Slashdot Mirror
MS To Become Open Source Friendly Post Gates
ruphus13 writes "Now that Gates has 'retired' from Microsoft, ZDNet is speculating that Microsoft will become much more Open Source friendly. From the article, 'We already see quite a different approach to dealing with OSS and OSS companies from Sam Ramji's group [which is] doing a great job in establishing dialog,' said Rafael Laguna, CEO of Open-Xchange and a former marketing exec at SUSE Linux. 'With Gates' departure, the only mammoth remaining is Ballmer. With him away in a near future, Microsoft will definitely open up. They have to.'" Microsoft could become the world's largest open source company; they've certainly made some concessions to it lately.
I'll believe it when I see it and not a moment before. With Microsoft's record anything short of unequivocal action should be treated with absolute scepticism.
Spelling mistakes, grammatical errors, and stupid comments are intentional.
is if Ballmer and the Gates people are no longer at the top. And that ain't gonna happen.
the term, FUD originated with IBM, not Microsoft.
so i won't say it can't happen, but i'm not holding my breath either
So what would be evidence of change? Well, they'd need to move to an OSS compatible business model for starters but right now they're still mostly about selling boxes of software. They don't have a services-side in the same way that IBM do. They have some hardware -- the mouse/keyboard/peripherals sell well. The Xbox is about selling hardware below cost but they make it back in SDKs and licensing -- so they couldn't open that.
So there's actually very little of the company whose business model is compatible with open source licensing. That's where you'll see change, if it happens -- not in Bill Gates leaving Microsoft.
They are always becoming friendlier but somehow never quit the full frontal assault. Their arsenal includes a full spectrum of technical sabotage, PR, legal threats on top of ordinary competition. If this is a joke, I'm tired of hearing it.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Oh right, after rigging the ISO process with OOXML and their triumph over open standards they're going to go open source?
Well, despite all the effort they put into getting OOXML approved, they will (theoretically) implement ODF in the next version of Office.
I have to wonder if the complexity of modern software is part of the big reason driving OSS, it would seem to me as our systems get faster, we can increase the complexity of our programs ad infintum, and at some point it 'breaks the camels back' and no business can hope to maintain something so large and unwieldy.
Personally I thought that with increased complexity you'd want more coordination and centralized control, not less. With the OSS philosophy and bazaar model a lot influenced by "do one task well", cross-integration is usually poor. Like say building a great e-mail application and a great calendar application but neglecting how these work together to function well. I guess it depends on what you're looking at but at least in the software I see making that kind of modular approach with lasting interfaces and replacable modules would be a huge undertaking, compared to just saying that in version X.1 we change this interface slightly on both sides.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
I will believe it when I see it, with microsoft's track record during its entire existence I wont hold my breath, respect and trust is something that must be earned and not given out like halloween candy, lets see them actually change = not with lip service and press-release/FUD, I want to see real change...
Politics is Treachery, Religion is Brainwashing
why would MS open source their software? If they open source it that means it can be ported and people will be more likely to leaving windows if they can use their windows apps on another operating system. Open source code does nothing to benefit MS especially when 99.99% of their customers don't even know what source code is. Sure it would be nice, but I just don't think it stands a snowballs chance in hell.
lots of people would drop linux like a hot potato if windows had the same level of openess. face it, windows is the standard and has all the vendor support and all the market share. if it was open, linux wouldn't have much of a reason to live.
If you mod me down, I will become more powerful than you can imagine....
Microsoft would first have to get over its "Not Invented Here" syndrome. One of the things that has driven Microsoft to try and achieve domination over all things software is the belief that everything they shit out is GOLD, they can do it better than everyone else, and the other guys's stuff is crap and deserves to fail. They pretty much believe that they're the center of the computing universe. Opening up and embracing FOSS would mean that other people are LOOKING AT and TOUCHING their code, submitting PATCHES, who do these people THINK they ARE?! This is high-quality Microsoft code, mister! Keep your grubby hands off of it! Oh god, I feel so unclean, the stink won't come off!!
Microsoft could give each open source developer a wheel barrow filled with gold and they would bitch about having to push it to the car. Why does anyone post any MS related article on /.? I just love it when MS is compared to the Nazi party and Bill Gates is called Hitler. It is as clear an indication as any just how out of touch the Open Source community is. Hitler murdered over 6 million people and Bill Gates ran a software company...? I am not seeing the comparison.
In addition, and I'm just paraphrasing a video I saw of "Maddog" Hall talking, their business model and the ecology of companies(i.e. the VAR channels) are incompatible with them selling services. In they did start selling services, they'd have one hell of an advantage and would be pissing off all the people who help to sell, install and maintain their software. So they're pretty darn invested in just selling those boxes. Piss off the VARs and there's a world of free software for those VARs to switch to.
'There is no doubt that Microsoft has no choice but to acknowledge that the closed development model for building software doesn't work any more.'
Their reasoning is circular. It will happen because it will happen and they have no choice but to acknowledge it.
An incredibly flimsy argument at best.
http://lkml.org/lkml/2005/8/20/95
I think Microsoft will end up announcing that Vista will be free for non-commercial use.
They wont release the source code but Windows will end up being free. They spread enough FUD that it wouldn't be hard to to convince a lot of people that free=open source. But better than open source because you don't have to set-up complex compilers and development environments you just need the binaries (yes i know but its FUD remember). Better because it stops someone inserting malicious code into the source.. the usual FUD.
They sell Windows to schools so cheap just to stop Linux getting much of a foothold anyway that giving it away wont make that much difference. They'll still charge for Vista Ultimate/Pro/Uber-bloat or whatever its called but tie it in with online services.. for a small monthly fee. Vista for free and get Office/their gaming gaming thing/online media services for $15 per month.
I am a free slashdotter. I will not be modded, blogged, DRM'd, patented, podcasted or RFID'd. My life is my own.
I feel like Microsoft has taken some important steps towards playing nice with Open Source, and encouraging interoperability. Some examples include projects like IronPython, the WIX Installer tools, the fact that Silverlight actually supports at least one non-Windows platform, and the extremely detailed communications protocol documents recently released on MSDN. Sure, part of this has been for legal compliance reasons, and it turns out customers value things like interoperability.
I think there's a subtler reason that will become more apparent in the coming years. Microsoft needs to hire new employees if it wants to stay relevant, and it competes with the likes of Google and others for these new hires. It also happens that probably the very best college candidates are the ones that have contributed to open source projects. These are the students that went beyond what their curriculum required of them, and showed the drive to understand and contribute to a real-world project on their spare time. This kind of experience is valuable in a new hire, but many of them would be turned off by an anti open source attitude and look for more open source-friendly employers. In other words, to attract the best young minds (which is crucial to Microsoft's long term success), Microsoft is going to have to become much more friendly to open source projects.
Working on Linux?
Um.. Open Source friendly doesn't mean changing to an OSS business model. They are competing in with open source software, why should MS play nice? If you don't think EVERY DAMN BUSINESS is about making money and driving out competition, then you're clearly delusional.
Every company cannot give away software and make money off support. Even redhat doesnt give away their enterprise branded linux for free. (i dont mean fedora, and not every person cares about the source code)
Even if MS did give away all of their products for free and charged like hell for support, everyone here will be up in arms about how they purposely make their software defective so people will need support. (nice bait placed here to make fun about how their software is already defective.. LOLZZZ) .. ok last part was a rant but other things are true.
Calling Microsoft "M$", or microshaft, or microshit pretty much destroys any credibility your argument has.
They will certainly have to adopt the open source business model and make money by selling low margin services without any moat or competitive advantage, instead of selling highly demanded software programs on which they have a monopoly with obscene operatring margins. If they do it right, one day they will make as much money as Red Hat! http://finance.yahoo.com/q/is?s=RHT&annual Hey, wait, they ARE making as much money in one day as red hat makes (in a year)!
As software modules get larger, eventually they split into separate modules. As hardware evolves much of the functionality of the driver moved into firmware eg. hard disk drives and graphics cards.
The problem is that proprietary OS vendors don't have the resources to write drivers for every piece of consumer hardware. Microsoft relies on the hardware vendors to do this themselves, while the OSS community can do this providing the hardware specifications are freely available.
Anyone else really loses out, because they don't have the financial resources to pay for entire teams of programmers to do this, and the hardware vendors can't afford development kits for every different piece of hardware.
The only alternative solution is for there to be a standard device driver file format - NDISwrapper is one way of achieving this.
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Very insightful. I think this can be boiled down to:
Businesses write closed-source software that becomes monolithic and unmanageable because they need to add features to remain competitive in a market.
Open-source software stays small and relatively manageable (I'm sure the Linux kernel is still a bitch to sift through, as nice as it is compared to the Windows kernel) because developers know that if their code becomes unmanageable, they aren't going to be paid to manage it.
Plus, I think it's got something to do with being available to the public. I mean, if there was a giant billboard over your head that counted how many days it's been since you last brushed your teeth, would you skip it as often as you do?
It depends on your definition of "thriving". Without Wintel (or some other standard platform), most of us couldn't even afford a computer.
Obviously Crays and Connection Machines were never going to be home computers.
Although the design legacy of the x86 still sucks today, their really isn't a microprocessor significantly faster. Also keep in mind that Windows NT ran on the Alpha as well as x86 and the marketplace couldn't care less.
I don't know. I think this would probably force companies to start open sourcing drivers. And we'd see things ported over to Linux. And we'd probably finally have linux on the desktop. Developers would take what they like from windows and pretty much salvage what they want instead of actually rebuilding Windows and taking out the bloat.
That which does not kill me only postpones the inevitable.
It destroys the credibility of the person but -- thankfully - not the argument :)
I tend to judge people on how they act in addition to what they argue for/against. On another note, whoever modded me troll - I have no idea what you're thinking.
Without Wintel, most of us couldn't even afford a computer!?!?
You do know that there were plenty of affordable, powerful (for the time) computers before they got squeezed out by Wintel, right? Amiga ring any bells? Atari ST? MacOS?
Computers became affordable due to Moores Law. Don't kid yourself that Gates and Co. had much to do with that. If anything their bloatware kept the cost of a computer that could run current apps *more* expensive than it should have been.
I think that OSS has always been about standards. It started as an implementation of POSIX. Programmers are much more likely to write a Jabber-enabled IM client than to write one with its own protocol. Once there was an office document standard, OSS programs rushed to add compatibility.
Freedesktop.org spends a lot of time writing specs which mean that desktops and programs can share data, configs, cache, or whatever is needed. Look at their attempts to modularize the XFree86 code, DBus, HAL, and XDG (which is attempting to get the user directory under control).
What this all means is that if you install a compliant WM like OpenBox and Python bindings for XDG, your autostart programs from Gnome will also start in OpenBox (unless they were defined to only start in Gnome). Now that the FLOSS community has these specifications (more like RFCs, not standards), the desktop is seeing a level of integration which wasn't possible a few years ago.
Put identity in the browser.
Red Hat comes to mind.
Well, speaking of zealotry. You're looking at the decision to go open source as a moral one. But it's always a business decision. Was at Sun, and will be at Microsoft.
And try to remember that the people who work at Microsoft (or anywhere else) are not the same people working there 10 years ago.
I not so sure that M$ will ever give Windows away like Linux. I can see them start using an open source kernel like Linux and put a pretty proprietary GUI on it just like Apple did with OS X; mainly because Vista shows what happens when M$ tries new code that isn't left over from their OS/2 days.
Windows is as solid as quicksand.
Fellow AC, with all of the logic and reasoning that these other posters would like to convince you that they have, they have totally never even considered that God is something that transcends space and time. So how would human logic and/or reasoning at this point in time even apply?
Keep the faith brother.
-AC
Vista is a sample size of one. Can you think of any counter-examples? OS X, per chance (the fact that it's "based" on Mach and BSD does not qualify, as the overall user-experience is proprietary)? IIS isn't all that small or simple, and it comes out as at least a workable product. AIX seems to be doing just fine. World of Warcraft (and the software/hardware behind it server-side) is easily as complex as Windows, and that seems to work.
On the other hand...
And how about large and unwieldy open source software? Surely you can think of at least one such example. Xorg and/or XFree86, per chance? I wonder how GNU/HURD is doing? How about OpenOffice.org (which is getting significantly better) but still will often crash during document recovery, and has a number of other problems with regard to corrupting documents and saving massive files (not just OOorg format, but DOC and PDF are all >100kb for a 1 page document, it seems!). Or how about KDE, which with version 4 is only slightly less bloated, sluggish, and so forth than Vista (and just as unusable as Vista on a 1.5GHz/1G system)? Or the wonderful mess that the Enlightenment project is - 10 years out from the last point release and 8 years from the last time anyone gave a damn, largely unusable and forgotten, but still in active development? And should I even mention what a stupid, stupid idea Avahi is, or the nightmare that having it an integral part of the major desktops/distros is? Or synergy, which is an awesome project with a lot of potential - but appears to have been abandoned and has some piss-poor security considerations?
And I could keep going. I love open source, but let's not candy coat a turd or shit-coat candy. The point is, the fact that it's closed source has nothing to do with it.
Vista is just Vista. Yes, they introduced some interesting concepts, but tried to stretch everything else too far, cut a lot of features, and left a lot of stuff half-done while ripping out most of those features. So it's a buggy, bloated, steaming pile of feces which won't work to an acceptable level for at least 3 years until after it was released - just like every other major MS product. That's just the way MS works; it's nothing inherent to large closed-source software projects.
~/ssh slashdot.org ssh: connect to host slashdot.org port 22: too many beers
"Calling Microsoft "M$ ... pretty much destroys any credibility your argument has."
Get over it already. Popular culture has re-branded them. M$ IS Microsoft. It says two things. One, their love for money trumps their customers interest. And that is just the way it is.
Umm, the culture that rebranded Microsoft as M$ isn't that popular.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Although Red Hat has made contributions to Linux, the OS was fundamentally done by the time Red Hat became invovled. There may be room for one company to be successful holding the corporate hand as they venture into Linux, but as corporations become more comfortable with Linux they may begin to question if Red Hat is adding any value they should be paying for.
What a load of drivel you do write. Red Hat are profitable and have expanded every quarter for at least the past 4 years, and we're selling RHEL licenses in spades, many to huge companies that have advanced in-house Unix/Linux teams. The operating system was not "fundamentally done" when Red Hat came around. Otherwise we'd just still be shipping RHL 1 to everybody. In fact we consistently top the list of kernel contributions, that kernel scaling up and down in ways that no one could even foresee 15 years ago when RH was founded. So stop trolling nonsense and pay attention.
Rich.
libguestfs - tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images
There's still no definitive evidence that there's a viable business model in an open source, software only company.
Of course there's evidence - just look at around at all the companies that DO base their business models on FOSS and still rake in a pretty penny. That's not proof, you say? They still might go bankrupt some day? Well, yes, they might, but so might every other company - in EVERY sector, one might add. The fact that car companies are not guaranteed to stay in business forever doesn't mean cars can't be the basis of a viable business model, either.
Heavens, if you're going to astroturf, at least get a clue.
As long as you have well defined, open and published interfaces that increase modularity you can scale to larger systems and still be stable. One of my biggest complaints about MS is that they don't do this.
The open source community will ultimately prevail because they do good engineering (doing it the Right Way), whereas commercial software is often rushed out the door a big steaming pile with a nice coat of paint in order get market share from people that don't know any better.
--
The early bird catches the worm. The worm that sleeps late lives to see another day.
The problem is, with Microsoft, the dialog is modal and has only one button.
True confidence comes not from realising you are as good as your peers, but that your peers are as bad as you are.
There is a current movement underway to slowly replace Microsoft at many companies.
At my company, we are slowly rolling out Macs, Google apps, and Linux. Sure, we still have Active Directory, Exchange and SQL, but they are of the 2003/2005 variety. We have NO plans to go to Vista, 2008 server, Exchange 2007, or SQL 2008.
Gmail will eventually replace our Exchange 2003 server, and the ONE application that needs SQL 2005 is running on a terminal server.
Even if MS gave their products away, we still would not consider them. They offer nothing in terms of usability, functionality, stability, or security over their competitors.
MS right now is fucked (they may be starting to realize this). I've been to a couple new product launch events for Microsoft recently, and I can't see one reason to buy their new stuff. ISVs are starting to make their products OS independent (or, at least, support multiple platforms) - thanks to Apple's desktop market share.
Companies will keep the old stuff and when it is time to replace it, MS will probably not be considered. It won't happen overnight - it will take a decade or so.
-ted
However, corporate culture has a funny way of infecting new employees and sticking around. A company might be filled with new grunts, but at the end of the day, the same set of values and ideals are passed from generation to generation.
Those who disagree and would want to see change tend to leave (similar to attrition). Without a person at the helm who is very dedicated to steering the company away from its course, you won't see much difference between the company ten years ago and the company today.
Monopolies treat their customers very differently. They have their customers and now they squeeze them. Contrast this to a company that still actually has to work for their money.