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Microsoft Planning to Buy Open Source Companies?
mjasay writes "At the Web 2.0 Summit, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer admitted that Microsoft 'will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products,' suggesting that to avoid open-source companies would 'take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically.' Ballmer has apparently come a long way since dubbing Linux a 'cancer.' The real question, however, is which open-source companies make sense within the Microsoft product portfolio, both from a technology and philosophy perspective. Novell? 37Signals? Jive? SugarCRM? And, equally importantly, which companies could look their communities in the eye after selling to Microsoft?"
"which companies could look their communities in the eye after selling to Microsoft?" ALL OF THEM.
Sounds familier to me... http://imdb.com/title/tt0218817/
The Yasashii Syndicate ||
What i want to know is, will they change the license of the software after purchase?
First they ignored us
Then they ridiculed us
Then they vilified us
Now they want to buy us
Tomorrow they will surrender to us
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
which companies could look their communities in the eye after selling to Microsoft?
Methinks the founders will be too busy cruising around on their shiny new megayachts to worry about such things.. and why not?
This is an absolutely textbook way of getting rid of competition - buy it and either assimilate their product into your own or simply close it down.
Microsoft aren't bothered about small projects which don't attract much attention. Nor are they particularly bothered about large projects, provided there isn't any serious commercial backing to them.
They're bothered about commercially backed projects where there is the potential to offer significant competition. Their spouting about how "you won't get any real support" (which is probably about their only reasonably sensible piece of FUD) only works when there aren't many commercially backed solutions based on open source software. If I worked for someone like KnowledgeTree or SugarCRM right now I'd be slightly nervous.
> ...which companies could look their communities in the eye...
I'd wager they'd bee looking at their bank accounts, not their communities.
Apparently they're really upset that Linux won't sell to them...
Meta will eat itself
If msft buys any OSS companies, it will probably be just to kill the competition. Remember Foxpro?
The only reason i could think of is to buy some companies and extinguish them.
HTTP/1.1 400
If you consider Linux a cancer, you can apply the same analogy to Microsoft (EA, ...)
It's spreading and infecting other software/companies...
"You will be assimilated. We will add your biological and technological distinctiveness to our own. Resistance is futile."
Any that have tech they want, but are at risk of moving to GPLv3, I'd say.
1. SCO buys Caldera and tries to embrace open source as their saviour
2. After a few years says this is not working and sues IBM for IP violations
3. SCO lost miserably while their stench slowly disipates.
Hmm sould more like a dream than a deja vu.
I just wish that Mcbride's gonads could be lobbed off and his sack stiched into his asshole as a permanent condom to prevent STD's in jail. And his gonads should be used as earings to make him a more attractive biatch.
Well, here we go, buying up this open-source company to kill competition. What do you mean our users "forked" our product? What do you mean the staff we just layed off just made a new company to support this fork? What did we pay umpteen gazillion dollars for?
Karma Whoring for Fun and Profit.
Geek to suit: "Hey look, Microsoft are now *really* getting scared by open source stuff! They want to throw *real money* at it!"
Also, people might now start investing in open source projects in the hope of getting a slice of that MS cash a few years down the line. This looks like a Good Thing.
anything the company that was bought by microsoft was doing. No offense, it is an issue of trust. Microsoft screwed so many partners and non partners in the past. We cant just put that much effort on our spare time into things that can be sent to hell by microsoft in a given point in time.
Read radical news here
We've seen this crap before. Companies buy up their competitors only to bury the technology. If you can't bean 'em, buy 'em. You know--at best--Microsoft would be buying an open source company only for the purpose of closing the source and making money. There is just nothing good that can ever come from Microsoft. It has been too many decades of evil behavior by them to believe they have any altruistic purpose here.
maybe if microsoft would actually build a good product and sold it with a reasonable price & without the dirty shenanigans and if they quit behaving like a bunch of white collar criminals they would have better success at being a software company = the harder you use force the more it slips thru your fingers...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
So are all the other commercial distros. So what?
the OSS "buy-me" trolls?
1. fork the most recent open release of a recently MS bought out OSS project.
2. improve and offer support for it.
3. Now MS either has to improve its own branch or buy you out too (which is the 3b. Profit!!! part)
I mean, seriously, isn't Microsoft going to prove money can be made with OSS?
---- MISSING MISCELLANEOUS DATA SEGMENT --- [sigdash] trolololol
..any open source project "team" they buy can will be pointless as if there is enough support the last version will be forked by the community if there is a perceived need. I mean, call me simplistic but isn't that the main strength of open sourced projects? If you don't like it then fork it, if there is enough support then it will work. Survival of the fittest and all that...
This sounds more like he's planning to pre-empt Google from buying those companies. Buy-and-kill doesn't work with open source projects, as the source is already out there and anyone can start another company based on the same code.
To Terminate, or not to Terminate, that's the question - SCSIROB
not like if they bought something like Mozilla that they could kill it, the code is already out there, look at what debian did with mozilla's software, debian has iceweasel (firefox), iceape (seamonkey) & etc, essentially microsoft would only be buying a name, the code is easily forked and if the code is not changed then only an icon & name...
OpenOffice is one application i would be concerned about, hopefully IBM & Sun will do something to protect OpenOffice since it is a high profile *nix application...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
There will be a new administration in Washington in 14 months, and it is likely to be one that will seriously care about antitrust matters. IANAL, if I remember correctly the Sherman Antitrust Act was created for just such a situation. "Every contract, combination in the form of trust or otherwise, or conspiracy, in restraint of trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, is declared to be illegal". and "Every person who shall monopolize, or attempt to monopolize, or combine or conspire with any other person or persons, to monopolize any part of the trade or commerce among the several States, or with foreign nations, shall be deemed guilty of a felony [. . . ]" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sherman_Antitrust_Act.
Get Red Hat!!!
We believe most software is too complex. Too many features, too many buttons, too much confusion. We build easy to use web-based products with elegant interfaces and thoughtful features. We're focused on executing on the basics beautifully.
threadeds blog
Hahahaha... hahahaha.. Jesus, you can't make this stuff up. Thanks, Slashdot!
No..., Microsoft isn't after SugarCRM, a PHP CRM system.
It's not after Novell either, since this would undermine their Windows brand. You probably understand that suddenly starting to sell another OS while Vista is having some harsh time won't be great for Microsoft's business. Partnering with Novell the way it is right now is the perfect solution for at least 5 years ahead.
Expect the OSS companies to produce products that tie well into the Microsoft development ecosystem, and thus advertising the platforms Microsoft maintains.
I can assure you that Canonical (Makers of Ubuntu) And Red Hat won't be bought out, and Debian is a community distro, and when SUSE is practically sold to MS already, there doesn't leave a lot of major distros left, I don't think that PCLinuxOS will be sold to MS or Mandriva will because they seem to be much like a community distro even though they are sponsored by companies, so with Ubuntu, Fedora, RHEL, Debian, Mandirva, and PCLinuxOS staying MS free, that doesn't give MS much room with the other distro makers, as for Novell, sure they have contributed to the Open Source community a lot, but that software is GPL'd so whenever MS makes a change to the code it becomes GPL'd too (assuming they actually follow the law this time...) But it seems that whenever MS buys a company, us /.ers won't use it (and when its open source stuff, face it were the main users of it) and so you hit a major user base that refuses to use it, but it might be nice to have a "free" Windows-Like distro like Windows thats Open Source (with a few proprietary components) to recommend to Windows users, but Im not going to switch from Ubuntu anytime soon.
There is no "disagree" moderation, and troll, flamebait and overrated are not valid substitutes
They mention Novell as a possibility... followed by a bunch of half-assed web production houses with no actual value. Think more like MySQL AB or other pieces of real software that people are choosing over MS products. Nobody gives a shit about Jive.
"If you can't beat 'em, buy 'em!"
"Every great cause begins as a movement, becomes a business, and eventually degenerates into a racket." -- Eric Hoffer
EOLing FoxPro, eh? I guess Ballmer forgot all about that, given Microsoft released seven editions over 12 years after the acquisition. A couple of those versions are still officially supported.
Are you one of those displaced FoxPro programmers who can't seem to fathom why the rest of the world finds you irrelevant? I'll give you a hint; that's not Microsoft's fault. We think the same thing about anyone who clutches old technology as change continues to push you further into obsolescence. The rest of the world moved on a long time ago, long before MS considered canning FoxPro. File based DBs are simply not all that relevant anymore, particularly since they cannot provide any real form of integrity and they are absolutely terrible over a network connection.
Open source companies that loves good money and dual licensing!
Novell? 37Signals? Jive? SugarCRM?
O_O. You forgot phpBB...
I mean, if it'll be all random and ridiculous, why not?
I am more concerned over the rattling of weapons in the "who owns *nix" carusel. Now, you may call me a tinfoil-hat wearer. But Aren't some of these companies in possession of certain linux-patents?
With Microsoft acquiring those companies they would acquire those patents and all of a sudden we have another courtroom situation that is going to keep PJ busy for the coming decade. And Microsoft has a lot more money than SCO had.
Anyone else sharing these concerns?
The real problem here is incompatible philosophies. Ever since their foundation, Microsoft's philosophy of doing business has been in direct conflict with the whole concept of Open Source, and it remains such to this day.
Some day the huge chasm between Open Source and, at least Microsoft's, way of doing business may be bridged, but it certainly will not be Microsoft that builds that bridge; which would be replete with crossing guards, tariffs, and EULA's a-plenty.
The only thing Open Source companies can and should hope to achieve in order to remain a true Open Source company is a clearly defined and specific list of values and objectives which are non-negotiable and not for sale.
Microsoft's recent offers to "partner" with Open Source companies is like mixing oil and water: it just doesn't mix.
I find it interesting when a company (Novell) claims to adopt an Open Source philosophy on one hand, and then gets in bed with one of the least Open Source companies in America on the other. No! Scratch that, I find it insulting to the Open Source communities.
Take your mod and shove it!
Microsoft has traditionally bought software companies that could augment its software portfolio. Buying a company that has a product that you lack is not new to the software industry or any other.
This time it is different. Microsoft is not buying "software ideas". Microsoft, like most software companies, is slowly realizing that software will become a commodity in the next 20 years. Operating systems, applications....etc will all be, more or less, equal to end users and businesses.
What microsoft is doing by buying "open-source" companies is buying a business model. Microsoft hasn't yet figured out that you can make money while giving something away for free. That model is completely foreign to Microsoft. They are going to buy companies that have established customers and use them as their springboard into the software "services" business.
The music industry is also going to this model (slowly) - give away the music to sell tickets and t-shirts. Microsoft's managers are not stupid - they know the days of selling shrink-wrapped boxed software are ending.
-ted
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Nope, M$ will simply make the same pitch to the new administration to explain to them the "perils" of busting up their tidy little monopoly. It will change nothing.
Gerry
I have to wonder if they plan to buy up some OSS projects and then relicense them. They can then start with the patent FUD and hit any forks with MS lawyers.
Before anybody tells me that the law is on the side of OSS, consider how long the SCO case took. What if MS doesn't play to win but to not lose, allowing them to delay and cripple projects until they give up?
Think about it: through the lawsuit against MS, Linspire has the legal right to distribute various codecs for MP3, WMF, etc. To add insult to injury, they are giving the other linuxes the ability to legally download various codecs, too...codecs which would otherwise be illegal in the US. Buy & shut Linspire, and you can again move the Linux desktop into territory where their users either break the law, or have a poor experience.
My money's on Linspire as the acquisition target.
This is not a new strategy.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Motors_streetcar_conspiracy
Vivendi Universal bought-up mp3.com and bulldozed it, Microsoft bought-up RAV AntiVirus and buried it. Now, M$ will probably do the same with these others; buy-up the businesses and turn them into parking lots.
Regards;
Since open source projects rely upon a community often hostile to Microsoft for their developement, what better way to kill an open source project than to buy it? Who wants to work for Microsoft for free!
I swear, if I had Microsoft stock I'd be selling right now. Steve Ballmer is running M$ into the ground. (Yes, yes, I know people have hated Microsoft and will say it's always been running into the ground.) But really, I don't think Steve Ballmer has a clue what to do.
He keeps going on these rants, throwing chairs around, etc. Why would Microsoft buy 20-100 companies. There is really no benefit to doing so. I've really felt M$ has been on a bad path. I had hopes Vista would change that...but obviously that didn't work out. Vista was the best thing that ever happened to Macintosh.
Now, Steve Ballmer has devised a plan destroy the one thing that would ensure M$ survival over the next few years - namely a vast $50 billion cash reserve. And Steve Baller has decided to spend it all buying a 100 little overpriced companies. Why?
Frankly, M$ share holders need to fire Steve Ballmer and do so quickly.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
The last part is the crucial one.
I know I'd stop any business relations with any OSS company bought by MS. For the simple reason of trust. MS has proven time and time again that they are a dirty company playing dirty tricks and not stopping at screwing over their business partners.
When you buy OSS, you have two reasons. One is it could simply be the best product of its kind around. The other is that you trust the OSS project to not play bait-and-switch, let's-not-renew-your-license, look-at-that-smallprint, that-requires-the-extended-warrenty or any of those other games on you because it knows you can simply take the code and go elsewhere.
MS, on the other hand, hasn't been about developing good products, or being a reliable partner, not for many years. The whole company is about playing dirty games and doing it better than you.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Remember Dimension X, the 1990s Bay Area startup built around an open-source Java graphics engine? Microsoft bought them, scrapped the project, shipped the developers off to Redmond and deployed them on ActiveX projects.
If I were a deep-pockets-legal-department-with-gold-plated-business-cards type of company, I'd try it.
I'd be willing to bet that a judge will look at it and say, "Well this part is GPL'd, but you own it, so you can still enforce your GPL rights. This part is not, and because the project is yours, you can do with it what you want."
So, who of you want to cough up the funds to defend against that kind of legal team?
...sound of crickets heard...Daffy mutters to himself.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
1. Buy (Open Source) Company.
2. Slap the Microsoft name on the whiz-bang technology they just bought, claim it as their product of "innovation".
3. Publish a press release that the the software company will be offering better "Windows compatibility" on all platforms to "build a better community".
4. Once the added Windows APIs have been debugged, (after a few months) start dropping all other non-windows OS support due to "customer demand"
5. Profit
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
I think taking on a Linux distro would be too big a can'o'worms for Microsoft - far too many copyright holders to allow a closed-source fork, probably including some GPLv3 components in the mix. I think even GPLv2 goes far enough to undermine the IP FUD argument if MS actually became the "owner" of an active Linux distro.
I'd look to the more self-contained, FOSS products that have been substantially developed by a single company and are already distributed under dual licenses.
The worrying scenario would be if a highly FOSS-hostile company acquired key FOSS projects with a view to "trolling" downstream users over minutiae and questionable interpretations of GPL, BSD etc. (witness the recent rows over mixing BSD and GPL, or some of the criticisms of GPLv3 - and before you bother to refute those, remember that you apparently don't need a valid argument in order to tie people up in expensive litigation for years, and that actually owning the IP that you're suing over puts you comfortably ahead of the game :-) ).
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
I thought you might.
I still miss "reveal codes" :-(
-- This
do not welcome our M$ overlords.
REDHAT......
RedHat already stabbed the home user in the back with Fedora, and no box in the store for $49 anymore.
So I seriously doubt any of their MS loving customers would care if MS bought them out.
Go away.
open (SIG, "</dev/zero"); $sig = <SIG>; close SIG;
I was worried, until I heard that Monkey-boy wants to buy Web 2.0 companies.
Gotta go, I need to get the business plan for my new start-up, pimentoloaf.com, into shape for the VCs..
--- The American Way of Life is not a birthright. Hell, it's not even sustainable.
It looks like you're planning an acquisition...
Would you like help?
* Crush the life and soul out of the idea and shelve it.
* Use your new acquisition's IP to bludgeon the competition.
* Add bloatware to Vista.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This won't work out the way Dancing Monkey Boy hopes it will. It is patently (heh) obvious that any open source company acquired by Microsoft will immediately lose all credibility in the open source marketplace. Furthermore, since the software itself is open source, that loss of credibility will immediately cause the project to fork, and the community will move in lockstep over to the newly formed, true open source project. Basically it'll be a repeat of what happened with Mambo and Joomla every time Microsoft performs an acquisition.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Instead of buying OSS companies to kill them off, most likely Microsoft would be looking for OSS companies with patents that have been used by other OSS projects, particularly Linux. Once Microsoft owns the company, it can enforce the patent. Forking won't help with a patent violation, particularly if the patent is question is in use by other projects.
Posters are right in that Microsoft buying companies producing Linux or other F/LOSS won't be able to stamp out the competition just by buying them, the way they stamped out Spyglass, Visio, Doublespace, etc. But neither will forking solve the problem completely the way it did with X.org, Beryl or GPG. Yes, the legal rights to the software will remain available to the community thanks to the GPL; but Microsoft is also buying up developer talent.
If MS buys SAMBA, for example, yes, we could fork off the SAMBA codebase and continue development. But somebody would have to carry on the torch after Jeremy Allison starts working at Redmond. That someone wouldn't be as familiar with the codebase and would take some time to come up to speed. He would not be as enthusiastic an advocate for the software. SAMBA development would slow down. What's that, you say? There are other developers on the SAMBA project who are just as good? Fine, Microsoft will hire them off, too. In fact, Microsoft could create an entire department of We Pay You To Sit Around Programming TicTacToe Games to lure off the major FLOSS developers.
(SAMBA was just an example, btw; it could be anything. And if Jeremy does get hired by Microsoft at an exorbitant salary, more power to him. He deserves the recognition.)
We need to take this into account. Just as the theoretical FLOSS advantage of "many eyes make bugs shallow" still needs work to be borne out in practice, so the ability to fork off the codebase is not that useful without enthusiastic developers to carry on the torch.
In this case, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish might not be aimed at the software, but the developers. Microsoft can later point to them and say, "See? Bunch of hippie volunteers! Can't be trusted to carry a software project through to completion!"
After all, what were the lyrics to the Monkeyboy dance again?
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
Then we win.
In the course of every project, it will become necessary to shoot the scientists and begin production.
the developers which were fired get toghether again and open company Z which continues to develop and support project Y, from the last GPL-released version.
... OpenMoko, GP2x (don't know the company's name), QNX.
It is always better to be a first grade version of yourself than a second grade version of someone else.
Microsoft may be many things, but stupid is not one of them. I would bet substaintal sums of money that the staff will have signed non-competes keeping them from working on any non-MS fork (and maybe any other OSS as well). Actually, umpteen gazillion dollars may not be a bad price to take out the various project leaders. Let us be honest, without good managment familiar with the source, large-scale OSS projects are impossible. And a rapid decapitation may take years to recover from.
Your ad here. Ask me how!
Ironic that the icon for MS discussions is the Borg, and this post is about MS doing exactly what the Borg do. In this case, assimilating open source companies.
When MS buys an open source company, does anyone really believe that it will remain an open source company?
So...if you can't beat'm, buy them.
no sane court would say that Microsoft and Redhat compete in operating systems sales.
Huh? Sure they do. Just not in the desktop OS market. They are definitely competitors in the server OS market. Microsoft Windows Server vs RHEL; they're probably the two dominant platforms in commercial server deployments.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
Jive, SugarCRM, and Novell are all companies that are built around products that are open source. While 37Signals has released an application framework as open source, their applications, like Backpack, Basecamp, and Highrise are not open source. 37Signals is a great company with really good products, but I don't think they are the sort of company that Ballmer was referring to.
Approaching Normal
"Since open source projects rely upon a community often hostile to Microsoft for their developement, what better way to kill an open source project than to buy it?"
.Net, require that project check in/out be done from a Windows client and Robert is your father's brother.
Rather than just go for a single project why not buy Sourceforge? Move all the projects to a new revision control system based on
say they buy open source company X
now all coworkers of X leave, found "their own" company and fork the last open version of their software...
in effect MS would have nothing for their money - except the right to sell the software under a different license, but in competition to a free version of the same software.... in time the versions might start to differ, but since the coworkers of company X are more familiar with the sourcecodes, the development of the free version should be faster (unless MS puts far more coders on the source - which I wouldn't consider a very bright idea either...)
The MAFIAA is a bunch of mindless jerks who will be the first up against the wall when the revolution comes
This is great news. Microsoft will give hundreds of millions of dollars to the founders of open source companies, and the software itself will remain open source. This kind of monetary reward can only encourage the development of more open source software. Thank You Microsoft!
Yes, the legal rights to the software will remain available to the community thanks to the GPL; but Microsoft is also buying up developer talent.
No, they aren't really. They are giving the developers lots of money and Microsoft simply won't be an interesting place for them to stay. So, they will be leaving Microsoft after the purchase. Non-competes are hard to enforce, both because courts don't like them and because it's difficult to see how an independently wealthy developer working on this own time would be "competing" with Microsoft.
Microsoft is the company that buys out all sorts of companies, abandoning support and development of the product.
They bought Blue Ribbon back when I was doing music on the Amiga and abadoned their highly innovative sequencer product Bars and Pipes professional (they were pipeline based, alter MIDI data in realtime). How is a buyout good for consumers? having a commercial product become open source at least stops the product being abandoned.
I'm surprised no one's has mentioned Sun as a potential target, as they've open sourced a great deal of their code, including Solaris, Java, and Open Office. All three continue either already are or have the potential to be big competitors to mainline Microsoft products.
Rule #1 -- Politics always trumps technology.
How many % has that gone up, especially since Dell included them on their systems portfolio?
What does Microsoft care about changing the license? Do you not realize that first and foremost, Microsoft is likely to just terminate the project?
/. could even give another option a moments notice. Microsoft exists because of Windows and anything they touch gets destroyed if it does not work ONLY with Windows. That's in 20 years of history folks. When Java was knocking on Microsofts door they responded by purchasing promising Java based companies and closing them down. Netscape got the same treatment. Why would anybody not think this was their plan for open source companies they purchased since most open source projects work on more than Windows and that is a threat to Windows? The top level at Microsoft look at everything as a threat first since Microsoft exists because Windows exists and without Windows, they are history.
And I have to wonder how anybody on
And the sad thing is that Steve Balmer was the one saying this yet nobody in half the posts mentioned them just terminating the project. WTF?
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
First of all, they aren't an open source company. All their shit is closed source, they just use open source software to make it. Second, all their shit is, well, shit. They have nothing of any value or interest. A couple of incredibly poorly performing, unstable, featureless web pages that any phptard could reproduce in a couple of weeks. That's not worth buying.
Also, that post points out how clueless 37signals are. Its a picture of an elevator with a lot of buttons, implying its a large company. Its in an ad selling software to large companies. Seems pretty straight forward. The large number of buttons have nothing to do with MS's products, or software of any kind.
What do you suppose normally happens when a company buys a competitor?
Maybe foxpro was a bad example since msft did not officially kill foxpro. Msft certainly did not promote foxpro. I think it's fair to assume that msft didn't want foxpro competing with msft's database offerings.
Please , please don't let Microsoft buy Atlassian. They are only trying to buy OSS and OSS-friendly companies to confuse and kill OSS.
If they really wanted to screw up the development model of a _lot_ of projects, taking Jira/Confluence/Fisheye out of the friendly-to-OSS world (or polluting their code) would cause the most pain imaginable at this point.
Oh, <insert your favored deity, market structure or believable omnipotent force> have them buy Mysql so they can kill that instead to recharge Postgresql's maintainers' batteries to help them get replication and cross database querying working, and bring us one step closer to OSS relational righteousness.
Microsoft offers a deal to buy a FLOSS company, say Mandriva. Of course, any time Company A buys Company B, Company A wants to make sure the staff in Company B won't just quit. Thus, it's perfectly reasonable for Microsoft to make the deal contingent on a number of conditions.
First, the enticements: if Microsoft buys Red Hat, all the staff get a nice solid pay raise, with double to triple the income for the executive; great benefits, not all of which are monetary (e.g. MS arranges immigration to US if desired and staff is foreign, or MS will pay for expanding their new home into a "home office", discounts on air travel or healthcare or whatever); a nice title; retirement plan with $20k per year contributed by MS (includes MSFT stock, of course).
Next, the strings: the benefits are only vested if the staff member stays with Microsoft for 2 years; if he leaves before 2 years, he owes MS all the money he was given for that home renovation, etc. Of course, this would also apply if MS terminated the staff for cause.
There is no way a FOSS company (or most other companies, for that matter) would be able to match MS benefits, so the staff stays on, planning to leave after the obligatory 2 years. And they do leave after 2 years, but by that time the wind has been taken out of the sails of whatever project it is --RHEL, or SAMBA if from my earlier example, or whatever. Meanwhile, Microsoft is marketing their EEE strategy like crazy: "See? We have a *better* MS-RHEL and MS-SAMBA. Compare with Original SAMBA, which isn't even under active development any more!"
Even worse, MS assigns the staff to work on proprietary code. "Here's how our SMB system really works. Here's the source code to the NT kernel. And here's the specification for Word97." That would contaminate the developers so that they are no longer allowed to work on any FLOSS related to the proprietary stuff. What if the developers refuse to view the source code? "Hey, it was part of the job description when you signed up to merge with us, so now we shall terminate you for cause!" There goes all the benefits.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
That movie was so fscking horrible.
I think the only word that comes to mind is "masturbatory".
I also think it was absolutely horrible to imply that Bill Gates is a murderer or that he would kill people for a profit. I don't know Bill, so maybe he would, however I don't see any evidence that that is who he is.
Steve Ballmer on the other hand.... well... he does have a temper.
Regardless, the movie lacked any merit. Watch "Hackers" instead.
"And, equally importantly, which companies could look their communities in the eye after selling to Microsoft?"
If "looking their communities in the eye" is a major concern, than these companies aren't really serious about being a business. Any company that has enough value to be acquired probably has already gone beyond the "kumbaya" stage of OSS.
Given the issues with Vista and numerous other products, are they trying to do open source acquisitions in the hope of bringing collaborative development into the company? Seriously, what MS does now is what ultimately results in the legendary MS reliability and security. And at what cost? At some point, someone at MS has to realize that the OSS products are (at least in some cases) developed faster/better/cheaper than the traditional model. Maybe someone actually read the Halloween memos.
As long as you own the copyrights to the code, you can license it however you want, and there's nothing forcing you to continue licensing it in some previous way. Many companies offer free software (perhaps in the form of demos or shareware) and non-free versions of the same software and nothing says they have to continue releasing shareware if it's no longer profitable to them. (If I have a copy of that shareware, though, I can still distribute it legally, even if the company has stopped distributing it).
You are reading a copy of my copyrighted post.
If Microsoft ever suspects Linux is a significant threat, they'll just buy out the largest players
So how exactly would they buy out something like, say, Debian or Ubuntu?
What always bothered me is MS's tendency to buy out the decent anti-virus companies that supported linux, which was shortly followed by those companies breaking up or dropping linux support.
a simple contract requiring the company's developers to stay with Microsoft and/or some non-compete clause. It's really not hard to remove the developers when you rake in billions in profits every quarter off of monopoly products like Windows and MS Office.
Do you really think $10M or $20M means anything to Microsoft if it effectively takes something like PHP or MySQL off the market? Microsoft constantly dumps millions down the toilet just to keep existing MS products going and keep competition away. They've lost over $10 billion on Microsoft Windows CE(PocketPC, Windows Portable, whatever they call it today ). Yes, that said BILLIONs in losses. They've probably lost a couple of billion on Zune and a few billion on Xbox.
As I said, they already make billions monthly off of Windows and MS Office so spending a few measly millions to protect those monopolies is nothing and they've shown they are VERY willing to do this. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Remember back in the 80s when the only music that wasn't plastic crap came from independent record companies?
Many,many companies popped up and produced many successful artists as well as also rans.
Big music industry,not to be left out of this slice of pie,started buying up the indies with their stables of artists only to weed out what they wanted and trashed the rest.
Eventually the artists they kept,just turned into the plastic music makers like they had previously.Instead of turning crap to gold,they turned gold to crap in order to turn a profit and eliminate competition.
This sounds like exactly the same thing.
If Gates and Co. crossed a burning desert w/o water,I still wouldn't sell them a $100 drop of piss to quench their thirst.How about you?
*Repent!Quit Your Job!Slack Off!The World Ends Tomorrow and You May Die!
If you don't or can't compete with the market buy them out? This would be a different strategy for M$ and I'm not sure how likely it is. It seems more likely they'll buy companies that could enhance their crap rather then directly compete with it. However, If they do begin to buy up real rivals to their OS/office products then we'll probably find out later then sooner how much support for the antitrust laws their is when dealing with Big buisness. Let's look at the facts, Linux and open source etc represent the first real threat to M$ dominance in what 12-15 years? I suppose you could include Google but their a more sinister threat since M$ has no way of controling the internet (not that they haven't tried; netscape anyone?). This may get interesting.
They recently purchased Tellme, which is a big open-standards promoter (VXML+ECMAScript) and open-source user (Linux, Apache, MySQL, Perl), which they've integrated with proprietary speech-recognition software.
Just because he said they're looking into purchasing OSS oriented companies doesn't mean that he doesn't think Linux is a cancer. Something that has been posted here all too often, OSS != Linux. Sure, Linux is OSS, but OSS is not Linux.[/rant]
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
This is similar principal that Oracle uses, if you can't get the market share then buy the company that owns that market share. Microsoft is copying Oracle at their own game. But Microsoft has more money than Oracle but I would like to see companies like BEA say "Put it where the sun don't shine". I just wish more companies where like that.
Wow, M'softies. When was the day, when you decided, "Computer programming is boring. I want to get into the acquisition market."?
Remember when you were an engineer, and laughed at the MBAs? Are you really assimilating, or did they assimilate you?
As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
Only problem with your theory is that Microsoft is a convicted monopolist. There would be an amazing number of regulatory hurdles it would have to jump through even to think about buying a company that makes a competing OS.
I don't think M$ buying a Linux company is the end of FLOSS. In fact FLOSS will take off like a bullet should M$ so that. It would validate what most truly technically astute already know, Linux is a better OS, and unquestionably as a server.
I wonder how much open source, likely heavily modified open source broken just enough not to work with others is already in Windows anyway. Given protocols/services like SMTP, IMAP, HTTP, POP3, MIT Kerberos, LDAP, XML libraries, PNG, on and on are used by Windows. One can bet they didn't "clean room" their development. Because Redmond has the same problem as anyone else, finding competence.
So buying Red Hat or Novell would make sense.
I could look 'em straight in the eye! Them and my banker. Failing that, I could look at you straight thru a webcam, from the Bahamas...
If Microsoft would purchase Mandriva . . .
. . . then my stock might be worth something.
Besides, it could be leveraged into a formidable opponent of Red Hat. I think that Microsoft might want to ruin Red Hat rather than buy them out and close them down. That would send a "message" that Ballmer could go screaming crazy over.
And don't forget, Slashdot-o-philes: at that level it's all about the money, turning any FOSS company into the whores they all can be. Then they'll have the money to pursue their ideology unfettered. Just look to Slashdot as an example . . .
Dear world,
I'd be more inclined to believe Microsoft intent would be to acquire and then shutdown the company. Well, they'd perhaps instead simply stop company sponsored development. Sure, even though the community could continue developing the product, how many products would live on without the support of the company original built around it? Microsoft has the cash to do this.
Later,
Slashdot Junky
.
Landfill Mining Co.
Managing the (Un)natural Resources of Tomorrow
While I know that a lot of folks want to hold up the ATT model as being similar, it is not even close. After ATT was broken up, all that "ATT" had was bell labs and long distance. ATT then divested Bell Labs. IOW, ATT was not only a fraction of its size, but all the other players were about == size. How many other players? Nearly all of the baby bells, MCI, Sprint, Worldcom, etc. IOW, there was a LOAD of comeptition. In addition, all of the mergers WERE checked over closely. If MS starts buying major Linux companies (Novell, redhat, etc), there will be major issues.
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
If the staff/programmers can be bought, it would be much cheaper to simply pay the $1m upfront to a few key developers and hire them away from the open source company, rather than go through the process of acquiring the company for a price, and then paying the $1m bonus on top of that.
I think the key question is simply whether the key OSS people can be bought by Microsoft. If they can, the mechanics shouldn't matter much. If they can't, no amount of money is going to make an acquisition work. I think Ballmer is just talking about this to keep the stock price up.
Build a man a fire, he's warm for one night. Set him on fire, and he's warm for the rest of his life.
The most recent version will remain debugged and maintained by the interested parties using it already.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
I think Mandriva is a prime target for Microsoft acquisition. They are well-known within the community. Previously producers of the flagship Mandrake desktop distro, they have been eclipsed by the rising star of Ubuntu. Financially, they've been on rocky ground.
I wouldn't be surprised if there were a few disgruntled staff around, either from the former Conectiva, former Lycorix, or former Mandrake itself, that would drool at the prospect of being snapped up by a huge company, with tons of benefits. The prestige of being part of a transnational company, and being able to participate in in-house Special High Intensity Training for elite developers, would probably set their careers on the fast track for the rest of their lives. Who wouldn't want that?
That's not to say that Francois Bancilhon should turn down an offer by MS, but we'll have to take steps to pass on the torch for Mandriva Linux after they're acquired, publishing the source for the in-house tools (gurpmi, diskdrake, etc.), getting meeting minutes, identifying enthusiastic hackers who are willing to take up the torch and working with them prior to the actual MS acquisition, etc. They need to establish a name that people will equate with Mandriva (since the trademark Mandriva itself will be owned by Microsoft afterward), the way everyone knows CentOS is really RedHat but with a different group supporting it. This way, the momentum will carry on.
404555974007725459910684486621289147856453481154 in hex is "You sank my Battleship?"
[GPG key in journal]
"What does Microsoft care about changing the license? Do you not realize that first and foremost, Microsoft is likely to just terminate the project?"
And from the perspective of an OSS dev company, how would that be a bad thing? MS just paid you a boatload of money and disbanded your company. You take that boatload of money and make a new company doing exactly what it did before, except now you're better funded.
Unless something in the principals' contracts prohibited them from doing that, in which case they were pretty stupid to agree to those terms in the first place. The only way it makes sense to agree to such terms if the objective is to take the money, move to Belize and sit on the beach for the rest of your life having drinks in coconuts with umbrelllas in them.
Of course I am always willing to work with other companies, friendly competition, deals that are mutually beneficial, etc. I will not limit myself or my future businesses to a single supplier though.
My businesses will also use Linux on all computers internally, right now I am helping people with their computer problems in my spare time.
... can only be bought out by Microsoft - out of existence eventually, that is.
As we all know, this would not be a monetary problem for MS, and maybe MS would consider such a "get them out of the way" option to be of much higher value than the "keep them running to whatever purpose" strategy.
Grab them, mine their assets (most likely, good bits of software heavily in use in the Open Source universe), change the licences of all their software, especially the GPL ones, to "as-closed-as-can-be" and then, shut them down.
I think it's gonna be vendors like StillSecure, who got called out earlier this year for their loose interpretation of the GPL. From MS perspective, this is a perfect way to claim "we have the advantages of OsS and the added benefit of our propietary layer," and get more vendor penetration. It's like Apple and FreeBSD, except with a few added layers of business entities, lots more bad management, and about as many marketing lies about their support for OsS.
Maybe but that's what is called "being in maintenance mode" and is the beginning of the end for any software project.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Belize? No, it's called the Microsoft Research Lab and they do this kind of thing all the time. There's non-compete clauses and other ways to prevent the developers from working on anything related for a few years if they don't retire to MS-RL for a pre-determined number of years.
Oh, and about how good it is to pay off these developers so they can start another project, well, they just burned a whole lot of customers who relied on the original project and must now dump it because Microsoft terminated it. Puts a nice sour taste in their mouths and will help keep them going with FOSS for many many years to follow.
I've said it in another post, the only defense from this is to have projects with a diverse and distributed developer base( not everyone in one company ) and/or angeles who fork the project and fund a good number of developers to pick up the project and move it forward while making sure they are involved and committed to the project.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
Well, yeah. But I think PHP could certainly do with quite a bit of time in maintenance, for instance ... the example I was thinking of was Wikimedia and PHP. MediaWiki is unlikely to be rewritten in anything else any time soon - MediaWiki syntax is mathematically impossible to put into EBNF, and the definition is actually the code of parser.php. Multiply that by all the organisations and projects that use PHP, and you have something like the way Apache formed from maintenance on NCSAhttpd.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
They will be purchased and either absorbed and put into proprietary projects, or shut down by MS.
General Motors and electric streetcars.
My truck is like a series of tubes.
the only defense from this is to have projects with a diverse and distributed developer base( not everyone in one company ) and/or angeles who fork the project and fund a good number of developers to pick up the project and move it forward while making sure they are involved and committed to the project.
Which brings to my mind the idea that Microsoft could purchase hAndover.net or VAwhatever, or whatever they're now calling the parent company of Slashdot and Sourceforge. Think about it. If Microsoft bought Sourceforge, they could shut down the 'project website' and distribution network of a huge quantity of Open Source projects. I have always felt nervous about the whole Sourceforge 'bring your projects over here so it's all centrally located and centrally vulnerable' approach that the SourceForge/VAwhatever folks have encouraged.
Microsoft says legacy (serial/parallel) ports are bad. They don't obfuscate the hardware enough.
"Well, yeah. But I think PHP could certainly do with quite a bit of time in maintenance..."
Good one. While I believe there would be a few cases where such events occurred and the project only stalled for a short period of a few years, I believe the net effect would be that this is the exception, not the rule.
If Microsoft went out and started 'attacking' a couple dozen open source projects annually by purchasing up companies behind said projects and effectively shut them off. I don't see a survival rating above 1:12 without some kind of outside help. IMO.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
but in that case, the purchase wouldn't be instant and sourceforge is FOSS isn't it? Also, they use SVN for SCM and so that means projects could be moved out of sourceforge.net and over to another location. If it's tied to proprietary software in any way then yes, this is a threat.
Good point though.
LoB
"Anyone who stands out in the middle of a road looks like roadkill to me." --Linus
If you think the EU would allow that, you are sorely mistaken.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Would buying out these companies do them any good though? Many of their customers and employees would simply go elsewhere. New top distros would pop up almost instantly and as those fleeing customers and employees moved to them all the value in what Microsoft could buy would have gone with them. It's really a pointless exercise unless Microsoft can first convince the community that they aren't the enemy. The only real way to do that is to stop making threats and to donate more code, open more specs, and grant 100% free use of their patents.
I think Microsoft can benefit from open souce and that they can become a good member of the community but I'm not sure they can do it without a major changing of the guard amongst their upper management. I don't think it'll really happen until open source starts to really weaken their position and certain people decide to retire.
At what price learning? At what cost wisdom? The price is a man's peace of mind, and the cost is his life.
Very few people have more reason to be upset with Microsoft than I do, but you have to give them credit where they have earned it.
Yes, Microsoft has been pretty reprehensible in the past; I know, I was there and I was on the front lines for a lot of it. That was then. Here and now, if you define open source a bit more generically; as facilitating the ability to create open source products as well as creating open source products yourself, Microsoft has make a valid and considerable effort to aid the community.
Consider their "Express" (free) editions of Visual Studio, which have done more to allow open source to work on Windows effectively than almost anyone. For example, the most common open source product is the Windows Version of the Apache Foundations httpd server; its compiled using Visual Studio C++.
Thing is, the power of these "free" versions of Visual Studio is enough that a large open source community COULD evolve around them, were it not Microsoft offering them. (Well, and MS got some usability experts to fix the VS user interface, Eclipse is SO much superior) These aren't "toy" versions, you can produce quite a bit of good software with them.
Microsoft really wants that to happen, Google is not only eating their lunch with it's mindshare, it's eating their access to talent and their momentum as a company.
Which means that Google has proven the open source model works, albeit in a way that nobody really expected. It's the people, the community that counts, not whether the code is free (as in beer or speech), most open source users never look at internals, let alone modify them. (To be honest, thats just as well. I DO look at internals, and I am constantly amazed that O'Reilley managed to find enough "beautiful code" to write a book about it.)
Microsofts best strategy right now is to build an open source community around a set of products/infrastructure they buy, and use that to penetrate the Enterprise market. As a legitimate initiative, not an "embrace and extinguish" tactic.
Open Source has made it's point (sorta) to the industry, IBM, Oracle and Microsoft all offer "free" versions of their databases, due solely to the need to combat MySQL's mindshare. Heck, Oracle 10g Express is far better and more usable than regular Oracle. )90 % of Oracles problems in the marketplace can be traced to the confusing istallation procedures) The free version of those databases aren't particularly crippled, they are adequate for any purpose that might occur in a small or medium sized business. A large business would not go with the free products anyways, it would prefer to pay for a product from a large company, just to minimize it's exposure to risk.
By now, Microsoft understands that can't trash open source (it's tried and failed) but also that it can use the movement to make money. It is not going to cost them money or future profits, companies of the size Microsoft wants to bother dealing with aren't going to risk their business with small company support that is common among open source. Consider IBM, for example, their open source and "developerworks" initiatives played a major role in why Websphere dominates in the large enterprise market.
Like it or not, Microsoft represent a part of the IT universe. If they are willing to toss some resources into the community, I can't see how it would be contrary to the open source values in accepting them, i am old enough to remember when IBM was as reviled as Microsoft. Open source is supposed to be a meritocracy, after all. How can we make that claim if we restrict some companies from competing on the basis of merit alone?
While it was not free software, the author did give the source code for all its products (which are very interesting btw).
:(
Then, Microsoft bought them and source distribution stopped
Does no one remember Hotmail's troubles trying to dogfood after being borged?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hotmail#Transition_over_to_MSN
What does this button d$#%* NO CARRIER
How do you terminate the project?
Say MS buys out SugarCRM. Microsoft then "terminates" the project, i.e., changes the license as has been mentioned elsewhere, tells the devs to stop working on it, stops people from using the trademarks belonging to SugarCRM. Microsoft will have to then sack the devs, or employ them elsewhere in MS, or pay them to sit around eating icecream or something. Some of them will quit anyway.
Then what? The source is out there and can't be revoked. The sacked/quit devs are free to pick up the code and do what they want with it. They can't use SugarCRM trademarks, so they can call it LOLCRM or something. Assuming it's GPL type source they can develop a product based on the code, or extend the code directly, so long as they make their code available etc etc etc.
How has Microsoft terminated anything?
I am government man, come from the government. The government has sent me. -- G.I.R.