that operates EXCLUSIVELY outside of Windows, they're never going to win. Given how much Microsoft has been investing in intellectual property, and given how much they have already developed (OS, Office, Exchange, accounting packages, CRM packages... basically all the tools that a business needs to function), it's going to be hard to end-run around the monopoly.
The one ray of hope is "standards" but as we've all seen, Microsoft will just ignore a standard until enough people want to use it. Then they'll offer support for it. You're seeing it now with IE7. For the longest time, MS didn't give two shits. Now enough web devs have complained loudly enough and they're finally getting what they want. IE7 might not nail it, but I'm willing to be IE7 SP3, or IE8 will. The problem with using a standard to fight Microsoft is that standards are very rarely proprietary. And as we've seen with the W3C, even "standards" are often times still works in progress.
embrace, extend, extinguish ...repeat as necessary.
If you think imaginary property and real property are the same, when does your house become public domain?
They did that to Netscape devs back in the day, too, albeit in a slightly less obvious way. They'd camp out in the nearest cafes and restaurants around lunch hour and "talk" to Netscape developers, sometimes making them offers they couldn't refuse. Many of those devs were at that point more interested in Ferraris and mansions than in writing code, but MSFT hired them anyway (only to fire when Netscape kicks the bucket).
Expect some folks getting offers in Redmond. Higher ups in IE team are downright stupid if they don't try to hire people away from Mozilla. You kill two birds with one stone - strangle Mozilla and get a good, security minded dev (who will be forced to think a lot less about security at MSFT by an arbitrary, managemen imposed deadline).