How Open Source Has Influenced Windows Server 2008

willdavid writes to tell us that Sam Ramji over at Port25 has a nice succinct list of the major open source principles that have been used while developing Windows Server 2008. "Overall, we've learned and continue to learn from open source development principles. These are making their way into the mindset, development practices, and ultimately into the products we bring to market. I've focused here on 'what Microsoft has learned from Open Source' - and ironically, I've agreed to do a panel at OSBC on 3/25 with Jim Zemlin of the Linux Foundation on 'what Open Source can learn from Microsoft'. As all of the different organizations in IT continue to evolve, we'll learn from each others' best practices and make increasingly better software. As in science, this incremental improvement will move all of us forward."

Comments

Cue Henry Spencer quote

[DrYak]

yeah, they've learned all kinds of stuff from Open Source.

As Henry Spencer has said (and also as quoted by some commentators on the original page) :

Those who do not understand Unix are condemned to reinvent it, poorly.

Microsoft just fails to understand what actually makes the success of Linux and F/LOSS, and thus they are only ble to pull out pale copy of what they think they've seen in order to fill such PR announcements.

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As an example, their entry about "Modular architectures" is almost funny if not tragic, citing OpenOffice.org and Mozilla Firefox as examples (which are actually criticized by the Linux community sometimes for being too bloated). What makes *nices systems cool isn't the ability to stuff plugins into big apps, what makes them cool is the "Unix way" : programs that just do 1 thing but do it well. Modularity is about all these small single-function programs and all those libraries (for ex.: pattern finding, on-the-fly compression, conversion filters, multimedia processing, etc) that can be freely played with by the user and assembled into more complex never-intended-for-this-usage construction, which forms the basis for huge application like those cited above. Application like VLC aren't an example of modularity, but an example of what modularity enables by putting together a bunch of functions already provided by libraries.

Also the ultimate advantage of F/LOSS is about freedom and the feeling that the software you have belongs to you. Something that is completely un-achievable with Microsoft style softwares.