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Linux Foundation - We'd Love to Work with Microsoft
johnno writes "In an interview with the Australian site pc world Jim Zemlin, the Linux Foundation's executive director, talks about the desire to interoperate with Microsoft and discusses the desktop outlook for Linux. He answers questions on the kind of legal protection Linux requires, whether anything ever come of the Microsoft protest that there's Linux code that they have patented, as well as Linux penetration on desktops and breaking Microsoft's stranglehold on the market. He also discusses Microsoft's recent move to open up their documentation, and why they'd like to work with the Redmond giant — 'We'd like to have a place where developers can come and work on making Linux more effectively interoperate with Microsoft products. And we'd like to do that in the open-source way that's not tied to any specific marketing agreement, that's not tied to any specific contract, that is an open process that can be participated in by anyone in the community,' Zemlin says."
I realize that Microsoft is the 800 pound gorilla in the room, but it just sounds like giving in. Microsoft really hasn't shown any signs of innovation in a long time and my fear is that this would just turn into another chance for Microsoft to take a concept from the collaboration, implement it in their own way and claim it as their own. Remember what they did with TCP/IP early on? Made their own stack that didn't quiet work with anything else but said it wasn't their fault.
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- Douglas Adams
Yes, it is good to keep your friends close, and your enemies even closer.
The kind of interoperability they speak of is precisely the kind that Microsoft chooses, by both word and deed, to explicitly sabotage. Whether one looks at the Novell agreements, the "licensing" of api documentation, or the OSP in the OOXML, these are not acts of encouraging such interoperability but rather of blocking it by any means possible, or of trying to meet the "appearance" of interoperability from the perspective of outside regulators when forced to, but while deliberately and explicitly destroying the spirit and any actual realization of it.
I disagree. I don't think that the Linux community can count on any given company treating us as anything other than hostile.
Let me give you an example. Warcraft II vs. Stratagus.
There was a group of people that wanted to play Warcraft II on Linux, so they made tools to extract the data of the Warcraft II DOS CDs and use it on the hard disk to play Warcraft II. At first, this was called 'Freecraft', later called Stratagus that made significant advacements in Warcraft II including:
Support for 16 Players rather than just 8
Support for Human/Orc joint AI.
Support for TCP/IP
correcting several gameplay bugs and sound bugs
No CD Copy protection
Actual uses for the Runestone and the Dark Portal (Dark Portal worked like a one way Starcraft Nydus Canal
Superior AI.
Linux technology must be flat out BETTER than anything a Windowsd technology can produce. Compare Samba 3.0 to Windows NT 4.0
- Support for LDAP
No stupid limits on Trust Hirearchies
Support for Kerberos
Support for SMB without NMB.
We can't team up with MS, we must Flatten it, or they will flatten us. Thats just the way it is.
Now on to the other half -- to get Microsoft to agree as well.
So of course they want to interoperate with Microsoft.
And MS seems to be the only ones being a problem here.
Microsoft: Yeah ... that's what we've been trying to prevent!
Tie two birds together: although they have four wings, they cannot fly. (The blind man)
It's only dishonest if the party making the offer is disingenuous about its terms.
I'm sure the FSF would be delighted to work with Microsoft -- if Microsoft released all of its source under the GPL. Of course, everyone knows that its unreasonable to believe Microsoft would accept these terms in our lifetime, so it would do no good to announce this.
This shows to have PR value, an offer has to have something that might interest MS. It must be something in which MS could recognize its own enlightened self-interest. It's possible to imagine this happening fairly soon, if there are significant developments that MS cannot profitably fight or coopt. If we imagine sub-$400 linux laptops taking off big time, it might turn defending that part of MS's monopoly from a cash cow into a cash sink. That kind of thing might signal a smart time for MS to reposition itself.
It'd be momentous, to be sure. But not impossible to imagine.
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I have no real idea if this has any bearing on reality, but...
I'm wondering at what point MS will honestly start to interoperate. For Internet Explorer, they didn't start to make meaningful changes until they started losing market share to Firefox and Safari. Now, we're hearing about IE8 being honest to goodness standards compliant. (and they actually sound like they mean it - not holding my breath, but I remain hopeful)
Is the interoperability threshold 80% market share?
Whatever the number is, I don't expect to see any significant changes until MS starts losing customers. Given their resources, they should have been able to make a better browser in 2002, rather than now in 2008.
Caving in to patent threats is a little different to interoperating with MS protocols, enabling people to move away from proprietary Office apps, even if they are stuck with the same file format for a while.
which is totally what she said
For anyone to 'work with MS' is just too much like the frog and the scorpion except MS typically has little to lose in any given arrangement.
"We are all geniuses when we dream"
- E.M. Cioran
For me, the whole point of Free (as in freedom) Software is that Free Software is liberated from artificial constraints that prevent interoperability and restrict users from doing what they want their computers to do. The "True Goal" needs to be one where a users and developers and administrators are free to chose platforms that meet their requirements instead of being locked in to one platform because of vendor lock-in due to formats or protocols or software limitations.
While it's easy to paint Microsoft as some big giant ogre, that's not very helpful to the achieving the "True Goal." So long as the Linux Foundation doesn't allow Linux and the GNU Stack (or any other Free Software) to incur artificial limitations, any relationship with Microsoft is healthy for both.
This is a boring sig
Is that what you got out of his rambling? Anyway, if that was his point, I still disagree. As a Linux user, I have had plenty of interoperability for years now, thank you very much. I am curious, if Linux is so inconsequential, why does Microsoft continue to call Linux its biggest threat?
Let us not become the evil that we deplore.
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