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Microsoft Cracking Open the Door To OSS
AlexGr sends us to a long piece in Redmond Magazine on Microsoft's changing relationship to open source. The article centers around a profile of Bill Hilf, Microsoft's internal and external evangelist for OSS. It's an even-handed piece that fully reflects the continuing deep skepticism in the community of Microsoft's motives and actions.
I've certainly never seen anything in this time/space reality that has been even-handed about the relationship of Microsoft & OSS.
What has Mr. Bill Hilf actually accomplished? This isn't the first time I've seen his name championed as Microsoft's OSS evangelist, which in and of it self is all well and good. However, I haven't actually heard/read of him doing anything that actually benefits OSS (not necessarily Linux). I'm hoping someone can enlighten me.
"Thanks for all the money you paid to us. We've used it to buy off ISO among other things" -Microsoft
How does one become the Open Source Software evangelist at a practically 100% proprietary company?...That's like being a Christian Evangelist at a Mosque.
In a world of acronyms, the words are the real victims.
They have one motive - to make money for their shareholders. Perhaps you mean `strategy`? They might ponce about with OSS if they can make money from it (not directly, but by selling apps/services which support OSS), but they make their money in the main from the desktop (which they show no signs of losing control over, despite/because of the number of Linux distros out there) and supplying Office (and exchange server, if you want to consider them as separate) to businesses. There's still no serious rival to them there.
"I ask those folks, 'How often has Microsoft sued over IP?' The answer is two [times]," he says. "We are not a patent troll company. We protect our IP and our licenses, but we do not want to litigate." - I assume this does not include the fiaSCO from Utah, I guess it is not direct enough to count it into these two times.
In any case, one thing I know I don't want to deal with in this life is MS stuff.
You can't handle the truth.
I see that every day around here and elsewhere. The different degrees of "M$ WINDOZE IS TEH SUX AND I HATE U LINUX ROXX LOL!!!1!" are getting to be completely ridiculous and will eventually hurt more than they help. People (you know, out there, not "here") by and large don't have a negative view of Microsoft, and ultimately that's what matters.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Interoperability -- Why don't they support Open formats then. Why don't they come up with proper documents so open source vendors can interop. They will be friendly as long as it do not hit there cash cow products i.e Windows OS and MS Office.
MS's Mantra is you can open source any product as long as it runs on windows and we are not yet developing that product.
in the community of Microsoft's motives and actions?
They have a community?
---GEC
I'm but the humble pupil, seeking to snatch the scratchbuilt pebble from the master's fully articulated hand
I'd really be curious to see Microsoft dive in the OSS and try to come up with a business plan.
My take on it is that MS realizes that OSS is here to stay and that its gaining due in part but not totally to their crappy vista.
So they said "if people are gonna move to OSS, we'll follow them" - as they say "if you can't beat 'em, join 'em"
but that's highly hypothetical and way too optimistic, with MS, there's always a snake somewhere trying to bite you in the arse.
That said, lets assume they do jump in the boat, i'd be curious what they would do to keep making money with OSS.
If you look like your passport photo, you're too ill to travel. - Will Kommen
Microsoft has been the company that poisons standards. For example, they sat on the OpenGL standards body for years while actively engaged in a disinformation campaign against OpenGL. To this day Windows doesn't support it very well out of the box - they support it just well enough to try to convince people that it sucks which is worse than if they just dropped all support.
Microsoft has been lying for many many years. They will have to start acting with honor and telling the truth for at least a while before people start trusting them.
It is like Apple in 1996. Back then people thought that Apple was incompetent to execute anything or bring interesting and relevant products to market. Then Jobs came back and things changed, but it took years before people starting trusting them again.
Microsoft would have to do the same thing - and hiring one guy isn't much of a start.
Avoid Missing Ball for High Score
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
That's marketing talk.
... if Bill Hilf worked for IBM, then he must have HUGE contributions to OSS, right ?
... point to at least one major contribution to OSS that he has done.
Yeah
Oh please
You OSS zealots (particularly twitter) are doing more harm than good.
Ironically, anti-OSS zealots are a lot more widespread and a lot more poisonous.
They're not supportive of OSS in the realm of device drivers for Windows, that's for sure. Vista 64-bit version does not permit unsigned device drivers to be loaded. Period. That is going to shut out a lot of OSS projects aimed at controlling all the nifty hardware you can hook up to your machine. Microsoft's official reason for this is they want to make it harder for malware to infect a machine. The real reason probably has something to do with DRM.
I'm not sure if your comment was meant as a jab at Bill Hilf, or if your just literally meant that it seems incongruous to find Bill Hilf and Bill Gates in the same roof. I'll assume the latter - I agree it seems odd.
The cynical side of me thinks that this is purely a political gesture, and that Microsoft is giving him a "window seat" with little influence inside of microsoft.
However, Microsoft attempted the same thing with Robert Scoble. Most people wrote him off as a shill, but he (IMHO) brought about real, substantive change in how Microsoft communicated with the outside world, and that they are now a more "transparent" company, especially with the development community.
Maybe he's a "double agent". I'm hoping that, even if Microsoft is being disingenuous, that Bill Hilf is able to undermine this attitude from within the inside?
come on, the MS Linux/OSS lab is nothing more than a place for Microsoft to keep an eye on what the OSS projects are doing and how they'll work within a Microsoft based environment. All this is to help them target their marketing and tweak their products so that they win and OSS loses. And I doubt if there is a single instance where befriending Microsoft will help OSS. We are talking about the "One Microsoft Way", "Linux is communism", etc Microsoft, are we not?
THERE'S 20 YEARS OF HISTORY HERE FOLKS. They are doing this to protect the MS Windows monopoly and their profits from this, noting more. So there is NOTHING in it to help you, the customer or you the developer. The game is about market protection and has been since the late 80's. IMO
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Do you know why Microsoft comes late to the buffet? Because they like their meal well fed.
20th century Marxism is not progress...
Ah, NS is a really, really bad example. You should have picked another one. Shall we?
Once upon a time, NS was king of the hill. People couldn't download Navigator 2 enough, and NS was flying high. NSN2 was an excellent browser, bar none. Then came NSN3. Kinda iffy. A lot of people would stay away from it. But Netscape was awash in IPO capital and they were having an identity crisis and they couldn't figure out if they were writing a "collaboration platform" or a web browser and an email/NNTP client. And yet, they were still on top. By that time IE3 had been released. It sucked ROCKS. It sucked so hard that it was laughably being used to download the Netscape browser by people who for some reason also had IE3. Then, with Netscape still in the lead, Microsoft released IE4. Remember, IE would NOT be bundled with an OS until Windows 98. It wasn't bundled with W95 at all, except at the very tail end of OSR2.
And then NS4 saw the light of day. Holy shit, NS4 was the worst piece of crap ever released by any software company. It was dead slow, it crashed with alarming frequency and it looked like crap. Compared to IE4, it was a dinosaur that was hardly worth running at all. So, people used IE4 because it was inherently superior to the competition. You don't have to take my word for that, BTW. Go read jzw's essays on the topic. About the only thing it had going for it was that it was cross-platform.
Do you remember using Linux in 1998-99? Do you? Remember which browser RH used to ship with? It was NS4. Did you enjoy using it? I sure as hell didn't. It sucked even more on Linux than on Windows.
So Netscape fucked themselves with gusto, fucked up their plan to influence the direction of the W3C (blink!) and control web standards, and when they finally figured out they were indeed utterly fucked, they went to the government to whine about how "evil" Microsoft had "destroyed" them by bundling IE with Windows. And the rest is history.
Now, if this bundling is so damaging to "competitors", how come it took years for WMP to gain traction? Why did so many people simply download Real, Winamp, Sonique, MusicMatch, etc? Because they were all better than the piece of crap WMP. Why are so many people using Firefox now? Why? Because Firefox is better than IE6. If NS4 had been an actually usable application, Microsoft could have bundled until the cows came home and they would have never gained 90% of the browser market. Never.
But it's always nice to blame Microsoft for other people's fuckups, eh?
And I said, there are other examples - it's not like they're angelic or anything. But Netscape? Cry me a big, fat river.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I love that you have lots of free time because your computers "work", and I'm trapped with "M$ Windoze workarounds" yet I have all this free time to "harrass" you. You don't even read what you write, do you?
As to the rest of your post, it's just the usual paranoid schizo "join us or die" zealot bullshit that doesn't even merit a response. It's always amusing to see you whining about "FUD" when it's about the only thing you have left as your desperation over your failure to do anything meaningful becomes more and more evident.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
Note that you had to change the word "monopoly" into "monoculture" in order to apply it to free software.
Because while RMS may be creating somewhat of a "monoculture", it is by no means a "monopoly".
If we imagine a future in which every computer in the world is sold with an end-to-end open source/GPL/FSF solution, you will still never see:
- Documents locked into a particular format, unable to switch
- Software which locks you out of media you purchased
- Software controlled entirely by a company
- Software which nobody understands and therefore nobody can fix or improve
The difference being that code released under the GPL isn't really owned by anyone. It's available to everyone. So that isn't a monopoly.
As for GCC, I think it's quite rare to find code made specifically for GCC. Most of the time, the issues with other compilers are:
- GCC is the most standards-compliant C compiler there is. Other compilers (VC++ included) have difficulty.
- Part of this is that GCC is POSIX compliant and VC++ isn't. POSIX is not a monoculture, it is a standard which predates Windows. A lot of open source code is written for POSIX.
The point being that someone could come along and write a new C compiler which is also POSIX compliant and it could be used instead of GCC. It isn't like anyone's protecting trade secrets as to how to write a C compiler. It's just really really hard, which is why nobody does it. That's separate from a "monopoly".
Errrr, is Google down today?
Don't piss off The Angry Economist