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Microsoft Acknowledges Open Source As a Bigger Threat Than Google

Posted by Soulskill on from the i've-been-waiting-for-you-obi-wan dept.

ruphus13 takes us to ZDNet for an analysis of comments by Microsoft's Chief Software Architect, Ray Ozzie, about how open source is "much more potentially disruptive" to Microsoft's business strategy than Google. Ozzie also spoke about the future of Microsoft's search technology, which will develop with or without Yahoo. There is a related interview at OStatic with several Microsoft employees about how they view and interact with the open source community. The head of Microsoft's global open source and Linux team is quoted saying: "The other thing I think is missing is implementation of a basic principle of economic fairness. Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially. Currently there are perfectly good projects that have been abandoned by their developers despite being used by large corporations. Subsequently the projects fall out of use. This is unnecessary waste that would often be prevented by making it easy for companies to pay the developers directly. I think it's important to solve this so that the sustainability of open source projects is improved."

22 of 376 comments (clear)

  1. In Other Words.... by PC+and+Sony+Fanboy · · Score: 5, Insightful

    So, microsoft says "Free software might lead to lesser sales" and "Paid Alternatives not as attractive as Free ones!"

    I'd say they're right.. but I'm also surprised that anyone has to say anything at all...

    AND, well, Google isn't distributing alternative OSes, and the FOSS community IS ... and what would be a bigger threat to Microsoft - Alternative OS or ... adsense. Hmmm...

    1. Re:In Other Words.... by Flamora · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Agreed, this does feel like a bit of stating the obvious. I think what they miss about FOSS is that at least some of the developers in the community do it as a hobby or for practice (or even resume padding so they can get a paid development job); compensation isn't that much of a sticking point for them.

    2. Re:In Other Words.... by xanalogical · · Score: 5, Insightful

      And some FOSS developers do it because they fervently want Microsoft and similar companies to suffer economically, as payback for the pain they have caused, the crimes they continue to commit and the freedom they attempt to take away. For those people, no amount of money could replace the pleasure of driving Microsoft et. al. into the ground, salting the earth and sticking a sign there saying, "so shall it be to all such tyrants".

    3. Re:In Other Words.... by nuzak · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Yes, and most of those people don't actually write a single line of code.

      --
      Done with slashdot, done with nerds, getting a life.
    4. Re:In Other Words.... by GeffDE · · Score: 5, Insightful

      I hear the "Time is Money" argument a lot and in most cases it is complete BS. Your analysis assumes that said hobbyist programmer is working on their project instead of working for pay (i.e. only 40 hours a week is worked on both work and the software project). The math is $60000/yr / (40 hrs/wk * 52 wks/yr) = $28/hr. However, even though I work 40 hours a week, that leaves 128 hours of that week left unfilled. Assuming 8 hours of sleep a night, that is 78 hours of awake time that I am not working. That is a lot of time. In fact, it is almost twice another full 40-hour work week. So a six month OSS project, worked on only in spare "hobby" time costs...$0.

      Time is not money. The work week is (nominally) 40 hours because if you start to work more than that regularly, there are many ill effects (increased stress, poor health, INSANITY). In the scenario outlined in the GP, the OSS project is a hobby: it is something that a person can do in their spare time, when they feel like it etc. It doesn't cut into their yearly income because they would not be making more money if they were not doing it; it does not cost $20,000 unless you assign some sort of billable rate to that person. Using that reasoning and the fact that the average billing rate for lawyers is roughly $350, a nice fancy 2-hour dinner for a lawyer costs $700 plus whatever the restaurant charges.

      Free software is still a great deal for a hobbyist developer because they are doing it for fun and they derive satisfaction and joy out of doing it. For professional OSS devs, it is still a great deal because they already tend to be paid by big companies. That entire post is how any big-ass-backwards blue chip company sees OSS: those companies don't get open source and obviously neither do you.

      --
      It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
    5. Re:In Other Words.... by GeffDE · · Score: 5, Insightful

      Your unwillingness to entertain the specifics is why you didn't get the lawyer analogy; I am stymied why my calculation (which agrees with your $30/hr calculation) was deemed worthless though. However, I worked my calculation out in full, whereas you seemingly pulled numbers out of thin air. Moving on, I will reiterate why the lawyer analogy was fair and I will again try to show you why your idea of "Billable Hours Applied to Free Time" is just wrong.

      In your previous post, you stated that, even when not working, the concept of billable hours still applies. That is how you derived all of the costs of developing OSS. However, if how much you make per hour to do your job is how much every hour of your day is worth, which is what you are implying, then any two hours of a lawyer's time not spend lawyering costs him $700. That is the equivalent of you saying that "For someone making $X/yr, their time is worth $Y an hour." What is insane is saying that every hour of yours is worth $Y. Only the hours you are doing your job are worth $Y. Any hour in which you would not ordinarily be working is not worth money; there is no conversion. If no one will pay you for what you are doing, then your time spent doing it is not worth any money. I brought up dinner as an example of how ridiculous your idea was; I am glad that you agree that it is ridiculous.

      My argument is that anything you do in your free time does not have an inherent monetary worth. If you enjoy writing code and decide to write code for your own purposes, that has no inherent value. If you want to write code for yourself, you cannot be expected to be paid for it. But that is, underneath all the blustering, what you seem to be expecting. I was not calling for you to do your job for free; I was calling for you to expect to do things you do for yourself for free. To rewrite one of your phrases so it has some truth: "Every hour I spend in front of my computer writing code COULD have a value." If you need/want something and you write it for yourself on your own time, it did not cost you anything and it has no inherent monetary value. If you can convince someone to pay you for the fruits of your labors, then it has monetary value.

      From my previous analysis, there are roughly 78 waking hours a week that are not spent doing a 40-hour/wk job. That extra time in everybody's day is their own. If you decide to spend that flying a kite, your time is worth the enjoyment you derive from the kite flying. If you decide to write code, your time is worth the satisfaction you derived from coding and any money you could derive from the fair market price of the code you produced. If you spent 15 hours writing a new Notepad, do you think you're entitled to $450? Do you think you will ever see $450? No, not if you're a reasonable person. It is very true that you could have spent the time making more money, but what I was trying to say before is that many people don't want more money than they want more time to do what they want; a corollary to that is that some people find hacking on a software project fun.

      People who do OSS *donate* the product of their time and for high quality code, that is not free. For a new Notepad, it is free. The point I tried to make before was that most people who do OSS and don't get paid contribute *for fun* not because they want to donate something. Just because you are a greedy bastard who feels that everything coming from the tips of your fingers is cashmoney does not mean that others are the same. That is also why those people contribute to OSS and you don't.



      Also, seeing how this has tied up some of your precious $30/hour time in front of your computer, you can forward me my bill.

      --
      It has been a nervous year, with people beginning to feel like Christian Scientists with appendicitis.
  2. FUD FUD FUD FUD. FUDDITY FUD. FUDDITY FUD. by zifferent · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Nothing is stopping companies from paying the developers. What is this guy's point exactly. And it's not like a company can't add a developer to their payroll to pick up dead OSS projects. Oh wait he's a M$ troll. It's FUD. It says "Please Mr. Company, don't use the OSS product, because it might get dropped, and then where will you be?" And "Please Mr. Developer, don't work on OSS projects, because people are just taking advantage of you." Gagh!

    --
    cat sig > /dev/null
    1. Re:FUD FUD FUD FUD. FUDDITY FUD. FUDDITY FUD. by NotBornYesterday · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Yes, but why SHOULDN'T a company just pay M$ to take care of 95% of their IT needs? Many do. For many others, MS products simply don't do what's required, or can't replace what's already there, whether it is proprietary or open.

      Reliance on proprietary MS stuff has hurt some companies in the past. Others don't want the added expense.

      Others want the freedom from onerous licensing headaches. MS attacked its own customers with licensing audits years ago. Many shops they audited were compliant (or mostly compliant), but MS raked them over the coals anyway. How much IT time do you want to devote to tracking licensing?

      How are you going to handle virtualization as part of your IT roadmap (if it's not already, it probably will be soon). You'd better be able to solve the problem of licensing your OS and apps (many with diverging licensing schemes; per user, per concurrent user, per physical chassis, per cpu socket, per core ... ) across multiple physical and virtual machines. If I clone a MS OS in VMware on one box, how many times do I pay for that OS? What if I clone it onto a different physical box? What if I clone it on a different box and shut down the original, so I only have one concurrent instance? If I have to worry about licensing when I move or create a virtual server, how is that affecting my agility as an IT organization? How is it affecting my bottom line as a company?

      Not trolling, just asking the FLOSS freaks if they can come up with something better than "Microsoft is bad, mkaay?" The first 2 words of that sentence offer a sharp contrast to the rest of it, AC.
      --
      I prefer rogues to imbeciles because they sometimes take a rest.
    2. Re:FUD FUD FUD FUD. FUDDITY FUD. FUDDITY FUD. by ElizabethGreene · · Score: 5, Informative

      Companies have been "doing for themselves" for decades. They come to realize that something is a critical part of their business and they take ownership of it. They take on the ability or responsibility to maintain the system themselves.
      Therein lies the fundamental difference between open or paid source vs closed source. We have a number of issues with our > $100,000 accounting system that Microsoft simply refuses to fix. If we could buy the source and fix it ourselves, we would. If we could download the source and release patches, we would. Unfortunately, we bought a Microsoft product and to them the "There is a (painful) workaround, so we aren't going to fix it in this version" answer is good enough for _them_. Our opinion on the matter is quite irrelevant.

      -Ellie
    3. Re:FUD FUD FUD FUD. FUDDITY FUD. FUDDITY FUD. by DeadTOm · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Unfortunately I work for a corporation that is nearly 100% Microsoft. There is a very blatant fear of open-source around here mostly due to a lack of knowledge or even curiosity about what OSS is or how it works. People are familiar with Microsoft even though it's buggy, with constant problems that cannot be solved or require 3rd party work arounds because it's not like we can just ask Microsoft for a specific feature or pay a guy to open up the source code and fix this one issue for us. They're content to stick with it and hope the next auto-update will fix it because it's what they know and it's what's main stream. OSS, GNU/Linux is something that they don't know all that much about but Microsoft says it's "a cancer" as Bill Gates him self once put it and we trust Bill Gates so it must be true. I've been pushing various open-source solutions to big problems we've had for almost 6 years to no avail and it's made me a bit of a joke to some people here. I look at it as a perfect example of Microsoft FUD at work. This is exactly the type of environment they are trying to cultivate and they're doing a good job. In light of this and the very long and diverse history of stealing, bullying and deception that Microsoft has engaged in since day one of it's existence, I find it very difficult to believe that anything they do is for the benefit of any community but their own. If someone from Microsoft is suddenly all concerned for the financial well-being of OSS developers that makes me concerned. To me all that means is they've changed tactics and I'm glad FOSS attorneys are keeping their eyes open.

  3. No all we need... by HappySmileMan · · Score: 5, Interesting

    Is for Google to release a Linux distro for desktops... Then Microsoft would be truly pissed off

    They already have modified distroes running internally, so it wouldn't be too far-fetched, though I don't think it'd happen anytime soon, if at all.

    1. Re:No all we need... by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Informative

      Well, maybe Google didn't do it, but someone released an OS bery, very similar to 'GoogleOS'. It even includes Google Apps.

      --
      My blog
  4. Gee, I'm touched ... by yelvington · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Ray Ozzie: "I think it's important to solve this so that the sustainability of open source projects is improved."

    I'm touched by this new warmer, fuzzier Microsoft! Now that it's "helped" the commercial software industry, creating a level playing field by bulldozing everybody else's buildings, it can turn its attention to "helping" the struggling open-source world. Welcome, new open-source overlords! May the innovations continue!

  5. Oh? by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Currently there are perfectly good projects that have been abandoned by their developers despite being used by large corporations.
    So, uh, which projects would those be, Mr. Ozzie? Because from where I sit, the major open source projects I've seen in use by businesses tend to be ones with foundations or for-profit companies behind them -- OpenOffice.org, Linux, Mozilla Firefox/Thunderbird/Sunbird, Apache, Samba, MySQL, etc. If any parts of, say, a major Linux distro are 'abandoned' by their developers, I think you'll find that due to their open source nature, someeone else will pick up the reigns. Possibly even a for profit-company such as the distro maker.

    No, Ray, I don't see this is as a problem. You are seeing problems where none exist. If a lot of people use an open source project, someone will step in and maintain it, sooner or later.
    --
    My blog
    1. Re:Oh? by slim · · Score: 5, Insightful

      If any parts of, say, a major Linux distro are 'abandoned' by their developers, I think you'll find that due to their open source nature, someeone else will pick up the reigns. Possibly even a for profit-company such as the distro maker. You buried the most important part deep in your paragraph. If you're a large corporation using OSS code that's been abandoned, you're in a much better situation than if you were using someone else's proprietary code that's abandoned.
  6. No doubt by csoto · · Score: 5, Insightful

    And as if closed Microsoft products don't "subsequently fall out of use." Look at Vista. We wasted a lot of effort testing this pig. We're skipping it. I'm sure more than one Softie got paid for working on Vista. Blaming disuse on FOSS is bogus.

    --
    There exists no way of exchanging information without making judgments. --Bene Gesserit Axiom
  7. Re:One reason compensation is not important by morgan_greywolf · · Score: 5, Interesting

    bacause most developers do it because of their personal interest.
    Correct. Every open source project I've ever started or written is a result of a need -- an "itch" as ESR puts it in Homesteading the Noosphere. Necessity is the other of invention.

    When I needed a GUI applet for my wife to monitor ink levels and run cleaning cycles on our Epson Stylus printer and none of the existing applications out there did the trick just right, I wrote Stylus Toolbox. Big surprise. I don't care if I ever get a dime in compensation, because I've already been compensated -- by the satisfaction obtained from the joy of software development and by the actual application itself, which I needed and still use today.

    Not that I wouldn't gladly accept monetary donations -- but I'd rather get donations of equipment (mainly printers) for development and testing of Stylus Toolbox and/or escputil. Also, developers who would like to help me update the alignment procedure for newer Stylus CXX and Stylus Photo printers would be appreciated. Thanks.

    --
    My blog
  8. Money? by warlorddagaz · · Score: 5, Insightful

    "Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially."
    Yet again they've missed the point. Some of us developers don't develop for money - we develop for fun/to help the community/geek points. I'm not sure I'd actually want to get paid for the software I write - when something's a hobby, it can be enjoyed at whatever pace you like, but if I was getting paid for it, those who were paying me would feel annoyed if I went and watched a film in an evening instead of developing the software they now consider to have paid for. And there are many times I'd like to go out in an evening instead of sitting in front of my laptop watching GDB tell me I've segfaulted
    It appears that yet again, Microsoft cannot look past the monetry value of people and software - for those who haven't read it, The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond is a good read, and covers this precise point in great depth.

  9. Re:Big Suprise by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    Surprise has two Rs in it. Did you know that before?

  10. Abandoned projects? by pesc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Currently there are perfectly good projects that have been abandoned by their developers despite being used by large corporations.

    Like Visual Basic or Windows XP? Too bad those projects aren't "open source" so that said corporations could step in and get support elsewhere.

    --

    )9TSS
  11. "Only a fraction" by Dystopian+Rebel · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially. And those thousands of developers are paid a fraction of what the high-rolling executives are making. The developers' final reward is to see their jobs leave on a flight for an overseas destination.

    Open source is satisfying for developers because they are doing ~what they like~ and ~what interests them~.

    In contrast with fixing bugs for 10 years in a cubicle while listening to feudal management aristocrats squabble, periodically announce their delusional plans for market conquest, and garner obscene bonuses as a reward for their ineffectual nonsense.

    Microsaur is unhappy watching a faster, more agile creature eat its eggs.
    --
    Rich And Stupid is not so bad as Working For Rich And Stupid.
  12. Microsoft for "economic fairness"? by argoff · · Score: 5, Insightful

    >The other thing I think is missing is implementation of a basic principle of economic fairness. Thousands of developers have put very hard work into building software used by millions of people and companies, yet only a fraction of these developers are rewarded financially.

    This is complete bullshit. What is really going on is that free software forces the software market to center around services instead of licensing controls. That might be bad for somebody who wants a global monopoly, but is very nice for those who create and do stuff.

    In an open source world, a software engineer may have lost a total monopoly over a work he creates ... but in return he has gained billions of hours worth of developed software without any financial loss. That increases his productivity drastically and thus the demand for his services and his pay.

    It is Microsoft who has deprived us of that benefit with their constant licensing fees and constant vendor lock in, not open source.