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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."
And why not? :)
which is totally what she said
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
reading this is like seeing a video clip of a one legged Iraqi kid with a stereo boom box playing 'Give peace a chance' ... or something like that.
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When foundations, companies, etc. 'agree' to work with one of their main competitors, it almost seems as if it is just for publicity.
Although they may want to work with their competitor, they might not want to do it on anything EXCEPT their terms, and I get the feeling that this is the same situation - They say "we'd love to work with you", but when the other party doesn't agree to their terms, it is the other party that looks like they're refusing to co-operate.
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.
speak for yourself, i do not want to interoperate with microsoft on their grounds, it would be better for microsoft to quit being the tyrant/deceiver that plays dirty pool to maintain their monopolist power over the desktop & office, make/wait (for) microsoft to change (not the other way around)...
and Jim please ignore the IP infringement FUD, unless microsoft coughs up some tangible proof they have nothing but FUD...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
Now on to the other half -- to get Microsoft to agree as well.
What about when you're neither? Obviously:
When you're neither, where should you compromise?
When you're both, when should you compromise?
And finally, when you're both and neither, you shouldn't ever not uncompromise.
In the same sense that Hillary would 'love to work with' Obama.
Zookeepers declare "We'd love to smother ourselves in steak sauce and try to masturbate the bears..."
We'd also like a solid gold toilet. And a pony.
So of course they want to interoperate with Microsoft.
And MS seems to be the only ones being a problem here.
In my house at least. I'd say that whatever year KDE came out was the true "year of the Linux desktop". Why should I care what OS everyone else is using?
mcgrew's razor: Never attribute to stupidity that which can be explained by greedy self-interest
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)
Yawn. Very little about MS-Linux collaboration here (except that Linux is willing but MS is weak); bad article summaries are no surprise.
/done it/, and then proved my suggestions with their success. Closed shops can't take those kinds of risks, so they're missing out on opportunities; however, once the management does learn to do more lateral thinking like this, the lessons of F/OSS and Linux' collaborative model will probably become integrated into more mainstream business thinking.
But since that's what the summary says, that's what everybody will be talking about, so:
I'd love to see MS bury the hatchet as much as anybody. But where's the Windows Genuine Advantage in that?
MS is obviously not going to give away filesystem specs or the other interoperability roadblocks that collectively create the best argument to businesses for continuing to pay the Windows tax. So the most collaboration we might see is in getting MS Office to run on Linux. In other words, if Redmond bit at all, it'd be at the chance to stomp on OpenOffice to prevent future competition in its core business desktop market.
***
Anyway, besides that, the article was surprisingly content-free. Yes, there are interesting synergies between extending battery life on mobile devices vs. saving energy in the data center. We get that, no need to repeat.
The interviewee promotes this thesis: these synergies are possible primarily through the collaborative Linux environment, which is Linux's great strength. However, I would argue that those synergies are equally possible in closed-source shops, but it's just that management has to learn to listen to them differently -- and that that is only a matter of time. For instance, I used to work in a company that made document-management databases for law firms. I think there's a huge market for (appropriately crippled and cheapened) versions of this product in the private desktop market, for promoting "paperless offices" in non-law businesses, and for aiding academic research: three huge markets that would be very happy to get rid of their physical files and add markup and search if you have enterprise-reliability document management database software. Nobody listened, though; in an Open Source environment, I could've just forked and
Freedom isn't free; its price is the well-being of others.
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.
I think more corporation between the two entities would be a good thing. OSS and MS are like ying and yang; they keep each other in check and balance each other out. In the real world, there's little benefit in either being omnipresent over the other; the two ideals have to work together for the perfect technological suolutions if you ask me.
Without Windows, Linux desktop would have no market penetration target, and without Linux Windows would stagnate.
I think any IT professional that thinks either one paradigm should be 100% prevalent over the other needs to take a good look at themselves and ask how "professional" they really think they are.
Interoperability is good, and personally I thank god neither MS or OSS will ever be 100% dominant in IT (each for their own reasons).
Just my 2 cents.
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Zemlin: Yes. Yes, I think it will actually. As an extention of my previous comment, I wished InfoWorld would have asked him why he thinks that. I can say "I think I will get -1 Flamebait"; so what? It only becomes interesting when I have something to substantiate it with. If you're a Motorola or an LG, would you rather, per device basis when you're selling tens of millions of devices, license Windows Mobile or the Symbian platform from Nokia, or would you rather have Linux, which is collaboratively designed, which supports every major architecture? He's saying "Would you rather have a, or b, or c? Note that c has properties p and q." For a meaningful comparison, he could list some properties of a and b as well. Sure, we may know some of them, but he could have emphasised what he thinks is relevant. Also, when you've picked an architecture, support for any other architecture is not of much interest. InfoWorld: So are Microsoft's days as the dominant provider of desktop and server and maybe even handheld operating systems numbered?
Zemlin: Monopolies don't last forever, so I mean, I think they've got a long way to go. It's just natural over time that people aren't going to allow a single company to dominate the market. People, as in individual consumers, always allow concentration of power; they don't care, they just want easy. Look at Microsoft; look at Google. People use their services because it's easy for them to do so. I'm conjecturing that it takes the power of the state to break up or prevent the formation of monopolies. Someone enlighten me: what happened with AT&T, Standard Oil and the Railroads? What's happening with Microsoft? InfoWorld: Wouldn't the emergence of Linux kind of say that maybe Microsoft never really was a monopoly, that there was always room for somebody else to compete in there and that's what Linux is now doing?
Zemlin: It obviously was a desktop monopoly for a period of time. Again, there's a claim but no argument. I don't want to argue against him, I just want a better argument. Yes, the days of high-margin, vendor lock-in monopoly practices in the software business, yes, those are gone, and they're permanently gone. This is five minutes after he stated that Microsoft makes 30% profit; that doesn't like either dead or dying to me (sadly). InfoWorld: Can Solaris compete with Linux?
Zemlin: [If Solaris was FLOSS eight years ago maybe, blah blah
(None of this is to say that I disagree with Zemlin's assertions, just that I think he could have made a better argument).
Sightings? Pshhhhh. Try photos!
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
Sorry but this is about the second time the Linux foundation issues a terrible statement like that, I still got a grudge after the "Linux users must respect Microsoft even though Microsoft certainly doesn't respect Linux users" one.
What's worse is that this is a smoke screen, since such Linux foundation statement will probably be echoed much more than SFLC's recent statement about the MS' (bogus) patent promise .
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"