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.
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.
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.
...legal threats...
I am still waiting for that list of 235 patents.
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
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!!
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.
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.
It destroys the credibility of the person but -- thankfully - not the argument :)