Microsoft's Open Source Guru Faces Tough Fight

coondoggie writes "Microsoft's Sam Ramji is like a turkey knocking on Thanksgiving's door. Ramji has the unenviable task of stretching his neck out into the open source world as Microsoft's representative. On top of it, his employer has preheated the oven with years of hubris, sleights of hand and broken promises. Ramji's Sisyphean task was evident last week in Portland at the Open Source Conference (OSCon) and will likely be fuel for chatter at next week's LinuxWorld gathering in San Francisco."

Comments

Re:Don't be a Nevile Chamberlain.

[ianare]

Microsoft licensing under apache but especially LGPL is a small miracle.
From what I understand, the apache license and the gpl are compatible now - in the sense that something licensed under Apache2 can be brought into GPLv3.
Nevertheless their past actions will make it very difficult for open source developers to have any kind of trust.

If we create great PHP support and we create excitement among PHP developers then there is opportunity for Windows Servers, Ramji said.

:: shudders ::
Just what the world needs, more windows servers ...

Re:Shades of Gray?

[Anonymous Coward]

I met some awesome people at Microsoft, people I really respect.

Hell yeah. Tantek springs to mind. Terrific guy. He did the great Mac version of IE that Microsoft put to slow painful death for embarassing the Windows IE team.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tantek_Çelik

There will be others. There are plenty of really good people working in really shitty companies. That doesn't make the companies less shitty.

The people who give Ramji a hard time really haven't given him a chance.

Microsoft made the bed he's lying in. It's a huge bed and they've kept it burning for years. I can feel sorry for Ramji and like him as a person, but it doesn't change for a moment that he is representing Microsoft. Microsoft has worked hard to earn all the contempt and hate and distrust, and strapping a big-eyed puppy to their bumper doesn't change a thing.

Ramji is an ornament. If he was CEO there might be something to give him a chance for. As it stands, he means nothing.

And if he chooses to be their public face, then he's going to get covered is all the shit that's going to be thrown at the company he represents. Who Ramji is & how earnest he might be is completely irrelevant.

HAVE you tried it?

[GameboyRMH]

Looks serious. HAVE you tried the latest Ubuntu, or even the second latest?

If Joe Sixpack knew his computer could be fast, dead reliable and simple to use while still doing everything his Windows box can do (this is Joe Sixpack and not Joe Gamer), all for the cost of:

- One blank CD
- Learning to click on the flaming fox instead of the blue E
- Learning to clock on the purple bird instead of the little green man
- Learning to click on the road cone instead of the colorful Play button
- Learning the names of the apps in the OpenOffice suite

he'd drop Windows like a hot potato and never look back. My whiny Paris Hilton wannabe sister bitched and moaned at first when I switched her to Ubuntu (after she stole one of my partly-patched XP gaming laptops and turned it into a spyware and virus-ridden BSODing mess within 36 hours) but after a while she learned how it works and now she doesn't complain, and the laptop hasn't hiccuped once.

Re:HAVE you tried it?

[Ooblek]

edit->links, select all, break.

I usually insert a picture from a file (screenshots). But, really, this is an example of a usability problem. To an average user, they save a word document and it serializes the pictures in the document. If I'm saving the OpenOffice document as a Word version X document, it should work the same way.

To a developer, breaking links makes sense. To an average user, their reaction will be, "What is a link?"

As for a test case....well, working from memory here. I create a document, write some text, insert a screenshot from a png file, save it. When it comes time to send it to others, I try to save it in various Word export formats until I find one that decides to serialize the images in the document file itself. (If I recall correctly, the Word 95 export seems to serialize the images.)

I then load it on my Windows box with Word 2003 and the pictures are usually thumbnail size. Not always, just very often.

And you can't say "Upgrade to Word 2008" (or whatever the current version is) because reality is that most corporate users don't have control over the version they use.

(Using OO Writer 2.3.0 for this too.)

Re:Fix for keyring password prompt

[Anonymous Coward]

I had this problem recently.

Here is an easier fix for joe sixpack:

Go to System -> Preferences -> Encryption and Keyrings

Select login keyring -> Change unlock password

Set a blank password for that keyring

Its not the most secure solution, but is better than have your password in a script.

Re:Don't be a Nevile Chamberlain.

[Bruce Perens]

Rrrrrrright. Which explains why, say, Windows is chock-full of shared libraries which any developer is allowed - nay, encouraged - to leverage without obligation.

"Without obligation" pretty much isn't going to happen unless the item under discussion is public domain. Probably the most important obligation you are under as a developer is the Visual Studio EULA, here. Section 3 especially has a tremendous pile of obligation related to building stuff with its DLLs.

You've got to read those licenses! You are probably under more obligations than you think, and more than any Free Software license would give you.