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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?"
The only reason i could think of is to buy some companies and extinguish them.
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Well, sure, most probably: it's what Microsoft Does(tm). However, it won't change anything for versions previously released under real open-source licenses. It's called a "fork".
However, will users follow microsoft's versions, or the free forked versions? That's the interesting question that only time will tell.
Misleading titles? Inflammatory blurbs? Keep in mind that Slashdot is a tabloid.
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.
They are under no obligation to link to the modifications as the application is used INTERNALLY.
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;
The truth is that companies must adhere to their mission statements or they face the possibility of a civil tort.
Yes, most mission statements include maximization of profit or somesuch, but it's mistaken (very mistaken) to believe that public companies can only take actions that are intended to maximize shareholder profits.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
They were open source, and they sold up to MS. Now their code is being slowly neutered. In another year or two their really useful utilities (FileMon, RegMon, et al) will either be history or blind to accesses to 'sensitive' information.
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First of all they were never truly open source. They released the source code to their command line apps, but not the cool gui ones. Thats not to say the source code wasn't useful, but it was more of a learning tool than anything, and they were not fostering community development. Their apps continue to improve I'm not a full time windows admin so I haven't noticed any reduced functionality. Feel free to point out specific examples.
What we lost from sysinternals getting acquired was we no longer have an independent person dedicated to figuring out the internals of the windows kernel and core api. He lost editorial control of himself. We also lost the source to the command line utilities, but copies of it exist, so we lose potential new source code. We also lose the potential of Mark writing articles where he proves how to do odd things like run windows without lsass.exe.
--- Justin Dearing http://www.justaprogrammer.net/ We're just programmers.