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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.
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 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.
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)!
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?