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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'."
They can read it & re-engineer it as paid for product !
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.
I think he'd be better qualified to speak on why BMC loves MSIE.
Microsoft : open source :: Prisonmate Bubba : his bitches
Where I'm from, they have another word besides "love" for that.
It makes it easier for them to get software patents.
Take the cheese to sickbay, the doctor should see it as soon as possible - B'Elanna Torres, "Learning Curve"
FTA: "Open source is not the threat; Linux is."
Is it like a swirly? Oh, it's William Hurley. Of course. That non-famous guy I've never heard of before.
This synopsis annoys me because it is written as if we're all just supposed to know what the hell a whurly and a BMC are.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
Free R&D.
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 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".
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
To say nothing of the fact that UNIX and NT are architecturally very different animals.
Microsoft knows unix. In the 90's they partnered weith a small company called proginet based on Long Island . They partnered to help windows machines talk to mainframes. I dont know if they still ahve this partner ship or not. Trust me though Microsoft knows unix even though they dont publically state it. http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3649/is_19 9507/ai_n8710090
That's like:
7 reasons a mouse likes a cat
7 reasons why oil likes water
7 reasons why intelligent design likes pasta
or
7 reasons why office users like clippy
Um, no. Both are threats to Microsoft. Linux, as a product, is obvious.
Open source, as a larger concept, is a threat to Microsoft because it is the antithesis of their power base. Microsoft has gained and held its control over the industry by clutching tightly its file formats and protocols. The only reason we ever got Office compatibility and the SMB protocol in the Open Source realm is because of careful reverse engineering and the hope that Microsoft's patent lawyers would keep their guns holstered.
I think Microsoft is realizing that the problem isn't the source, which is eroding as a base of power, but the software patents. On the one hand, they hold enough to crush pretty much anybody they choose. At the same time, they've already been victimized once by Eolas. The Novell deal shows how reluctant Microsoft is to really enforce their software patents. It's as much a defensive action for Microsoft as it is for Novell. Obviously, Novell can step out from under that Sword of Damocles. Microsoft, however, by not filing a straight-up patent suit, avoids throwing the first punch in a barroom full of patent trolls, all of whom are itching for a brawl.
This sig intentionally left blank.
OpenOffice poses more of a long-term threat to Microsoft than Linux, because Microsoft's revenue stream for Office is less subject to margin erosion than its operating system revenues. Firefox also poses a threat insofar as a common browser platform that is OS independent undermines control of the desktop. Windows and IE provide control of the market, while Exchange and Office provide the revenue. Competition on any of the four fronts is taken seriously.
Were the kernel Linux licensed under the BSD license, MS wouldn't consider Linux a threat. It's because of the *license* that the kernel Linux has that Microsoft is scared silly of it. That goes for anything else that's released under the GPL--Samba, OpenOffice.org, Mozilla/Firefox, KDE, *anything*. Why? Because they can't just lift GPL code without providing source. That's why their Services for UNIX is based on BSD, not GNU/Linux. It's also why Apple used a lot of FreeBSD code for the core of Mac OS X (the non-GUI parts).
Microsoft has made it clear, many times, that they consider the GPL a "cancer" and "Communist". They've also said that "we're not against 'open source'. We like BSD, that's fine. What we don't like is the GPL."
The GPL is their enemy because the GPL proactively defends our freedom. Is the BSD license a Free Software license? You bet! But it doesn't proactively defend our freedom like the GPL does, and it is that characteristic of the GPL that frightens Microsoft to its core. That's also why they're fighting so desperately against the OpenDocument file formats; to Microsoft, actual, true Freedom for users is a very, very scary thing.
Linux wont put Microsoft out of business. Microsoft will put themselves out of business that is if they don't learn to adjust the the market. proprietary products are painting themselves in to a corner & a niche. as OSs & software becomes more of a commodity. maybe sooner than most people think...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
There would be absolutely no reason for Microsoft to port Win32 on top of Linux. The NT kernel is more than capable as the OS. It is a microkernel design with isolated loadable plugin subsystems. Win32 just happens to be the subsystem with which most people are familiar. Microsoft has released other subsystems, including their own limited POSIX subsystem and an OS/2 subsystem (which was the original subsystem as Windows NT was designed to be OS/3 with IBM, until Windows 3.0 took off). Later Microsoft bought Softway and further developed the Interix POSIX subsystem releasing that as a part of Services for UNIX which is now a free download for Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 and ships on the DVD for a number of the Windows Vista versions.
What MS could possibly do is instead further extend Interix to include more compatibility with one or more flavors of Linux, including support for ELF binaries. They could include an implementation of X11 on top of the desktop composition engine with little trouble. There have been implementations of X11 for Windows for some time already. Microsoft doesn't really have a lot of reason to do this.
Ultimately the two things that would benefit Windows the most would be for Microsoft to finally allow security to trump third-party legacy and enforce the security model which has been in Windows NT since it's inception. It's already more granular than the security model available in Linux. Third party software could be addressed potentially by either including a VM environment which emulates Windows XP or Windows 98, sort of like Mac OS Classic, or through fine tuning this virtualized jail concept that User Account Control enforces.
The other thing that Microsoft could do, and they are slowly moving in this direction, would be to finally make Windows into a microkernel. The source of the majority of the instability in the system is due to faults in drivers and since drivers are loaded into kernel mode the only option the OS has is to fail, according to the security standards set by the US government in C2. If the drivers were instead loaded into a separate privelege level, such as ring1 or even ring3, the OS can protect itself from those drivers and degrade gracefully in the case of failure. If ATI's piece of garbage Catalyst driver fails the video would go away and the OS could attempt to restart it a couple of times before deciding to fail.
Note that Linux is not a microkernel. Neither is Mac OSX despite it's Mach underpinnings. In both cases a fault in the driver causes the OS to fail, e.g. kernel panic. The best reference OS for a microkernel is QNX.
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.
I'm not sure who "everybody" is... but such claims ignore history. It ignores the very impressive turn-on-a-dime business strategy Microsoft pulled off after they initially failed to realize the importance of the Internet. And it ignores a historical precedence in the changing of IBM's desktop hardware market when it shifted from a proprietary to commodity platform.
Micorosoft is not going to simply curl up and die. They've proven to be agile enough to react to threats / lost opportunities. And they have the momentum and resources to deal with a suddenly difficult market.
If we're lucky, Microsoft will become the software / OS equivalent of IBM. Sure - they're still powerhouses in the Industry... but they no longer control it. They have influence but have to compete with every other market player for that influence to pay off and drive the market in their desired direction.
That sounds plausible except for a few minor details. The first of which is the GPL. One of the major cornerstones of the GPL is that there are protections to prevent people from exploiting GPL code in the way MS would certainly exploit it. Microsoft has built an empire of locking every other competitor out (sometimes through illegal means). The famous extend part of the embrace, extend, extinguish ploy would not be allowed by the GPL.
Also, Apple was able to develop OS X not using Linux. Apple acquired NeXT which had developed some advanced technologies used in OS X. Also they based their kernel on BSD which does not have the same restrictions as Linux.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
You are uninformed.
Apple not only maintained is own Unix distro of A/UX, sold AIX servers, and created its own Linux distro prior to OS/X, but also ported the Mac environment to other Unix variants, using MAE and laster MAS.
- Steve Jobs and 20 Years of Apple Servers
And everybody knows that NT's "POSIX compliance" was a bullshit dance designed to make NT legal to sell to the government. NT never offered anything more than pretend support for POSIX, and it was of no more importance to Microsoft as a subsystem within NT than was OS/2.
Further, since POSIX compatilbility is techniclly a paid seal of approval on a specific implementation of Unix APIs, of course Linux as general idea can't ever techically pay to attach the POSIX trademark to itself in the way Microsoft pretended to.
The reality is that the only value of POSIX is as a general synonym for "Unix-like compatibility." In the real world, Linux currently helps define what that is; NT does not offer this at all.
Are you really trying to argue that NT provides some useful sort of compatibility for Unix apps? Citing the Wikipedia as a source does not do much to create credibility for your conjecture.
When you lose something irreplaceable, you don't mourn for the thing you lost, you mourn for yourself. - Harpo Marx
Because people spend their time working on open source instead of the product to beat Microsoft. So Steve Jobs the second comes along today. He's going to make an OS that's going to destroy Windows. He looks for his best coder. However coders don't need a Steve Jobs to make software anymore. They can just work on Linux to get their coding fix. They don't need a guy with a vision because they have Linux Torvalds to follow and continue to lead them.
Let's face it, Linux is not going to destroy Windows, there's too many issues with it. People have already seen Linux and made their opinions then. We can change them but it's an uphill battle. The in fighting, the "hard core linux guys" vs. the Red hats vs. the Slackware vs. everyone else has ruined what little chance Linux has. The very fact that if Linux takes over, it won't be one version but every version and it will all create work for the end user means it's going to be problematic for it to even gain market share.
Open source diverts and directs a lot of time for the people who could take on Microsoft's products and that makes Microsoft happy. In theory it COULD make for a better product because everyone can be working towards one goal. But in reality every programmer has an opinion on how best to go about the assault on the big MS and with out true leadership (Torvalds isn't looking to lead the revolution, Stallman is but he's as polarizing as can be, hell Stallman will scare most corporations back to Microsoft's loving arms with his free software talk.) Even the term open source scares businesses and executives. It's a good thing after you understand it but there's a lot of parts of it that Microsoft can whisper in people's ears to scare them into using the Microsoft alternative.
So Microsoft loves the fact open source is here because if anything it's destroyed more genius ideas than they could probably fight on their own in a number of ways.
It's a cookbook!!
1. We can steal code!
2. We can steal ideas!
3. We can steal design!
4. We can release a version that doesn't turn off noobies!
5. We can make a proprietary competitor and wipe the original FOSS off the map with our hegemony!
6. We can put out a press release about how we invented something again!
7. We can steal code!
I hold very few opinions. I hold information based on observation and fact. If you wish to disagree, please use facts.
Then again, the NT microkernel seems a bit overstressed for what it's being pushed to do in Vista, and it's starting to show... badly. Two versions from now, they're going to have to replace it with something... 'cause what they got now simply isn't going to cut the mustard (well, unless they up the minimum HW requirements to an 8-core box + 16GB of RAM + four SLI-chained vidcards...)
That said, I do agree that it prolly won't be Linux - MSFT will most likely snag the latest *BSD kernel (one that has no GPL encumbrance) and lock it down good and hard. Then they'll build the world's ugliest set of wrappers and APIs for it, then call the results "innovation".
Quo usque tandem abutere, Nimbus, patientia nostra?
Your retrospective goggles seem to be compressing time. I suggest you try fixing them.
That is certainly a loss for Bill Gates and perhaps the rest of the original cadre of MS corporate officers. Throughout the 80s and 90s, MS was steered consistently toward a "vision" of dominance that really wasn't profit oriented. MS has consistently passed up the opportunity to make profits in its efforts to become the dominant player in different digital markets. It has thrown more money down the toilet to prevent someone else from succeeding in an area where it wasn't good enough to win on merit than many companies had earned during those 20 years.
When MS gives up this foolishness and starts acting like a profit-oriented business, it will almost certainly lose its tarnish and become a respectable member of the business community.
That will be a long-term winning situation for MS. The only losers will be Gates (who has already thrown in the towel), Balmer, and the rest of the original dreamers with their juvenile fantasies about attaining world dominance.
"Embrace and Extend"
I hate when they do that.
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
I'm sorry, I don't see it that way. I don't think changing kernels is going to help anything. The problem is that Vista tries to do too much, namely DRM. All the DRM crap they added in is probably tied into everything, right into the kernel, and of course that's going to slow everything down. It'd be the same way if they took a clean BSD kernel and loaded it down with a lot of DRM crap.
As for two versions from now, that's over a decade away, probably more, at the rate that MS releases major new OS versions now. I have a feeling things are going to be extremely different in computing-land by then. I'll go ahead and put out my predictions right now. Things are going to be extreme, one way or another, but I can't say in which direction it'll go.
1) MS is going to collapse because of too much pressure from OSS competition, stagnation, lack of customer interest, ultimate failure of their lock-in strategies, etc. At best, pieces of the company will spin off and live on: Xbox and Office are the two main candidates for survival, though the latter will be a shadow of its former self. Windows will be dead, and MacOS and Linux will be the two dominant systems.
2) MS will squash OSS in the USA (and possibly other 1st-world countries like Canada and EU) due to patents, DRM, and other devious tactics mostly involving the legal system. OSS will survive to some extent, but will be largely underground, as US-based OSS users will have to download everything from servers in places like Russia and India, and all development will have to take place there as well (or at least stored there, as US-based developers will have to do their work in secrecy). Other countries which don't honor our stupid software patents will dump Windows and move to Linux: India, Russia, and China will be leaders in this. This will result in a rift between the two parts of the world, and greater innovation in the Linux-using countries. Eventually, the US economy will collapse due to lack of technical leadership and innovation and China will become the world superpower. EU's future depends greatly on how much they follow the US or if they decide to grow a brain and do their own thing.
I posted a comment there on his page, refuting his arguments. It wasn't too hard to rationally shoot most of them down. I was able to refute 6 of 7, but one of them I just wasn't familiar enough with. Here's the comment if you're interested:
----------------
I can't take you very seriously because there is a lot of misdirection and hand-waving in your article. I will give you credit that I didn't see any outright lies, which Microsoft directly uses, though. Here I'll point out some problems with your points.
"They include open source code in their products."
You bring up the TCP/IP implementation as an example. That's not a good idea on your part because it's exactly the example people use to point out why Microsoft likes to let other people come up with good stuff under the BSD license and then selfishly take it with no thank-yous or giving in return. When it comes to a mutual sharing license that they can't take selfish advantage of, like the GPL, they spit venom, lies, quasi-legal lobbying interference with government action, violation of their court-ordered code of conduct from their anti-trust conviction, etc., etc. So basically, your first point illustrates that they just like code that other people open without restrictions so they can just snatch it.
"They support open source vendors."
I won't say a lot here because I'm not familiar with these Microsoft "programs created to test and verify open source applications on Microsoft platforms". If they do that, fair enough.
"They benefit from open source everyday."
It's called FUD. Have you read the content of the "free press" they pay for? That's kind of a twisted way to look at things to say that your competitors benefit you by giving you the opportunity to smear them with falsehoods. You're not understanding what the alternative situation was to this "battle with open source" they've been waging in the press. Before open source was maturing, Microsoft didn't have a big war in the press and had close to 100% market share. Everyone just kept buying it because they had never heard of anything else. Now Microsoft is having to viciously attack to slow the slide of their market share. Open source isn't doing them any favors there.
"They open source code."
Ah, UNIX tools for Windows. This is beating the ground where the dead horse rotted away several years ago. They did a small token action on a minor product most people don't use once, and we're supposed to be reminded of that over and over? That hardly seems like strong evidence to make it one of the "Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Open Source". That's weak, man.
"They are adopting open source culture."
You're not recognizing what this is. Culture means actually doing something, which they're not. This is co-opting the language of open source to try to pretend to be something good, while remaining the wolf in sheep's clothing. It's the same with their proprietary data-dump of their new MS Office format, which they have ironically called "Microsoft Office Open XML". They want to have that word Open associated with them, even though the format is very closed and does not contain specs enough for anyone else to use it.
"They aren't threatened by open source."
Well this looks like a good place to continue the talk about the office document formats. They are threatened at least as much, if not more, by other forms of openness than just by Linux. Have you kept up with Microsoft's conduct in Massachusetts over the document format decision? They have been putting out some of their most blatant lies to convince them to use the Microsoft document formats, rather than go to a neutral document format that can be used by anyone, including Microsoft if they wanted to stop their tantrums long enough to do it. Read some of Andy Updegrove's blog to find out some of the story about that, including how they fed a false character assasination story on Peter Quinn to Boston Globe reporter Steve Kurkjian. The story was published before they even
We may experience some slight turbulence and then...explode. -Capt. Mal Reynolds
In the NT3 timeframe (approx 12 years ago now), there was a big effort to sell NT to companies, such as the one I worked for then, supplying back office /server room style products. Many/most products of the time were running on Unix boxes or similar. We were using Unix x86 boxes (SCO etc) for compter tephony applications. NT had to check a few boxes to encourage people to switch: POSIX and streams driver support. This gave people a reasonable porting avenue to a cheaper OS (NT was about half or a third of SCO's cost at the time).
The POSIX and streams drivers were very inefficient, and were dropped within a short while (once the bait and switch had worked).
This ploy was very clever on MS's part. Using ourselves as a benchmark for people in this space, our customers were putting on some pressure to provide NT based products because they were eating the MS blurb and wanted to reduce costs. Our techies looked at NT and figured out what would be needed to port: POSIX-check, streams driver model - check. So we say that on paper it can be done with trivial architectural change. Marketing start hyping the NT-based offering. The business people say make it so, so we do. Unfortunately we find the POSIX and streams driver model are very slow on NT, so end up having to start doing native drivers and non-POSIX code. We start slipping, marketing starts screaming and the portability gets dumped in favour of getting shipping. The bait and switch has worked.
We never got any benefit from NT POSIX or the MS streams driver. Our systems went from requiring low-end (16-25MHz) 386s to 100+MHz 486. Basically a very bad case of bait and switch.
Engineering is the art of compromise.
Are you really trying to argue that NT provides some useful sort of compatibility for Unix apps? Citing the Wikipedia as a source does not do much to create credibility for your conjecture.
And citing roughlydrafted is better? Sorry, couldn't resist.
To use the term 'Love' here is incredibly naive. MS would obviously 'love' to destroy Open Source by any means possible. They only become involved with it when forced, when they can make a buck off it, or when it saves them time and effort. There isn't the remotest attitude of benevolence. This guy may well be laughed off the stage.
But enough from me. Be sure to read the comments below the article on the source page. They are very insightful and diverse.
I am you insensitive clod!
No, it's not. Microsoft themselves refer to it as a "hybrid kernel"; practically, it means it's a monolithic kernel that sort of looks somewhat like a microkernel if you squint and turn your head a little, but it still misses out on most of the relevant advantages of a real microkernel architecture. Most modern operating systems have kernels that support pluggable binary format and other kernel service modules, but the amount of marketing spin has more variety.
Indeed, and they work with Mainsoft for the Unix ports of some of their applications. (Not to mention Microsoft Xenix back in the day!)
Not only that, at least about a year ago when I last tried SFU, it was like being blasted back in time and using ISC UNIX in 1993 (and that was a horrible experience even back then). Cygwin is just miles better - it's unfortunate that the cygwin people can't make an NT subsystem, the interface being closed and propreitary.
Oolite: Elite-like game. For Mac, Linux and Windows
Microsoft see OSS as a threat: that's their problem, not ours. OSS has never been - and never should be - in the business to compete with anyone. OSS is here to produce better software. Period. If distributions like RedHat or IBM want to go toe-to-toe against MS, that's their problem.
Really, any press release or fluff from OSS collaborators should be ignored. Any OS release should be examined for goodness - copied - then ignored. Any attempts to say that OSS is here to "wipe-out" MS should be ignored. OSS can never do that. Those people who whinge about OSS *not* competing with word, access, oh, get a life.
Patriotism is a virtue of the vicious
The only losers will be Gates (who has already thrown in the towel), Balmer (who has already thrown in the chair), and the rest of the original dreamers with their juvenile fantasies about attaining world dominance.
Fixed(TM)