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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