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.

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".