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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."
Wait, wait...how to release commercial software on par with an untested, alpha Linux flavor and have all their customers switch back to an old version?
Or maybe how to give consumers what they "want"?
Isn't their philosophy to try to take ownership of anything that threatens their business?
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure dome decree
So it is a listing of things NOT to do in an OS.
.. about learning anything from Microsoft. They're probably just going to sue you for it.
-Microsoft Cube is hailing us, Captain! ...
-Bring it up on the main screen.
We are Microsoft. Resistance is futile. Prepare to be Embraced.
If you don't know what AltaVista is (was), get off my lawn.
...open source development principles?
What are those, exactly? I'll bet he couldn't name them. I'll bet no one can. It's a bazaar, not a cathedral!
- The Kessel run is for nerf herders. I can circumnavigate the entire Central Finite Curve in a lot less than 12 parse
Maybe they will release more specs to their API so we can make our own damn Windows OS, with hookers and blackjack, forget the hookers and and backjack, forget the whole damned thing!
Tsukasa: All I really want, is to be left alone...
Open standards, choice of platform, no vendor lock-in, release-early-release-often, user-modifiable programs, ability to fork... yeah, they've learned all kinds of stuff from Open Source.
Thomas Galvin
You can find these wherever you see participation at scale - and often a rearchitecture to a more modular system precedes expanded participation. Great examples of this are Firefox, OpenOffice, and X11 - from both the historical rearchitecture and the increased participation that resulted. The Apache HTTP server and APR are good examples that have been modular for as long as I can recall. OpenOffice? Modular? Maybe OOo is developed in a modular way, but the end result is hardly anything but modular. In fact, it's quite monolithic -- when you start OpenOffice Writer, you also start OpenOffice Calc, Base, Draw, Impress, etc. Programming language agnostic
A given project uses a consistent language, but there are no rules on what languages are in scope or out of scope. Being open to more languages means opportunity to attract more developers - the diversity of PHP/Perl/Python/Java has been a core driver in the success of a number of projects including Linux. Open source projects are 'programming language agnostic' because they used public, published and open interfaces. They follow standards. The reason a the Linux kernel build process can be a mixture of bash, Python, Perl, awk, etc. is that all of these things can connect together using pipes and whatnot. The reason you can write GNOME applications in almost any programming language is that the APIs are completely open. The reason why AbiWord and KWord can read Open Document Text files is that that spec is completely open and free of royalties, patents, etc. Feedback-driven development
The "power user" as product manager is a powerful shift in how to build and tune software - and this class of users includes developers who are not committing code back, but instead submitting CRs and defects - resulting in a product that better fits its end users. Huh? How are CRs the same as accepting code patches? Open Source development differs in that these "power users" as he calls them can make their own changes and, if necessary, fork off their project to offer a competing or even a completely different project. Built-for-purpose systems
frequently seen in applications of Linux, the ability to build a system that has just what is needed to fulfill its role and nothing else (think of highly customizable distributions like Gentoo or BusyBox, as well as fully custom deployments). Uhhhh....BusyBox is not a "distribution" and cannot really be compared to Gentoo except that, yes, the program (as in single program, hence, not a distribution) is cutomizable through the use of custom build options. Sysadmins who write code
ability of a skilled system administrator to write the "last mile" code means that they can make a technology work in their particular environment efficiently and often provide good feedback to developers. This is so fundamental to Unix and Linux environments that most sysadmins are competent programmers. Unix sysadmins are generally NOT competent programmers. We're lazy schmucks who whip up quick-and-dirty scripts to accomplish tedious and boring tasks out of sheer laziness. And then we call it 'enhancing productivity' in an attempt to get a raise.
Whether the standard is something from the IETF or W3C, or simply the implementation code itself, where these are used projects are more successful (think of Asterisk and IAX2) and attract a larger ecosystem of software around them. Real open standards are developed by the community at large through agreement, not by a monopoly who can change the "standard" at anytime without notice.
My blog
Hmm interesting...
If you just say it's great you can get more of the market.
If you say you innovate people believe you.
If you name your product close to the more popular true standard you can confuse the PHBs into paying you money instead.
If the competition is winning tell everyone your competitor is unfair to competition.
If people like a bad practice, and it's yours, then keep doing it.
There more money in prolonging the problem then just putting out a solution.
If you can convince a big bux company to buy your product it is a good vehicle for the advertising/PR department.
No mater how much you neglect your customers' previous purchases, privacy and security, you can still keep them buying your products.
The problem with MSFT is not that they don't know these things. They do. But the internal power structure in MSFT is so driven by "if the playing field is level, we will lose" cowards. So they still do things that was ok when they held a 20% share against Word Perfect and 10% (by revenue) share against unix and mainframe giants, back in the late 80 and early 90s. They got lots of money and grew too fat and have too many layers of management. So they go and hire this dogbert to tell them what they already know.
sed -e 's/Chuck Norris/Rajnikant/g' joke > fact
...does not make you a chicken.
Tyler Durden (1999)
That's just my POV... no more, no less.
Open Source has learned how a company can abuse their position, how a company can be a monopoly and make billions and then influence those who are elected into office to protect us. Those billions go a long way to influencing the lawmakers to push aside any attempt to make a better cheaper product.
It is ludicrous to think that a product that can be made cheaper and better should be put asunder because some powerful monopoly can influence the powers that be. There's no socialistic tendencies there. No communistic tendencies. It is pure capitalism that is being thwarted by Microsoft's practices. Microsoft is a bully, an entity that has one goal and that is to rake in all the money while destroying the competition and they are doing that with their monopoly.
Your privacy is being violated hundreds of millions of times a day by Microsoft with WGA/WGN and Vista's equivalent. They are able to get away with it because they don't take competition seriously because they don't have to. Would you go out and pay $2000 for a TV from Best Buy and then allow Best Buy to enter your home to verify that you didn't actually receive stolen property? What if they want to do that every week or every month (inspect your home for stolen goods)? What if they say that they'll do this with a hidden camera? Would you permit it? Say you buy frequently form Walmart. Would you permit Walmart to enter your home to inspect your property to prove you didn't steal it from the store? I think not. You wouldn't let your neighbor enter your home upon accusations that you stole something from him. You wouldn't let the police enter your home even if the neighbor filed a complaint.
What the open source community practices has learned is that Microsoft is the type of entity that uses "Embrace, Extend, Extinguish" tactic to kill solid technology and those companies trying to bring them to market. The open source community has learned that Microsoft has threatened every Linux user with 235 alleged patents claiming everyone will have a price to pay to Microsoft, without Microsoft stating specifically what is being violated. This is like an oil company stating that they are going to sue car owners for using gasoline from one of their competitors because their competitor may have allegedly use some of the IP in the gas refining process. Then they threaten the car manufacturers or large companies that use that same gasoline with lawsuits if they don't stop using the competitors gasoline. Then they refuse to say which competitors and they refuse to say which IP has been violated. BTW, that IP was probably stolen by them to begin with.
We've learned from Microsoft that they will steal IP from small entities and when caught will ignore those companies request to have Microsoft pay up. Z4 Technologies is one of those companies. In this case Microsoft was contacted about their use of the IP developed by this firm for the purpose of over the internet product activation. According to the final ruling which went in favor of Z4 Microsoft knew they were in violation of the IP of Z4 and they continued to use it. During the trial they flooded the court and Z4 with paperwork in hopes of covering it up. The day before the trial began Z4 found the evidence. Z4 won the trial and were granted approximately $100 million. In the ruling the Judge noted numerous acts of misconduct on Microsoft's part and though he could have awarded 3 times the amount he only awarded an additional $25 million in special damages (which is no small amount by any measure). The Judge also noted that Microsoft had participated in these acts because they believe that Z4 was to small and to weak to defend their own IP. Upon appeal Microsoft lost with the Judge also noting the numerous acts of misconduct. With the latest appeal of this Microsoft lost that as well with all awards in tact.
But what you must understand from this is that Microsoft stole the IP of Z4 which Microsoft used to keep you from stealing their IP. So, they stole the technology
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
As Henry Spencer has said (and also as quoted by some commentators on the original page)
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.
----
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
He/they have learned something from Open Source software and principles.
It may not have been what you wanted them to learn, though. Frankly, a Microsoft may (metaphorically) buy things at your church bake sale or play basketball with your kids, but they're never going to convert to your religion.
Well this is interesting, whenever Open Source tries to learn from Microsoft Steve 'rabid-monkey-man' Ballmer starts throwing around software/idea patent threats.
If this is an incremental process that can move us all forward, how about Microsoft offer up their patents to the OSDL Patent Commons? Or just allow Free/Open Source software developers to work without threat of being sued? Oh yeah, they'd rather reserve the right to sue anyone who dares to even look at their markets.
I'm going to transform myself into a mighty hawk. Either that or I'll just go and work at Dixons, haven't decided yet.
Not all developers can contribute equal value to your project, however. One of the big benefits to open source is that your developer base and your user base coincide a lot more. I wouldn't care to estimate the odds that if one customer wants a feature badly enough to code it, somebody else wants it badly enough to switch to your product for it, but they seem pretty good for something that's free.
Bottom line is that the OSS model will surpass the closed source model in time. It has no choice but to do that. Open cooperative community development has no choice but to meet and exceed that of the closed source model due primarily in that it is very evolutionary. The OSS industry will update faster (bug fixes and new features) than the closed source with the typical 18 month to 5 year product cycle of the closed source. Given time the OSS industry will create more useful features and modify those features over and over long before equivalent features will be available in the closed source market. It is like an organism that evolves more rapidly vs an organism that evolves in huge spurts with larger time intervals in-between. The organism with the shorter evolutionary steps has a greater possibility of finding flaws, correcting them, and creating new features and testing those.
Open source by its very nature will overcome monolithic development cycles of closed source, given enough time. Closed source doesn't have the time and can't experiment much. Open source has all the time in the world.
Let's also keep in mind that 1) Microsoft is a finite entity with limited number of developers and thus a limited number of ideas, where only so many of those limited ideas will pay off (this is why they steal everyone else's ideas). 2) The Open Source community has the resources of the community as it exists "world-wide" and thus has a significantly greater chance of coming up with new and unique ideas. 3) Some ideas are just obvious and that is why you see duplicity of ideas in each platform. These ideas tho can be extended and modified faster due to Open Source's ability to have more minds looking at the product and submitting coding ideas.
If any of you read the blogs of the ex-Microsofties that left just prior to or just after the Vista release you can see clearly that each developer in the Microsoft community is a microbe that has limited access to the brain and does what they are told even if the process is to redo and undo and redo the same thing again and again. This is certain to result in significant slow downs and even failures (as we have seen with Vista).
The Open Source model will succeed because it is designed to succeed whereas closed source practices dictated by a criminal monopolist to developers using their platform tools, etc., will result in systemic failure and their ultimate demise. How long will it take? It doesn't matter because the open source community has the time and the manpower.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
Microsoft used to contact companies during the 80s that were developing products. The ideas that were coming out were quite incredible. Pen computing was one of them. It was reported over and over again that Microsoft would ask for a presentation of the ideas of a given company's product and then a few months later announce that they were adding this or that feature into Windows. Why would anyone who was going after venture capital to bring a product to market survive with the dominant criminal monopolist announcing competing technologies to be incorporated into the OS? In the 80s this scenario played out endlessly.
This is what Microsoft did to pen computing. Do we have pen computing today? No. Because Microsoft announced pen windows. Pen computing died. Then so went pen windows.
Were some of these companies responsible for their actions? Absolutely. They helped their own demise. The lesson learned from Microsoft is not to demonstrate your product to them for they will steal the ideas, just as they are stealing the ideas of the open source community under the guise of learning from them and teaching back. Microsoft will not do anything for free.
Apple showed Microsoft their version of the Mac prior to the official release. They wanted Microsoft to develop their word processor and spreadsheet for it. Microsoft did that, but they also took all the ideas and made Windows. When confronted Gates simply slapped Jobs in the face telling him to grow up. What was Jobs to do? His product demanded applications and Microsoft was a leading developer, even though they'd purchased their Macintosh word and excel programs from other companies.
With open source it is still subject to the stealing of technological ideas from a closed source vendor but that's part of the benefit. Open Source benefits by the exposure of companies such as Microsoft stealing other's ideas instead of developing them themselves, which they seem nearly incapable of doing.
Essentially, Microsoft has created over the past 2 decades the air of distrust due to outright theft and manipulative practices that ultimately were deemed illegal by the court system.
What is best is that the open source community continue it's uninfluenced progress toward the time when all software is developed in the same manner.
You can lead a man with reason but you can't make him think.
So when is microsoft going to stop bastardizing open standards? For instance, are there any plans to finally release specifications to microsoft's proprietary extensions to Kerberos? [and I don't mean the NDA bullshit microsoft tried to pull]. Or how about the ODF vs. MS OOXML debacle?
This is what microsoft will never "learn" because their business model depends on not learning it.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
- Dumbification of Linux: this is being done by Ubuntu & Kubuntu. And I'm not saying this as a negative thing, entry level Linux should be easy enough for just about anyone.
.NET, and create a version that add more functionality, features and 'cool stuff' and make sure anything that written on this version wont compile out-of-the box on VS from Microsoft.
.NET, SQL Server, and some other Microsofties in one place (and maintained properly). ... just my $0.02 ...
- Run a study on user-usability: OSS can hire or contract an established and well-known 'GUI usability' expert/company and let every top OSS products that directly used by the end user to consult to them.
- Embrace
- Ms. Exchange?
- More GUI for everything: Stop forcing us to edit some shady configuration file.
- Out of box Linux distro should be just like Windows': Just some basic programs (notepad, file manager, paint, etc.), but packed with more drivers for lots of stuff.
We don't need amaroK, MPlayer, tvtime, Gimp, and KDevelop out of the box just like we don't need Winamp, VLC, AFM2000, Photoshop and Delphi on Windows. Thanks to package managers, we can just click here and there, and have them available in a couple of minutes. Not having drivers, now that's a show-stopper.
- MSDN: Seriously.. we need MSDN-like website for Linux. Running around the web for some API, and stuff in Linux. While on the M$ side we can get everything from Win32,
It might well be that they learn (slowly, like the slowest of your "friends" in 1st grade), the lessons of open source.
But then, they will not pay. They _claim_ to care about "intellectual property". But only when a _laywer_ that can _sue_ them, they will _respect_ the lessons to be something of value.
So I will be glad when they are destroyed, once for all, and everybody else trying to _exploit_ others' work will have something to fear for.
I mean, Microsoft _invented_ the notion that you should be paid for the _same_ work over and over and over and over again. Only they profited from that. And if you are not a Microsoft shill, you will _have_ to agree that this was unethical.
Now they "learn" from Open Source? Well, even if they do, do they compensate those who taught them something?
I guess not. So this planet will be better off if Microsoft dies a _violent_ death, discouraging all those parasites out there, trying to behave like Microsoft, too.