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

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: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)

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?