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Microsoft's Annual Report Reveals OSS Mistakes
mjasay writes "Microsoft's most recent annual report suggests that the company is increasingly coming to grips with open source, yet also seems determined to perpetuate myths about open source that poorly serve it and its shareholders. Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has suggested before that 'free software means no free soda' for Microsoft employees; but this is perhaps the first time that Microsoft has managed to enshrine its ignorance in a public document. In the annual report, Microsoft makes two primary false claims about open source: 1) Open source companies don't invest in research and development and instead largely free-ride on Microsoft's patents and copyrights; and 2) Open source projects don't innovate and instead mimic Microsoft's products. Perhaps Microsoft has forgotten its own 'innovative' past copying of markets and technologies created by Apple and others. But at least Microsoft gets one thing right: 'To the extent open source software gains increasing market acceptance, our sales, revenue and operating margins may decline.'"
A 10K report is *supposed* to have a section where the CEO lays out, in gory detail, external threats and situations on the horizon that have a significant chance of derailing their revenue plan for the next year.
What Ballmer is saying here is that
IIRC it was Marc Andressen who first hit on this tactic for competing against Microsoft, when Netscape launched the Mozilla Foundation in 1998. It took a few years of fumbling around before that took fruit - probably because the Navigator/Communicator code was so badly written - but that turned out to be a masterstroke of business tactics.
Yes, well they're not just wrong to say that FOSS never innovates, they've actually acquired patents bearing on innovations (probably) originally made by FOSS (such as the Enlightenment pager, fundamental aspects of RSS, ICCCM-like extended clipboard formats etc.) As far as I know they haven't yet used any of these patents to steal (no inverted commas) a FOSS developer's own invention and work, but it is not impossible or inconceivable that they might. Their claim that FOSS 'steals' or free rides on their copyrighted [wtf?] and patented "intellectual property" is simply despicable.
The parent post is right, Microsoft has incorporated BSD-derived code into its operating systems.
The web browser and web server were concepts and implementations that originated within the open-source community.
If MS is accusing the open-source community of absconding with its intellectual property, then why no compunction about incorporating same into their products?
Software *ideas* are just that, ideas. They should not be patented, or patentable, but that's just what's happened and has been encouraged by USPTO. Companies like MS (and many others) rode that bandwagon and have patents that one might call dubious.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
Open office is a bad replica of Microsoft Office.
Remember how hard it was getting people to switch from a CLI to a new GUI back when the first Macs were coming out? Getting people to migrate to Windows from DOS? It was hard. Now change the interface of someone's most used program, it is the same thing over again. Plus, OOo looks nothing like Office 2007, and that is part of the reason it is being adopted.
Sharp Develop is a bad replica of Visual Studio.
Again, people use familiar things.
Firefox 3 search bar and navigation button interface is derived from that of IE.
There are only a certain number of ways to improve something. For once IE got something somewhat right, so the Firefox developers took that and changed it. Guess what? The tabs in IE 7 are similar to Firefox's, which are similar to Opera's. And as for the UI, it mostly has stayed the same from Netscape onwards, and just about every browser has adopted it.
Linux desktop are inharently trying to copy Windows day by day.
Ummm... Yah. Wrong. First, take a default install of Ubuntu, one of the most popular Linux distros, you get, 2 taskbars, not like Windows, you get a package management tool, not like Windows, you get pre-installed programs for advanced image editing, word processing, etc. not like Windows. Ok, sure, you have a button on your window manager to close, minimize or maximize your window, but that is about where the similarities end.
And that isn't even dealing with the technical differences.
Taxation is legalized theft, no more, no less.
False. Somewhere around here I've still got a spool with a copy of the NCSA server and Mosaic sources from way back when. And lookee here, you can still download Mosaic source for X Windows, version 1.2 in the directory called 'old'.
A quick read of the web's history, such as the Tim Berners-Lee book Weaving the Web, and you'd *learn* that the first web browser was, in fact, open-source.
That's what the internet was founded on, open principles, not proprietary, though proprietary wasn't ever excluded. Much of the internet's infrastructure was proprietary early on, and still is. But if you're going to assert that open source software is nicking code and patents from proprietary, let's see some evidence, eh?
Don't know about tabbed browsing, though it's plain for anyone to see that MS was late to that party, and brought with it a very clunky implementation.
O lord, bless this thy holy hand grenade, that with it thou mayest blow thine enemies to tiny bits, in thy mercy.
I know it's somewhat taboo to RTFA around here, but I thought I'd compare with the summary anyway:
Article, quoting MSFT:
"Some of these firms may build upon Microsoft ideas that we provide to them free or at low royalties in connection with our interoperability initiatives."
Implication: there exist some companies that reuse some of Microsoft's ideas, reducing their costs in the process (presumably at MSFT's expense)
Slashdot summary:
"Open source companies don't invest in research and development and instead largely free-ride on Microsoft's patents and copyrights"
Implication: Microsoft claims most/all open source companies copy Microsoft's ideas and don't contribute anything
Article,quoting MSFT:
"Open source software vendors are devoting considerable efforts to developing software that mimics the features and functionality of our products, in some cases on the basis of technical specifications for Microsoft technologies that we make available."
Implication: there are open source products that look and behave very similarly to some of Microsoft's products
Slashdot summary:
"Open source projects don't innovate and instead mimic Microsoft's products."
Implication: Microsoft claims most/all open source products are copies of MSFT's products
I understand that bashing MSFT is a popular passtime around here, but when the article summaries are completely misleading, that starts to get in the way of the trustworthiness Slashdot as a whole. If Slashdot hopes to remain relevant in the longterm, it needs to make at least some effort to accurately portray the stories. Otherwise, it will eventually become the internet equivalent of tabloids, worth only the entertainment value of reading the stories+comments, and completely untrustworthy for actual facts.