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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.
Nazis to become Pro-Jew post Hitler.
Christians to become Pro-Reason post Apocalypse.
KKK to become Pro-Black post Hanging.
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.
Ha ha ha ha
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Ha ha ha ha
(catches breath)
Ha ha ha
...at some point it 'breaks the camels back' and no business can hope to maintain something so large and unwieldy.
So, you're saying that in the future, all programmes will be written in perl?
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.
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.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
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.
... Microsoft _could_ become the world's largest open-source company...
... Apple _could_ become the world's largest producer of low-cost laptops...
... China _could_ become the world's largest anarchy (by population) ...
... Jupiter _could_ turn out to be the solar system's second Sun...
... Hell _could_ freeze over...
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.
The truth shall set you free!
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.
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)
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...one line of PERL!
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?
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?
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