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Microsoft's New Leaf On Interoperability
A large number of readers are submitting the news that Microsoft has made a major announcement about interoperating with others including specifically the FOSS world. The impetus is the ongoing EU antitrust case against Microsoft. The announcement comes in the context of the release of 30,000 pages of API documentation for Microsoft Vista, Windows Server 2008, SQL Server 2008, Office 2007, Exchange Server 2007 and Office SharePoint Server 2007 — and a listing of patents that apply to these technologies, and a pledge not to sue open source developers who use the APIs. InfoWorld summarizes by saying that Microsoft "promised greater transparency in its development and business practices." Fortune is blunter, saying "Microsoft declares truce in open source war." Here's Microsoft's FAQ on the open source interop initiative.
What is a "pledge?" Is it anything like a legally binding agreement, or is it like when you promise to do something while looking at a flag?
Step into a huge movement. Don't Tread In Me.
I believe it's called "Rope a dope" :
I'll even link it for you : Google rope a dope"
"Rope-a-dope is also commonly used to describe strategies in areas other than boxing, where one party purposely puts itself in what appears to be a losing position, and then becomes the eventual victor. Lying on the ropes had been, and still is, considered a "sin" in boxing, exposing a fighter to punishment because he cannot move away from his opponent."
I can assure you, the work we're doing to comply with the EU regulations is *not* minimal.
While I can't really opine on the EU's regulations themselves for various reasons, I've been talking with people who are directly affected by them, and the amount of work we're doing to accommodate the EU is astronomical. About a third of our developer workforce has basically lost 6 months or more of time to write documentation on things that range from current file formats, to things that aren't even current technologies anymore.
That's an astronomical amount of man hours for it to be 'minimal compliance'. We're producing the documentation we're required to produce, at great expense to us. I can't comment on other areas we're being regulated in, however, but it's probably going to take us years to make up the amount of time we've lost in revenue from Europe.
I'd say (in my own opinion) that the EU regulations have basically turned Europe into a loss leader for us for the next several years. I'm not even convinced that the documentation is going to actually be useful to anyone (See Joel Spolsky's commentary on the matter, for instance, and he helped write that code!)
As a former Microsoft employee (worked on dev tools the entire time), I speak from personal experience when I say I never encountered a problem accessing any internet site from inside Microsoft's Redmond campus. The most annoying thing MS's IT department did was push down various updates to your machine and automatically reboot your machine after displaying a box for abot 30 minutes, but since we (at least in product development) were all admins on our box it wasn't difficult to repeatedly kill all of their processes on start-up so you could safely run long series of tests without worrying about some UI popping up to interfere with the tests or the machine being rebooted in the middle of the run.
Software Inventor
You would be in the minority then... I am often hesitant to mention that I worked for Microsoft for seven years. Not because I ever did anything I'm ashamed of (I wrote C++ compiler ISO/ANSI compliance code, fergawds sake), but because people get so damned uppity and assume that I'm either (a) some idiot who can't write code worth a damn, or (b) some kind of evil genius out to dominate the world through the software industry. How I can simultaneously be a bumbling incompetent and an evil genius is somewhat baffling to me, but there you have it -- people are irrational, and when you threaten their religion (FOSS, to some), they get more so.
FOSS advocates are human, and it's human nature to paint your opponent as absolutely evil, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever. It's a mistake, and a sign of immaturity, but it's human.
So mostly these days, as I work on Linux-based Java projects, I just tell people that I worked for a number of years at a "major software company in the Northwest." That's true enough...
Standards committee: I'm actually applying to join like 4 relevant to my job. I really look forward to it both in terms of increasing my knowledge and getting some real world insight. However, no two standards committees are alike. I don't think I'd be able to relate the ones I want to join (not computer related) versus computer related and/or technical.
I do understand the cost saving aspects, but if the bar is so low for compliance you raise it. Of course the vendors groan at that too. I agree usually the large companies see the light and do well better than compliance, but this is Microsoft. You have to fundamentally change your business view in such a situation. They have essentially defined their own business model and quality is not a part of their equation.
Have you worked on a standards committee? I don't mean that as an insult, but please clarify so that I can understand better what I am missing either partially or completely.
About your motherboard, I am moderately sympathetic I suppose, but what is stopping you from switching motherboards? It's not like they're the most expensive part of a PC system, even for a quality mobo. I believe it's called "influencing with your dollar", aka taking your business away from the non-compliant company and giving it to the compliant one...of course being a consumer in and of itself sucks all the same
What would be a truly sincere support of interoperability and open standards? For one, full support of OpenDocument.
I just heard Tom Robertson, Microsoft's GM of Interoperability and something else, say that Windows is already "a totally open platform" as evidenced by the large number of applications that currently run on Windows. What a joke.
Now you take 25 years of this strategy, wrapping whatever feature you need inside an API that's responsible for accomplishing a task as fast as possible (which probably uses half a dozen older APIs of the same sort), and you've got what appears to be a complete mess (and is, if you're trying to implement a compatible product from scratch). New features are added that make Office files essentially mini file systems to facilitate embedding each format inside of every other format, and things get even worse. But internally, the APIs make sense, perform well and allow developers to implement new features with a minimal amount of pain.
Microsoft aren't the only ones who do this. Java, for example, has built-in serialization of objects to a format that would be very difficult to work with when you don't have the JVM at your disposal and, even then, you need the actual classes that were used to produce the serialized format in the first place in order to make things really simple. But the end result is a binary format that is fast to read/write from/to, is a reasonably-compact representation of the data and is dead-simple for a developer to use when the proper tools are available to him/her.
Sun is partway down a similar path and Apple keeps backtracking.
If Microsoft starts now (and doesn't screw up along the way) they can probably be considered a good guy by the FOSS community some time around 2040 or so.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
.... are taken by Ballmer and Gates.
All the nice chaps at MS are not providing direction to the company in the ways we know (which include breaking the law btw).
Most people would have problems making business with somebody they know is dishonest, but in Slashdot there is always a MS apologist willing to overlook a company with a record littered with illegal, immoral and abusive business practices.
You should keep in mind that people relate to MS as a monolith, all those nice chaps in MS just follow orders from the top brass, which is intent in dominating the industry by underhanded means if necessary.
IANAL but write like a drunk one.
Sorry, I respectfully disagree.
I think the environment has changed to the point where the 'tipping point' you describe above will be a lot harder to achieve. Back in the mid 90s not every office worker had their own computer, email account and NETWORK ACCESS (nevermind internet). If they had a computer it was not uncommon for it to be used as a glorified typewriter and calculator. Also it was normal NOT to have a computer at home.
Now everyone has a windows PC and lives off IE/word/excel/outlook. The barrier to entry so to speak has been raised many bars higher. How many non geeks do you know who would be willing to learn a new OS? Heck people don't even want to use firefox as they're too used to cllicking on the IE icon.
Also back in the mid 90s, if they wanted to build a home domain/network environment, most geeks had few other options except for NT unless they could afford a unix server at home. And NT was poor. Now the obvious option is linux, which is free, very heavily documented, highly reliable and can be made to do everything bar make coffee (pretty sure someone's getting around to that too!)
Hence IMHO you are kinda right if you substitute mac for linux - what you describe above has been one of the big reasons for linux taking over the server space. But I still disagree on the desktop side.
Also like the below poster mentions, linux is the weapon of choice amongst the geek elite.
I'm not suggesting for a moment that macs can't regain their dominant status (market share wise) but I don't think it will primarily be driven by the top down method you describe.
disclaimer: typing this from my macbook, with a fedora box as samba/squid/torrentflux+apache/ssh backend server, and seriously thinking about a hackintosh when I build my next desktop