Slashdot Mirror
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."
I'd like to know what it would take for Microsoft to actually back up those claims with proof in a public forum. But that's probably a question for Steve Ballmer, since he's the one who seems to flog the patent FUD.
OTOH, I have contracted at Microsoft (once as a dev doing an intranet site for a testing lab, once being the editor in charge of a couple of sections of the MSW homepage), and it's an interesting culture there. It's not the Death Star with Ballmer walking around, periodically strangling people with his mind just to show who's boss.
In a company that big you can't escape the control freaks and evidence of The Peter Principle, but you also have people there like my manager on the intranet site contract, who was the best manager I've had in the 23 years since I started having managers. For all the greed and arrogance people here like to claim go into Microsoft products, there are a lot of people who are there because they love what they do and Microsoft gives them the opportunity to get paid well for doing it. I met some awesome people at Microsoft, people I really respect.
I switched to Mac to avoid Vista. I use NeoOffice instead of MS Office. But I can say that despite some of the aura of badness Microsoft gives off as a company, there are people there who are truly dedicated to the company being a good citizen, putting out good products, and getting along with others. The people who give Ramji a hard time really haven't given him a chance.
Start a happiness pandemic
why can't we just ignore them? I mean seriously, if there is one thing we (oss guys) can agree on... SURELY this is it. For many years, hate for M$ has been the only thing that the free software community could agree on.
why can't the entire free software crowd just stand up and say "No thanks", we aren't interested in what you have to say.
if you think that M$ will ever help free software in any meaningful way, you obviously haven't been paying attention over the past couple decades.
there is good news in this though. M$ is obviously noticing that every day there are people installing linux who used to use window$. They know that linux on the desktop is closing the gap and many other companies stand to profit from it. After years of pretending OSS didn't exist, or worse yet, attacking it in underhanded ways, they don't have a piece of the action. This whole M$/oss thing, just means they are realizing there is a chance that maybe OSS really IS the next big thing.
My prediction is that a huge company with unlimited resources like google will package up a nice, distro, call it something flashy, advertise the hell out of it, and give it away for free. I am well aware of the options that already exist, but the average person is not. It takes flashy marketing to capture the market.
how can M$ possibly compete with other companies who come in at a price point nearly $0, with a better product, a good ad campaign, AND profit margins of nearly 100%? They can't. Someday the house of cards will fall. They know it, they think, they can adapt by getting involved with OSS. They will fail because we hate them.
Obama is a twitter sock puppet
Yeah. Apache, Firefox, MySQL, Asterisk, PHP, Wikipedia, BIND, Postfix: all COMPLETE FAILURES.
Utter crap that nobody ever uses, right?
I was there when he was being grilled at the final keynote. Honestly, O'Reily (the OSCON sponsor) had to ask people to *STOP* asking the MS representative tough questions... but he even gave the harder questions a go. Not everyone wass going to be happy with the answers, but... they won't ever be, right? It's coming from the Ebil Micro$oft, afterall.
MS is changing with the times, as any successful corporation really must. There are even some pretty compelling business reasons for this, I'll wager. For instance, MS can (I presume) distribute this "free" software without typical development costs (and I presume it wouldn't hurt them to distribute the source code for these free utilities). They can instead focus their developers on ensuring that FOSS interacts and is integrated well with their products and services. They even receive free bug fixes and are likely to contribute bug fixes themselves.
Evidence of this business practice is emerging even now: MS is a platinum sponsor for Apache, and contributed a MSSQL patch to ADOdb (BSD license, not MS). Of course, MS isn't the only large corporation doing this (Sun, HP, IBM, Google, etc).
Well, at least, that's my theory for the sudden about-face.
I know you will hate me but, in all seriousness, I had actually hoped Bill Gates would leave Microsoft and go into politics. I have my reasons and I'll keep them short.
A country is about a lot of things and one of the most important things is about keeping the majority of the people happy. Honestly? The vast majority of Windows users are quite happy. We, here, probably wish that they weren't but they are.
There comes a time when a government must do things that go against their normal routine. Bill would likely have done all sorts of unethical things to help return the United States of America to its former glory but it would have served us, the citizens, well.
His ability to make wise choices is not something we can really argue about if we look at reality. We might not *like* his choices but they accomplished what he'd intended which was to make the computer a personal device that anyone could have and make himself and his company filthy rich. He did that quite well.
I wouldn't want him as a more than a single term president. I'm hoping that the people who read this know the difference between Ballmer and Gates. I wouldn't want Ballmer running my local PTA honestly but I really think the business acumen demonstrated by Bill would do a great deal to getting our country to the point where it is stable again.
I can picture it now...
Bill: We're spending WHAT on WHAT???
Aide: Millions per day on the war that people don't like, sir.
Bill: No patch in sight?
Aide: None from the generals on the field sir.
Bill: Well, screw it. Bring the boys home, let 'em rest up, and tell the world to wait for SP1.
"So long and thanks for all the fish."
They are coming. Their are quite a few of them, but they are coming. Remember what I said about "Preventing the last year of open source and Linux?" While Linux is strong now, do realize that we got a break.
In Vista, I expected the Harbinger of Linux's Doom. I expected another Windows 2000. I was pleasantly surprised how bad Vista turned out.
We got a break, we got lucky, and Linux will survive to fight another day, but the monsters are still out there. At this point, Linux needs to focus on combating OSX. Apple is as lethal a threat as M$ is.
LGPL isn't GPL. You can still "embrace and enhance" LGPL code. GPL is the real test.
Bruce Perens.
So we should be welcoming, give them a drink of the kool-aid and treat them like one of the gang. Its going to be hard and we'll have to keep an eye out for deception, but I think we should start playing nicer with them and hope that they do the same.
"If your enemy is hungry, give him food to eat; if he is thirsty, give him water to drink. In doing this, you will heap burning coals on his head, and the LORD will reward you." - Proverbs 25:21-22 (NIV)
I've always liked that passage. :-)
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
Until there are actions made by Microsoft that benefits open source in general everything Microsoft does in OSS should be taken with a large dose of skeptisism. Its all PR.
As long as their goal is to obliterate any competition, kill partners any time it gives a benefit and screw their customers over they shouldnt be allowed to be in our community. While we play nice they spend their time trying to come up with new ways of controlling or killing the open source movement.
HTTP/1.1 400
I'm afraid that right now I have no choice but to agree.
For instance, a few days ago I have decided to help the KDE project by picking up the translation; the Croatian translation team has been inactive for the past year or so.
I have found several people willing to translate, too; in addition, I would undertake to make it all consistent by designing a (semi-)controlled language, as it would combine well with my graduation thesis.
When it became apparent that my views on translation were rather different from the inactive team's coordinator's views, things became nasty.
I will see tonight whether things can be resolved; if not, I guess the KDE project will remain incompletely and overall rather poorly translated to Croatian, while people use the equally poorly, but more completely translated Microsoft products. And I mean equally, because the inactive team's coordinator also localized Microsoft products.
Ignore this signature. By order.
I must be new, here.
Diplomacy is diplomacy. Throwing [Pick your weapon]s only serves to reinforce the idea that we have nothing to offer them, and anything they try to offer us will just get rejected, anyway.
So go on, make your self-fulfilling prophecy. I'm sure you'll have more fun doing it. Sometimes I wonder if the really hardcore open source people are about empowering the end user or empowering themselves.
Perhaps Microsoft would see the light and become friendlier to open source and open standards. Unlikely, but so was getting Excel working under Linux through Wine if you asked someone 10 years ago.
Are you saying the WINE project has had help from Microsoft? I wasn't aware of anything like that going on.
What possible use is their in having MS on your side anyway? All they've demonstrated themselves to be good at is writing consistently shitty software. They're a joke. All major business held back from using Vista "until SP1 comes out", and then by the time that it did come out, most still didn't see any benefit in it. I'm quite happy that some of the world has shown that it understands that the latest version isn't always the best :)
which is totally what she said
100% classic, real-deal bonafide /. article this- can't resist commenting! :D
MS would need to first (L)GPL at least XP/2000, Vista, VB/C#/.NET and Office to the fullest extent possible before the free software community will even listen to a word that they or any of their infiltrators may have to say. Until then we'll carry on using Linux, xorg, gcc, OOo etc. and tools that protect our freedom to compute as we like.
Simple!
I actually prefer keeping Microsoft around as a slightly-more-popular option. It's sort of like putting a pile of rotten flesh and garbage in a trough and letting the zombies feed while the rest of us party at the mall.
bluHatter
* Learn to manually set the MTU of the ppp0 interface when connecting to a pptp VPN at the office since the VPN setup effectively ignores the MTU setting. Although this makes certain things just not work properly when the remote end ignores requests to fragment, it is not a priority to fix apparently.
* Figure out how to make ndiswrapper load the wireless interface drivers on his laptop. Even though there are wireless drivers for the wireless nic, they don't work. You have to download the Windows package, extract the ndis driver from it, and then follow some cryptic commands to get the ndiswrapper kernel module to load it.
* Teach his 4 year old kid how to enter the keyring password so that the wireless WPA key can be retrieved when the kid's gaming computer starts up that is down in the kitchen with a wireless card. Though ubuntu has a nice option of auto login (since kids that young might not know how to type a username and password in) so that he can put links on the desktop that the kid can click to go to Barney's website and such, auto login doesn't count as entering the password. So he can figure out a way to put a script hack in where he has to put in his password IN PLAIN TEXT to get around the prompt for the keyring password.
* Try using open office and embedding pictures in a word processing document, only to find that Microsoft Word (which everyone else at the office uses) either can't load the pictures or the pictures come out scaled to thumbnail size. But, you have to export it in like Word 95 format to at least get the thumbnails.
* He can continually wonder WHY THE HELL DOES FLASH KEEP LOCKING UP FIREFOX? Seriously, after a few LiveLeak or YouTube videos, you have to force-quite the browser and reload it. WTF?
I use Ubuntu 90% of the time now, but I'm no Joe Sixpack. The open source community has its own hubris that is, quite frankly, annoying.
I mean, seriously, all the open source people are rabidly anti-microsoft and insistent that anything they can do OSS can do as well or better. All this forcefully exerting how idiotic it is to use MS products culminates in end users finally moving over to OSS. Then....
They inevitably have problems or encounter bugs. They ask, sometimes not nicely, the project community to fix the bugs, only to be met with: "This type of attitude really irks me. You get all this stuff for free, you can fix it yourself or pay someone to fix it."
It was YOUR agenda that brought the users here, make them WANT to stay here rather than giving up and going back to Microsoft. Ubuntu is nice and useful as long as you know how to deal with these little usability quirks and annoying bugs. Supporting non-developers on OSS still SUCKS.
I don't think an Ubuntu style OSS OS will ever be successful with Joe Sixpack. For one thing he requires a massive marketing campaign (see iphone). For another, OSS is developed by geeks. Windows and OSX development is ultimately driven by marketing and sales people. The developers give them what they think they can sell to the masses. The one place where a client OS could gain traction is in the business world, where the price may be attractive. But even there, a surprising amount of proactive marketing and selling is required. I have seen many cases where an obviously superior solution has been beaten out by the slick corporate effort at literally 10 times the price.
Of course, on the server side technical superiority and price are fairly compelling. But even there, not to the average IT drone. Nobody ever got fired for buying Microsoft.
You're not looking. Start with the web server and browser. The first ones were Open Source. If you want something more recent, look at Ruby on Rails. Much faster than Java as far as time-to-market is concerned. Look at Linux. Runs on an incredible number of architectures, from watches to supercomputers. Nobody knew you could do that before. Look at the Open Source development paradigm itself. Did anyone know you could build software with a distributed team of people who never met, and the result would be fit for mission-critical work so well that it would fly in space? I could go on.
The problem with employees is that their direction is set in advance. The people who do not have those constraints are free to innovate.
Bruce Perens.