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.

Comments

System complexity driving OSS?

[blahplusplus]

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.

Re:System complexity driving OSS?

[CastrTroy]

It seems to me that the only people making things large and unwieldy are large closed source software companies (like MS, but others exist), that believe they have to be the be-all-and-end-all, the "one software company to bind them all", that they end up creating giant monstrosities like Vista. Open source, or at least, the Linux way, is to keep things simple. Do one thing and do it well. Don't try to be everything to everyone. Realize that it's OK if somebody wants to use some other competing software product. Just because our computers are fast, and they do lots of stuff, it doesn't mean that we have to make it complicated.

Re:System complexity driving OSS?

[rtb61]

Feature bloat, of the pointless variety, has very little to do with competitiveness and much more to do with marketing. It is the means by which, costly and productivity destroying upgrades are made more sellable but, of course everything comes to an end. So office 2007 and Vista have proven to be 'a bridge to far' that nobody wants to cross and a pointless waste of M$'s share holders money.

Rather unfair to blame that failure on Bill as it was largely ballmer's fuck up, a trial run to see how the company would function under ballmer's sole control, as it pans out, not very well. As a result ballmer's position is under real threat and he feels it, which is why the defensive public announcement that he will not retire for 10 years, quite clearly he will not voluntarily leave the position regardless of the blunders he continues to make.

M$ as it currently stands can not succeed in OSS as the most important part of generating a income out of OSS is customers service and support, of being able to establish and maintain a quality relationship with customers. Treating them like the enemy with bogus EULA's, licence audits, B$ marketing and some very public deceitful practices makes it virtually impossible to achieve success it what will be a very competitive market, proof of that is M$ continuing failure with MSN.

M$ has no real public, no customer desire, a prime example of that is the complete failure of Zune, even the name shows the level of M$'s customer disconnect. M$ needs to undergo a complete personality transplant and lose the arrogance, ego and bullshit and that will only happen once current management has crippled it's value and made 1/10th of the company it is today, after a shareholder revolt.

Open source could hurt Microsoft long term.

[CrazyJim1]

Microsoft embracing open source would allow it to hurt them in the short term too. Remember how tolerable XP was? Well open source hacker A has made XP no longer need online registration. XP is free now! So is every Microsoft product. Maybe if the first hack everyone did wasn't to make the software free, companies may think about open sourcing their software to get a superior product in the long term. And you know what the second hack would be: Halo 3 cheats. With the whole code open to look through, cheating video games gets easy.

Re:April Fools?

[Technician]

I suspect they will follow the customers and the money.

So there's actually very little of the company whose business model is compatible with open source licensing.

As they watch their pie slice shrink and then shrink rapidly as open source get a solid foothold, they will have little choice.

I prefer legal software. In comparing licenses, the one that permits legal installation on all the machines in my home vs a one license one machine restriction, a slightly differing interface becomes easy to trade to reject BSA threats.

MS will have to effectively compete, sue like crazy, or shrink.

They are attempting to compete and lock-in, but are failing while OSS expands. It's not just the Unix servers in the target zone anymore. The battle for the desktop is beginning.

Re:Skepticism aside...

[Bandman]

Lots of people would spend the better part of a year reading and rewriting code. By the end of that year, wine would be nearly complete, Windows and Linux would support each other's binaries (probably with a patch to the linux kernel, as I'm sure Linus wouldn't include it with that little testing). and the more broken part of Windows would be fixed. It's hard to tell whether XOrg would include Windows code, or whether they'd fork off another project to support the API. The windows code would fragment into dozens of distros, almost immediately. Of these, maybe a couple would last longer than a half year. There would be lots of interpretations of how to fix or change the windows code to bring it more inline with the linux philosophy. Eventually, I think most people would come to accept Windows as a separate end-product, but that wouldn't stop some people from working on combining them.

It would be a couple of years before the first solid Linux distros started shipping which included support for Windows programs (and actually worked)

"They have to"

[ClosedSource]

That's Internet Bubble talk.

There's still no definitive evidence that there's a viable business model in an open source, software only company.

Most profitable "open source" companies are in the closed hardware business and just use Linux inside.

It's still an open question whether traditional companies who buy open source companies like MySQL will ever see their investment pay off. What is the balance sheet for Sun with respect to Star/Open Office?

If you had inside information that MS was going to make all their products open source, that would be a great time to sell the stock short.

Re:In related news...

[fm6]

Har har. Fact is that one generation's Victory or Death struggle is often the next's What's the Big Deal. I work at Sun, and ten years ago, there really were people here who compared Microsoft to the Nazi party. Now we have OEM and Interoperability agreements, and there's no question in my mind that our partnership with the Dark Side^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Microsoft is a Good Thing.

And you know, in the past, many people at Sun have not been friendly to Open Source either. And I don't mean the distant past either. When the decision was made to open up our Java implementations, there were some fairly important people who quit rather than participate. I think it's a safe bet that the culture at Microsoft is undergoing a similar upheaval. They haven't been anti-open source because of Bill Palpatine's mind control, but because a lot of people thought it was a bad idea. I've seen exactly the same struggle at every company that ends up going Open Source.

Evidence.

[SanityInAnarchy]

It did, however, answer your point:

There's no evidence of change

It's not conclusive evidence, but it is evidence.

Also:

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.

Seems to me they get much of their money from hardware vendors (like Dell) and from large corporations (volume licenses). How many people do you know who've actually bought a boxed copy of Windows?

And because of that, it seems like neither of those customers would stop buying from them if their product could be had for free. After all, Dell pays Canonical for support...

Just guessing... maybe the secret is that Microsoft doesn't actually offer any support?

Re:remember the OLD IBM?

[thermian]

Don't you know the new required thought pattern? We aren't supposed to remember how nasty IBM were.

They are meant to be thought of as the poor unfortunate victims of an evil Microsoft, not the over confident and arrogant giant company who's failure to understand the market handed the world of computing to a small company whose owner lived on junk food and didn't wash much.

Being old I remember the time when Microsoft were this great company who liberated the computing world from the Unix wars. A company whose philosophy of getting their product out there cheaply and on everything meant I could finally afford a computer after several years of wanting, but not being able to buy, a Mac.

There was a time when Microsoft were the good guys, where people suddenly found that they could write a product for DOS and it would run on almost any computer. That meant it was possible to become a software house with a lot less effort and money than before.

I rather suspect people just don't realise what it was like before DOS.

Ok it didn't stay that way, or didn't unless you're a big Microsoft fan, but when I were young it was true.

Personally I wish they would get with the Open Source movement. I've been an open source developer for over five years, working with both Linux and Windows, and the lack of high level co-operation between the two camps is, in my opinion, is preventing a huge leap forward in computing.