Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Open Source

tlockney writes "Next week at Microsoft's MIX, whurley will be leading a discussion on 'Open Source, the Web, Interoperability, and Microsoft'. To kick off a bit of pre-session discussion and enlist the help of others in putting Microsoft on the spot, whurley, king of all things open source at BMC has written an article entitled 'Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Open Source'."

Comments

Reason zero

[cyberianpan]

They can read it & re-engineer it as paid for product !

Re:I can see microsoft doing what apple did

[cyborg_zx]

It doesn't work like that - if MS is forced to use a UNIX based OS derivative in order to survive they may not go out of business but it is endgame as far as dominance is concerned. That is a lose situation for MS, not a win.

Duh

[derEikopf]

Free R&D.

No competition = stagnation

[dedazo]

Microsoft needs open source because established companies cannot compete with them in the "normal" market outside of the web (Google and Yahoo) where Microsoft has historically played catch-up. Open source levels the field, and so you have things like Firefox. Firefox forced Microsoft to come out of their "it's good enough and no one has a choice anyway" stagnation. The inevitable comparisons between Apache and IIS5 ended up resulting in IIS6. When Microsoft feels the pressure, they are a better company with better products.

Arguably this is not true for all their markets, such as development tools and Office, which historically have not been too contested (not lately at least) and yet have not resulted in the same stagnation.

Many people want open source to succeed, because one of the end results of that is a better Microsoft. I've always included myself in that group.

As for the article, I think it's a good read for all the "LOLOL M$ is TEH AFRAID OF THE GNU/PENGUIN ETC" crowd:

Microsoft doesn't fear open source; it fears what the competition can do with it.

Microsoft fears IBM and Novell and CA. It doesn't "fear" Ubuntu or Gentoo or Torvalds. That's the key issue that RMS managed to miss (or probably chose to ignore for the oomph effect) in his incisive analysis of the "Halloween documents".

Re:No competition = stagnation

[TubeSteak]

They realize open source is their future.
Sure, Microsoft sometimes makes it easy for us to hate them, but aren't as disconnected from the pulse of the open source community as you may think. Linux is causing issues for them in the market, and they're working hard to keep up. They didn't build their empire by not planning ahead--even the most closed-minded executive in Redmond realizes open source is in their future.

Notice how author of TFA doesn't bother to back up his assertion?

I would have though that reality backs up the opposite: MS doesn't want to open their code or specs.

Right now, they're giving the EU a tough time over specs,
I can't imagine how "They realize open source is their future".

Re:Admitted

[parvenu74]

That makes no sense. Microsoft primarily makes their money from Windows and Office; with Linux making progress toward a usable desktop and OpenOffice.org already at the state where it can replace MS Office for most tasks, what can Microsoft use to lock people onto their platform? IIS? There's Apache. MSSQL? There are MySQL and PostgeSQL. .NET? There is Mono and Java. There are two reasons why MS still exists: the huge amount of legacy code and applications that cannot run on any other systems, and the lack of corporate hand-holding for customers considering the jump to Linux (though this is rapidly changing). For companies that don't rely on legacy business applications, the ability to roll out Linux desktops to the bulk of their users can be done today. As the state of Linux apps business progress, there will be ever less reason for customers to play Microsoft's game.

Re:I can see microsoft doing what apple did

[Grishnakh]

I think there's a bit of a difference there. The "BSD backed" is really a custom microkernel (Darwin), with BSD userspace tools. But this really isn't important, because the thing that Apple provides that's really different and proprietary is the system libraries: Cocoa, Carbon, etc. These are the APIs that application writers code to for the Mac platform. Because of this, you can't just compile Darwin for your Intel machine and run Mac apps; the APIs are closed-source. Trying to clone that would be an effort on the order of the WINE project; as we've seen with WINE, it doesn't really matter what kernel you're using, within reason, it's the system APIs that matter for running applications.

If Windows ever used a Linux kernel (hah!), there'd really be very little difference from the current status quo. They'd probably have to fix up the NTFS driver a lot (or use a different filesystem--most users wouldn't notice or care), they'd certainly benefit from all the built-in drivers, but the graphics subsystem would probably be a big showstopper since they'd either have to use X and change a lot of things, or make their own subsystem built into the kernel which they seem to like to do. Other than that, they'd certainly keep their whole system libraries proprietary and secret, which would make it non-trivial for people to run Windows applications on free software. Yes, they could use WINE, but that's still trying to hit a moving target and is developed slowly because of the need for reverse-engineering. Personally, I don't see why MS would ever bother using a Linux kernel; it doesn't provide them much technical benefit.

Worded differently

[Daath]

"Embrace and Extend"

I hate when they do that.