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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.
There was a lot of progress made in the world when we had Soviet Russia to rally against during the cold war. Get rid of Microsoft and much of software and the open-source movement will stagnate. Not necessarily because of any direct improvements, contributions or achievements by Microsoft, but because they are the central evil empire around which all opposing viewpoints, practices and communities can clearly see as the colossal against which they're flinging the rocks of their own progress and movements.
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.
"Smells like Linux"
Ohh yea.....
"You made one mistake, you trusted us."
This is just Microsoft's fud piggy bank. They put some pennies in now and they will take some more latter.
Money is the root of all evil?
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
Yes, it's in recognition of Microsoft's increasing acceptance of Open Source that we moved the Halloween Documents off our website onto Eric Raymond's website. We only have a link from http://opensource.org/halloween/ to Eric's site. Perhaps if Microsoft makes some more concrete step towards being a member of the Open Source community (e.g. by sumitting their licenses for OSI approval, hint, hint), we might remove even the link.
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
This is 100% not true. The party line of FLOSS fans is the promotion of free and open source software and advancement of the computer industry in general. If MS actually started developing and contributing open source software without any hidden lock in technologies, FLOSS advocates would embrace them. Personally, I don't dislike MS because they develop closed software. Lots of companies do that, like Apple and Sun and Adobe and I don't have any problem with them and I don't think most FLOSS fans do either. The problem I have with MS is they abuse their market position to hinder the adoption of FLOSS and in the process stifle innovation and slow down progress in the software industry in general. All the commercial companies out there are trying to make money, but MS is the one huge influential company that is lying and breaking the law and refusing to play by the rules everyone else does. They are criminals profiting by hurting the computer industry. That is why they are not trusted or liked by computer people in general.
People (you know, out there, not "here") by and large don't have a negative view of Microsoft, and ultimately that's what matters.A lot of people do have a negative view of MS, not because they understand anything about their business practices, but because their computer does not work and is a stupid piece of crap that keeps slowing down and messing up. I don't think there is anything wrong with trying to inform people that it doesn't need to be that way and there are better options and if the laws were just upheld the whole industry would get better. Ranting incoherently about MS obviously will not give you any credibility, but your strawman argument about what FLOSS people are saying is just that. You're the only one that wrote leetspeak crap about sucking, so stop trying to pass it off as "the community."
Is this a sign of a coming linux apocalypse? Interesting question. If linux ever becomes the primary desktop system, we'll see products hitting the market like "Microsoft Office for Linux" or "Visual Studio Linux Edition" or "Linux.NET" or "DirectX for Linux"... I'm pretty sure the future is more gray than people might expect. There's no way in hell there'll be the magical open source free software unicorn land that GNU and FSF might anticipate- but a hybrid market? Quite possible.
I'm not a fan of Linux or its many cacophonous ideas of a desktop system, but I won't care by that point because I'll be driving a flying car.
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
Redmond, sensibly, will do what is best for Redmond, however they conceive of that. Whether they take a strategic view and work with OSS in the context of what is good for both Redmond and OSS is good for Redmond, or not, is up for discussion later on. In either case, right now, right here OSS is a tactical approach for Redmond. Tomorrow might be a different tactic - who knows. But one should always remember that for better or worse, whether they are actually good at it or not, Redmond should and will do what is best for their own interests and agendas.
What plausible benefit is there to working with OSS? Well what benefit was there to working with Novell or IBM or anyone else? It's to co-opt them and share technology to the point where it can help a little and hurt a little less. Working with OSS can keep the OSS communities from straying too far and there may be some actual technical upside to code sharing. But beyond that if you're looking for some goodwill, community action or just plain old being nice, i'm afraid you are badly mistaken.
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
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.
What have YOU done for OSS? You OSS zealots (particularly twitter) are doing more harm than good.
Advocating freedom never hurts anyone in a free society, but thanks for thinking of me. I love you guys, and all this new M$ tone that spews forth here.
What you say about Mr. Hilf may be true, but I'd like to know what he's done since joining M$. The article is a collection of confusing propaganda, more inflammatory than informative, and I hope it does not really reflect Mr. Hilf's beliefs:
Nice flame but not much content. Mr. Hilf's "dirty little secret" comment about most people being forced to run M$ first, without mention of the Federally proved monopoly, is more of the same. Oh wow, this is rich:
The company responsible for the fiaSCO that's threatening everyone that they own patents on everything is not a troll? OK, that's enough fantasy reading for me today. Mr. Hilf is not the first nice thing that M$ has bought and ruined.
If these things don't reflect Mr. Hilf's opinion, let it be a lesson for those who consider working for "the enemy". they will use you and hang whatever opinion around your neck they please before they dismiss you.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
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?
How does one become the Open Source Software evangelist at a practically 100% proprietary company?
Sell out.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
"What have YOU done for OSS? You OSS zealots (particularly twitter) are doing more harm than good." I'll have you know that I have PERSONALLY downloaded over five, ahem, FIVE different Linux distributions and tested them on my old laptop at home. SO THERE. Ha.
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
MS has obeyed the GPL for quite a long time now. The Unix for Windows services thingy contains GPLed code, and MS has always had the source available.
According to Richard Stallman, because I write "closed-source propietary" software, I am immoral and should find another line of work.
Morals are personal beliefs. He's free to express his, but why would you care?
How does that tie in to the usual "oh, but we're all nice" party line? I will not generalize to the point of claiming every single person associated with open source has the same views, just that there are enough of them to be a problem.
I've spent my entire life working at companies that create open source software. I've contributed to numerous projects. Almost all those companies also produced closed source software. There are probably close to a hundred Linux and OSS contributors in my office. All of them are paid and some work on other OSS projects as hobbies. I've not heard any of them objecting to keeping some of our software closed source when it benefits the company more.
Richard Stallman is to FLOSS as Billy Graham is to christianity. He is an extremist who advocates a hard-line approach and adherence to doctrine in the hopes of motivating change. You should not judge the FLOSS community by Mr Stallman and more than you should judge the christian community by Mr. Graham.
"Criminals" is another one of those weasel words, eh? Please show me where Microsoft was convicted in a criminal court of a crime. I'd love to see that.
Umm, the US DoJ v. Microsoft. Antitrust abuse is a criminal code of law in the US, although prosecution of it is often precipitated by civil suits. I believe that applies as well to the EU antitrust suit MS lost, although I'm much less versed in EU law.
That aside, I think the industry is doing just fine...
Are you joking? Web standards are frozen using subsets of 7-8 year old versions of the standards because while every browser development group on the planet has managed to implement almost all of much more recent versions, MS has intentionally declined to do so to prevent the Web from becoming a viable platform for rich applications that might threaten their lock-in and desktop monopoly. Most people who have ripped music CDs over the last 10 years ripped their music to a format that added DRM and is incompatible with the most popular portable player forcing them to do the whole thing over again. Most users still don't have a spellchecker that works in all their applications. Holy crap its only been decades since users started asking for that one. By default most users cannot just run random binaries from the internet without substantial risk that it will completely take over their machine and start sending spam, despite the fact that most users want to perform that exact task. Where's my ubiquitous real time translation between languages, written and spoken? Why is it that I still can't send an IM message to anyone I want on any network, but only within proprietary networks? Why is it that binaries are still not all cross-platform? Voice recognition is still at the same state it was 8 years ago.
From my perspective the industry has been dragging along and when I look at most of the reasons I keep coming back to MS. They buy up innovative companies and mothball the technology. They slow things down so they can charge feature by feature and they halt anything that looks like it has the potential to revolutionize things because revolutions are dangerous to an incumbent.
More often than not the FLOSS claim that Microsoft "hinders" them is centered around disappointment over unrealistic expectations of fame and fortune, not to mention conveniently forgetting that Microsoft is hardly the only commercial software in the world.
What do you know about the economics of monopolies? Traditionally a monopoly is considered dangerous because they can remove the incentive for innovation in markets by introducing artificial problems and barriers that mean the best product will not necessarily make money and win
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
Sure, prior to joining Microsoft Bill did some things for OSS.
But what since then? That's the real question. History is littered with great minds that went to Mcirosoft and then - poof! There was no output after. Half of why Microsoft acquires these kinds of people is simply to keep them away from other companies - you noted yourself that he was the leader of IBM's global software effort. Pretty good deal to take out that kind of leader from a large competitor for just the cost of one persons salary, and you get the marketing warm and fuzzy press releases about how much Microsoft is doing with OSS because they hired this guy.
History is littered with continuous reminders of what happens to partners of Microsoft. Why should potential OSS partners be any less wary?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The harassment dished out to me personally is part of that.
No, that's because you make yourself an easy target. Posting long-winded rants using slang like "M$" and "Windoze" is a good way to do it. Grow up already.
I love that you have lots of free time because your computers "work", and I'm trapped with "M$ 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
Oh please.
Apple *threatens* to sue all the time, even against BLOGGERS for crying out loud!
The fact is, Microsoft is always on the defense of these idiotic patent suits.
And they indemnify other parties to protect them from such suits. The 1.5 billion mp3 suit wasn't originally against MS, it was against Dell and Gateway, but MS indemnified them to protect them from the suit, so MS took the brunt of it themselves. Let me know when any OSS company does such for the good of the industry.
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
Moodle is a large GPL PHP project that has benefited from Microsoft funding. Last year Microsoft paid Moodle core developers to add MS SQL Server support in Moodle to let it work better in institutions used to Microsoft platforms.
;-)
http://moodle.org/mod/forum/discuss.php?d=57989
The developers actually used the chance to revamp their whole database abstraction layer, effectively adding support for a number of other commercial databases as well (Oracle, Interbase etc).
Microsoft also developed Sharepoint web parts for Moodle, and an extension for Word that allows teachers to publish straight into Moodle.
http://www.codeplex.com/Moodle2003WP
Yes, it's true there was a business case for Microsoft, because some very high profile institutions can now switch to using MS SQL, but I think overall it was a win-win for all concerned.
I used to work at MS when I was young and delusional, so I will only say this once and in a manner that I can not be sued in:
In my personal opinion, based on my real life experience, MS sees Linux and open source as a threat to it. In my mind they will never be 'friendly' to OSS, just willing to work strategically with what it sees as a form of competition.
Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer..
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".