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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.'"
Did anyone expect anything other than spin from MS with regards to Open Source Software? Hmmm.
There's no question that they've made some missteps in this area, but I think the tales of their demise are very, very overstated. Microsoft still has an enormous install base, and I would absolutely expect them to try and apply the "embrace and extend" approach increasingly to open source. All they have to do is get more involved in coding for OSS projects, and they can change the entire nature of the situation.
Catch telemarketers
Hmm, where did that IP stack come from? Where did they get the idea of tabbed browsing? Where did they get a web browser from? The list goes on and on. I wonder how many "patents" came from ideas inspired by open source?
The reason Microsoft is failing is that the parasite has become larger than the host.
"To those who are overly cautious, everything is impossible. "
That makes sense now. Leave peer review out of research and you get vista.
2) Open source projects don't innovate and instead mimic Microsoft's products.
They must think they invented tabbed browsing so as to not have to admit they aren't able to innovate enough to have thought of the idea on their own.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
LOL.
Money is the root of all evil?
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.
Those sound like the same point. Was it that way in the report or just in the summary... meh, not worth it to RTFA.
No comprende? Let me type that a little slower for you...
Just because Micro$oft copies doesn't mean open source doesn't.
I agree. Compiz-Fusion totally ripped Microsoft's patents to the desktop cube idea.
I just forgot how to enable it in Vista Ultimate...
Microsoft's innovations stand on their own.
Their accomplishments with active directory, for instance, are wonderful. I'd like to see the open source community come up with anything like it.
Also, their networking stack is rock solid. It would take years for the open source community to come up with anything as polished.
From the beginning, Microsoft has been an innovative company. MS Dos, Basic, I could go on and on. Their contributions to original research have truly advanced the human condition.
Open source projects are simply parasites on the innovations of microsoft. Bah!
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.
Microsoft knows that a lot of open source products overlap their patents, many of which would be dubious in court. MS is positioning itself to justify using it's patents to try and crush competing open source projects.
MS has made more money on me than if I had bought a PC with Windows pre-installed on it. I'm running a full retail version of Windows XP on my Macbook via Bootcamp. Everyone in our family is running either Office for Windows or Mac or both. BTW I also use Ubuntu and Windows 2000 via Vmware Fusion.
The originally proposed wording:
"Open source means you should sell your shares."
Just got reworked to make it easier to read.
--Q
At least they intended it to be I'm sure.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
That was a load from mjasay. Frosty Piss did not submit this one
I prefer the "u" in honour as it seems to be missing these days.
Have you used Firefox?
Not really worded as the author states, and is quite interesting - mainly the meat is the Risk Factors section where they must report the possible situations on investment/profit risk. Nothing really much there about stealing ideas, but what was omitted by the author was the probable losses incurred by MS "opening up" on some interoperability technology as well as being forced to open up other standards due to high court rulings.
They still call their Licensing "Ownership" as in Cost of Ownership... sigh.
Very interesting read.
"Enjoy what you're doing! If it becomes drudgery, you're doing it wrong!" - Jim Butterfield
Not that there's anything wrong with that.
I fail to see where Microsoft makes any "mistakes" in its filing. The statement the company made were, as far as I can tell, correct. Without making judgment calls on R&D models, it's fair to say that the proprietary-versus-open source methods are very different, and that open source products benefit from the fact that their research costs *are* distributed amongst the various contributing developers.
The filing never says that OSS companies don't spend a great deal on R&D, nor does it say that Microsoft's R&D (ie. feature development and coding) hasn't been influenced by outside factors. Therefore, I fail to see how there are any mistruths spoken here.
Keep in mind that this is SEC filing, for goodness sake, and that the questionable sections are intended to be simple, concise analyses of the competition and a few differentiating factors between them and Microsoft. I think it does that just fine.
With all the complaining we do here about the FUD inflicted on us by megacorporations, I am rather embarrassed to see us using the very same tacticts with this sort of story.
Your posting on the internet asking such a question? The irony is strong with this one.
What's wrong (or, at least, morally dubious) is that they fail to recognize what they did with the OSS-originated network stack...
Just make sure the folks at BSA do not pay you a visit.
Like this?
I hate printers.
The two statements from Microsoft in the summary is just their usual FUD. Spreading FUD doesn't mean the originator is ignorant, though.
An entire complete operating system including thousands of programs that can be freely shared far and wide at no cost by everyone, suitable for use in the tiniest embedded processors all the way to the top ranked supercomputers on Earth..and now beyond into space?
Outside of that, nothing I guess.
Thankfully, most observers are able to see through this particular line of nonsense at this point. Sadly, however, it's likely that Ballmer and other 'softies actually believe it. They're so narcissistic that they really do believe that Microsoft is the epicenter of innovation, and that it really is impossible for good ideas to come from anywhere other than Redmond.
In fact, many open source projects and products use Microsoft as a reference point for how not to design software. Call it a second mover advantage if you like.
Tired of FB/Google censorship? Visit UNCENSORED!
Such statements come from the company that has been so many times declared by Novell a benefactor and the only reason for its economic growth.
Copyright infringement is "piracy" in the same way DRM is "consumer rape"
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I've noticed that stories regarding Microsoft or Apple have difficultly cultivating constructive debate. For example...
Apple topic - The iPod design is amazing, I really want one, but am concerned about DRM. (Score:-1, Flamebait)
Microsoft topic - vista suxors!!11!!1 (Score:5, Insightful)
Would it be possible for Slashdot to have two sections? One for discussion of topics, that present conclusions based upon stated facts and assumptions. And a second section for free expression of angst, like 'Bill Gates is the Borg-Devil' or 'I want to have Steve Jobs iBaby!'.
Compatibility gets confused with copying. And when you know nothing about the history of computing, well, "UNIX? That's like DOS, right?" Because the GUIs can be made similar to Windows, because menus like OpenOffice are made similar to Office for ease of transition, because compatible file formats are often read and written, people who know nothing about the underlying structure of computers or the history of innovations can logically, if incorrectly, conclude from their experience with Windows from the earlier '90s that linux _must_ be a copy of Windows in the '00s.
They must drink alot of soda in Redmond.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
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.
Outside of development tools what major innovations has OpenSource produced?
Oh, just...
Linux Kernel - one of the worlds most stable kernels
LaTeX - Publishing industry standard
Apache - Web server, hosts large percentage of the internet
Blender - Need I say more?
Amarok - as above.
I could keep going...
I think Microsoft is absolutely right here. I mean if you see this story about what they did to BlueJ I think you'd get a better picture of what I mean.
Pot, meet Kettle.
LB
...Lorenzo / I'm into kinky crustaceans. I just discovered internet praWn.
So what MS is and has been saying is that it acquired the IP fair in square, and is properly selling it on the market, while others are just copying. Let us not dwell on the fact that is where MS was 20 years ago when Apple acquired the WIMP interface fair and square and MS copied it to run on cheaper hardware, which let us remember that Compaq created at no small expense fair and square. No, let's just look at the claims as they stand using a classic example, SQL
SQL server was aquired acquired from sybase. Is there technology here that MS can claim was part of that deal, and stolen by the OSS community. I think not. SQL was developed by IBM and what is now Oracle, and was standardized, I believe, in the mid 80's. The two big OSS competitors, mSQL and PostreSQL were both independently developed by teams concurrently with the Sybase product and opensourced, partly or otherwise, by their creator. I am sure that both not include features that MS SQL has, but I would also guess that Oracle or IBM has the features first.
In the end MS problem is simply that they are not 2-3 years ahead of the curve. When this happened to SGI, they went bankrupt. A firm simply cannot charge a premium for this years technology. In the case of software, this is because the OSS people can do the same thing, for free. MS Office is simply too mature to be a profit center. MS Server is simply relatively too low tech. Even the X Box is not at the front of the pack, at least not by more than six months.MS has some traction through collaboration, and they can continue to make money there, but complaining about the loss os MS Windows market share is silly. They had the chance the database file system, but for some reason they did not provide enough resources. This in itself proves that they are not innovative.
MS will lose customers because they are lazy. They will continue to have enterprise customers, they will continue to have the gaming market. We will see the general desktop and server market move away from them unless they come up with something big or go back to their roots as the cheap solution. We see this in the emerging $100-$200 portable market. If this will provide the growth the stock market wants is yet to be seen.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
In a surprising twist, Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has admitted yesterday that Free Software is the cause of better than average health for Microsoft employees. "Free software means no free soda" is the new catch cry at the Redmond, WA software powerhouse.
"We used to offer our developers free soda, and never thought about the health consequences", said Ballmer while rocking on a designer chair. "Then one day, one of our employees installed Linux on his workstation, which also happened to run the in-house Visual Basic control panel that overrides all the networked soft drink machines on the campus. Suddently, people couldn't get their Mountain Dew anymore, unless they actually paid for it themselves".
Ballmer went on to explain that the programmer who wrote the soda control software had left years ago, and nobody could replace him. Soft drinks were left in the machines for months and morale went down at first among the employees, but soon picked up again when a drop in the monthly rate of deaths from heart failure was noticed. "Free software is like a virus that actually helps you", Ballmer said. "With the money we saved in ambulance fees, I bought every employee a free yo-yo, and even had enough money left over for a new chair. Way to go, Free Software, we love ya!" Former CEO Bill Gates declined to comment.
"open source software doesn't innovate"
Ha! The article directly below this one states that someone has developed an app to graph or diagram SQL statements... Now, that's innovation - and it didn't require any Microsoft products to be harmed during testing or development!
Oh by the way, the Internet itself is an open source effort and I can't imagine anything more innovative or groundbreaking than the most advanced communications medium ever created!
The 0ne-eyed man is King
Those who would preserve GPL software from the end of copyrights for software need to realize that the end of copyright preserves the four freedoms (Yes, it's a FSF reference, no, I didn't link it wrong).
Be careful what you wish for.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
It took "innovations" like Firefox to finally get the monolithic Microsoft of its collective ass and FINALY update their aging browser after letting it hold back the internet for about half a decade.
I guess you forgot some Desktops aren't MS based in the least. NeXt is so much more fun to copy =)
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
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.
If they copied ideas from Apple how is open source community any different when it blatently copies Microsoft products?
When the OSS community copies, they don't call it "innovation".
This is a subtle point that seems to be missed by a lot of folks. People copy. It's to be expected. That's how technology works; you build on ideas that have come before yours.
OSS embraces this (as do others - but we're making this a binary conversation). Microsoft claims they exist in a vacuum, developing things that wouldn't exist without their efforts alone.
Who do you think funds this OSS RnD? There's a mixture of big and small names that contributes to this stuff.
It's useful to recognize the differenc. A mistake is where you don't know any better.. misformation is where you intend that others not know any better. This is clearly an example of the latter.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
An entire complete operating system including thousands of programs that can be freely shared far and wide at no cost by everyone, suitable for use in the tiniest embedded processors all the way to the top ranked supercomputers on Earth..and now beyond into space?
Outside of that, nothing I guess.
yes, but does it run linux?
VLC FOR MAC IS DYING! IF YOU DEVELOP, PLEASE SAVE IT!!
They barely grasp the concept of 'open source', and almost totally reject that. Asking them to understand the 'free as in freedom' issue may be too much.
seriously, when was the last time microsoft innovated?
1) Open source companies don't invest in research and development and instead largely free-ride on Microsoft's patents and copyrights;
I say Microsoft cannot sue. If they could, they would've already done it. I think if Microsoft sues, they are either afraid that they'll get sued for the free-ride they've been enjoying or they simply do not know who or how to sue. OSS isn't really making any money. OSS is not a company. Yes, MS could sue, say, Redhat, but Redhat is not equal to or represent in anyway OSS itself, and I doubt Redhat really does that much IP damage since most of their business is distributing what others have made and providing support - they are not burning CDs of Windows, if you will. Then sue GNOME or KDE? Can't. Sue kernel developers? How? For what? They would have to go project to project performing drive-by lawsuits which will all be tedious and expensive and very unrewarding.
Like all annual reports, these are self-published documents designed to serve the appetites of shareholders. So anything written in it should be viewed with that in mind. It is not a tech document or a fact sheet. It is a spin sheet.
> Hmm, where did that IP stack come from?
I assume you mean the code, but you could also go a step higher and ask: where did the IP protocol stack itself come from ? The whole of the internet, WWW, email, HTML etc is built on Open Standards. That is why it is so successful. MS just added a proprietary front-end to it !
Shareholder reports are usually the most gloomy documents known to man. A corporation is liable if something goes wrong and they didn't warn the shareholders in the quarterly report, so the reports typically cover *every conceivably thing* that could possibly go wrong. It's not the sort of thing you want to put spin into. I can't understand why they would be doing it...
To make laws that man cannot, and will not obey, serves to bring all law into contempt.
--E.C. Stanton
With the Earth's population rising, I think it could be possible for MS to continue growing in size and profits, while OSS grows in market share.
Outside of that, nothing I guess.
Wha? no, you're leaving out all the cool non-development-oriented Free Software created in UNIX such as X and TeX/LaTeX, which were already mature software before Linux was even born. And given that they still are, decades after their creation, still the "industry standard" in their respective markets, they certainly qualify as "major".
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
"Our business model has been based upon customers paying a fee to license software that we develop and distribute .. Certain "open source" software business models challenge our license-based software model..."
I do believe MS has been drinking too much of its own koolaid. If they really believe this then they are only deluding themselves. That their current business model is under attack is a given, but not from the Open Source sector. I mean how many times can you sell the same GUI, web browser and email client to the same people. The only real innovation they do is making each new version of Windows more bloated than the previous version, forcing the endusers to buy a new computer year after year. They also manage to make their older formats incompatible with the 'newer' software. That you see the writing on the wall is evident in your "software as a service" sector.
The WinTEL PC is obsolete and people would have moved onto smaller embedded Internet aware devices if it wasn't for your repeated actions in stifling the market. Twenty years of CrapWare. That a bunch of hobbyists working in their garage can produce applications that equal anything Microsoft has produced tells us just how lacking in the innovation department you really are. Anything you ever produced you only ever leeched of the academic sector.
davecb5620@gmail.com
Almost no one realizes that R&D has only a tiny sliver of R of it, and the rest of it is D. And by Development, they mean everything - developer/tester/program manager salaries, computers, costs of running the buildings and datacenters, IT, etc. So it's not like they spend $7B just on Microsoft Research. Last I heard, MSR costs something like $300M a year. And stuff from there does end up in products every now and then.
Sharp Develop is a shitty ripoff of Visual Studio, because it is a shitty ripoff of Visual Studio.
Woah, I'm convinced!
On a more serious note, if you wish to be taken seriously you should actually respond to the person you're replying to, addressing their statements specifically, not restating general claims and ignoring anything you may disagree with.
Well, if you don't see any of it in products, I'm curious what you call R&D? 'Cause unless I'm mistaken, it means exactly that: Research and Development. It's the first step in the chain that then goes through Manufacturing and later Marketing.
So normally even stuff like developing a new product (say, the XBox 360) does count as R&D. When Ford comes up with a new car, even if it's not revolutionary in any way or aspect? That's R&D. When NEC or Samsung come up with a new TFT, only this time with LED backlight? That's R&D. When Seagate announces a new line of HDDs, only this time with higher density (i.e., pretty much a smaller head and more precise mechanics)? That's R&D too.
Technically even writing a program, any program, is R&D. (That's a mistake many PHB's do: thinking that programming is manufacturing and can be treated and measured like assembly line work.) Manufacturing is when you press the CDs and print the manuals and box it, later. So if none of MS's R&D made it into a product, they pretty much wouldn't have a product.
So, yes, MS does invest in R&D. Now if you're trying to say that they never made some major scientific breakthrough, we can agree on that. But then most other companies don't, either. And I don't remember many fundamental breakthroughs from the F/OSS camp either. They too just tweak a little here and there and occasionally put lipstick on a pig... err... skins and transparencies on the same old program. Not condemning it in any way, but let's not pretend that the latest release of KDE or Firefox are comparable to discovering Penicilin or Quantum Mechanics. It's R&D anyway. And it's still R&D when MS does it.
And yes, occasionally R&D does produce a dud like Vista. Well, that's the inherent risk of it. It happens to other companies too.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So when they do include software for free, they are killing markets and competing unfairly (ie, wmp...) when they aren't doing it, they clearly lack features found elsewhere.
No. They are killing markets and competing unfairly when they tie their resellers into illegal licensing deals which prevent anyone from bundling other competing applications except the ones which Microsoft supply.
In other words, supplying Internet Explorer for free with Windows was not the problem. The problem was that no OEM was allowed to pre-install Netscape on the same terms.
"we know everything, we make no mistakes, we are the computer industry, when it goes wrong, it is everybody else's fault, they stole it from us"
How soon, if ever are the OEMs going to wake up a realise they own the desktop market. They could dispense with Microsoft tomorrow and the endusers wouldn't even notice.
davecb5620@gmail.com
This company lack of any common sense of ethics is just becoming a real case of concern as their "dominance" is now on the decline. Microsoft will finish like another company who was selling some *nix derivative who is now trolling the patent system...
People who live in glass houses shouldn't throw stones.
I run Windowmaker and I don't even HAVE a taskbar.
Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
Indeed. What have the Romans ever done for us?
"Nine times out of ten, starting a fire is not the best way to solve the problem." - my wife
it's funny how that happens, since gnome is nothing like the windows gui. If anything, it tries to somewhat imitate the osx gui (which can also be said for windows)
1. Because it _is_ R&D. Manufacturing is where you already have a detailed blueprint of what cog/transistor/thingamabob goes where, and you just have to take it from bin A and stick it into hole B. And move on to do the same thing verbatim again. And again.
In programming, the equivalent would be, I don't know, copying someone else's program by hand. It makes no sense. If you have to make the same program again, you just make a copy it, you don't go through the assembly line to make an identical one from scratch. Even bits and pieces, whatever you need again, you don't program verbatim again. You move it to some library class and call it from there. Or it's already included in the compiler or standard library.
Programming isn't manufacturing and it makes no sense for it to work like manufacturing does. There is no mechanical taking a cog from here and placing it there, and knowing in advance exactly which cog, where, and how much time it takes. The whole exercise is, every single time, designing the whole mechanism in the first place.
Just because the manufacturing step is missing, or trivial (e.g., just pressing the CDs), it doesn't mean you can move back one step and proclaim the development stage to be manufacturing. It's just about as silly as, if a river has no delta, moving back a step and proclaiming the whole actual river to be a delta.
But that's what some incompetents do. They learned how to manage an assembly line, and then they re-christen a whole different thing an assembly line if they don't have one. Sorta, when your only tool is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail.
2. It's not even the only one. There have been plenty of other cases where only one piece of something was built, and it was basically the prototype at the end of R&D. It may have been an actual manufactured product, but nevertheless the manufacturing step has been missing or never done, and the "product" was the prototype built by R&D.
As an infamous case, and a botched project at that, take the Vasa. The design had been experimented with and tweaked right until it was put to sea. (And it sank.) If it were a software project, it would have been pulled out of the sea and "debugged" until it works. And it still would have been an R&D stage, rather than mechanical repetitive manufacturing.
Or take the atom bomb dropped on Hiroshima. There was no assembly line, and (unlike the Nagasaki one) not even testing. It was a prototype right out of R&D. The fact that it was actually used, doesn't make the whole process any less R&D.
So basically again, it seems to me like just a case of some people not wrapping their heads around a different beast. They learned in school that if you have a product at the end it's manufacturing, and if that step is missing, they'll re-christen something else as manufacturing. Just so it fits their mental model.
3. Well, that's still no excuse for incompetence. If an industry works differently enough from others, managing it must fit the reality of the industry, not try to warp the industry to fit the pre-existing mind-set.
Basically, imagine if I came from agriculture, and started managing a car production plant. And went, "no, no, no, see you have to plough the land outside the factory and bury some cars as seeds." Wouldn't you think I'm retardedly incompetent and have no business managing a factory like it's a farm? Well, I'm thinking the same about those who manage R&D as if it were an assembly line.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Firefox 3 search bar and navigation button interface is derived from that of IE.
It is? The search bar has been there since at least Firefox 1.0, and I don't remember IE having it back then. The rest of the user interface has looked pretty much the same all the way since Netscape 1.0.
So what did Firefox derive from IE?
Linux desktop are inharently trying to copy Windows day by day.
Like what? I use Gnome, and it surely isn't a lot like Windows. Sure, it has windows, icons, menus and a pointer, but so have almost every single graphical user interface for the last 20 years.
I've read MS's policies about licensing software over and over, and their ruinous shortsightedness about the kind of benefits that OSS brings to the market has inspired me to change some policies in an internet company I'm forming.
;-)
One of the side effects of the algorithms I'm writing for my company is that I'm *also* writing some very useful code that could be easily incorporated into OSS apps. Though I've thought about patenting those algorithms, I'd like to know whether or not you all think that releasing my code into the wild to benefit others while publicizing my work is a better business model than retaining the rights to it?
From what I've seen, I am coming to believe that patenting my algorithms might provide me with a short-term benefit (if GoogleYahooMicrosoftLexCorp wants to buy the patents), but that publicizing them might be a better business strategy in the long run.
I think, however, that trademarking makes more sense; if someone clicks on a link with my graphic design or logo, they should be assured that they'll actually GET to my site, as opposed to someone else filching my business's logo to redirect customers to their site. I don't particularly WANT to sue people, but I want to protect my company's image (GIF, not rep
Does the release of my code and algorithms into the wild make more sense? Will the OSS community embrace a business model that is actually trying to do a better job at what it does than any other site, rather than trying to shut out all competition by locking down an idea in patent regulation?
I "have a friend" who has occasionally forayed into downloaded books, music, and movies. This "friend" notes that she has paid quite a bit of money for books and music from artists she has grown to know after trying out their content beforehand. I am of the opinion that publicizing your work makes far more sense than trying to close it off, and that patenting ideas and locking down content causes resentment and frustration among people who would otherwise have enjoyed doing business with you (I'm pointing a finger at YOU, Metallica!).
On the other hand, it IS a business, and I don't want to scare off investors by engaging in creating a business that has no chance of succeeding because anyone can take my idea and sink money into it.
I don't want to commit Microsoft's sins, but I also don't particularly want to spend years building an unprofitable business only to have Yahoo blitz an ad campaign for their own version of my idea.
Ideas? Comments? Encouragement?
You may be joking, but I think something similar to WINE might be Microsoft's best approach to fixing Windows:
Redesign/clean up the OS without too much regard for backwards compatibility, then put a WINE-like compatibility layer on top.
C - the footgun of programming languages
Just for the record though, RMS has stated many times that the decision to base GNU on Unix was a technical one, not a preferred one.
One might add to this that before GNU, RMS was working on the Lisp machine and its window system.
The GUI toolkit he had developed was more powerful than Swing, Qt, or Gnome, and easier to program. The object system he was working on put AOP and Groovy to shame.
The fact that this software became proprietary despite his objections was what prompted him to develop GNU. And he based it on UNIX and C because he correctly realized that the world wasn't ready for advanced GUIs or advanced OOP. It's taken 20 years for people simply to accept basic single inheritance systems and garbage collection.
The people behind GNU were technical pioneers; they consciously kept things simple with GNU because they knew they were building software for the unwashed masses of programmers.
That's the first time I've ever heard I'm a sockpuppet. It's especially funny since I've been accused of working for MS by Twitter numerous times.
To bring it back to gp train of thought, think of OSS being funded by micro-payments (stupid term, but effective for this purpose). Each user/developer that helps debug or feature add in their own time, is making a micropayment to the relevant project. Individually poor, collectively rich.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
You know, claiming the Internet itself is an open source effort tends to discredit your argument. There are thousands of sources involved in the development of the Internet as it is today, many of which have nothing to do with open source. It certainly didn't originate with the idea of open-source. It originated with a government program. Further additions have come from both the public and private sector. To call it an open-source effort is to add your own inaccuracies and deceptions.
This is a discussion about Microsoft's annual report and their view of OSS, this has nothing much to do with their latest product.
It's entirely relevant. Vista OS, Linux OS. Who would have thought that the basis of microsoft's monopoly would marked OffTopic as another way to bash vista. You anti-corporate types are getting way out of hand.
This is my sig.
Open source is not just a term for the IT world my friend... Open source is a term that represents the free exchange of ideas and "innovations". The fact that we all work together to actually make the Internet possible makes the Internet an open source effort. No, we don't write code to make the TCP/IP stack or write code for Cisco routers, but we do create our own blogs, articles, and links that essentially build the Internet. If it were not for people like me and you adding our content (just like a programmer adds code) the Internet would just be a bunch of websites created by corporations like Microsoft. The Internet IS and open source involvement because it is developed by a community just as software is developed by a community...
dreamchaser also spells Microsoft without the $ in his journal.
Gasp! Twitter must be on to us! He is starting to use normal English in an attempt to pass a sockpuppet off as human!
Also, I think I have discovered twitter's real identity. He is obviously Adam Weishaupt!
Really, I know that twitter's sockpuppets get annoying, but lets try to not jump on everyone who replies to him and accuse them of sockpuppetry. They could just be newbies who don't know about twitter, or they might know about him and just not pay attention to whom they are replying.
The creator of this post (Jacob Smith) hereby releases it, and all of his other posts, into the public domain.
It's also funny how the current iteration of Gnome has been around longer than Vista... Lets face it we have been hooked on flamebait.
Semi-automatic amateur armchair Australian philosopher; conjecture ready at any moment...
And both try very hard to look like either Windows or the Mac.
While I do realize that there is a lot of R&D done in the open source world... there is also a lot of imitation being done interface wise.
What I think is being forgotten here is... MS didn't write the report for you or for any other even slightly savvy person. They wrote it for the investors and for the less knowledgable people who are more likely to give them their money now that they have been "shown the light" by the "all-mighty" Microsoft.
Sometimes ignorance compounds itself.
GC
Gregory Casamento
## Chief Maintainer for GNUstep
Claiming that "well, they do it too!" is a poor excuse for being a copy-cat. Certainly Microsoft (and Apple) have "borrowed" ideas from other companies -- and Gnome and KDE try to be just like Windows and OS X. Oh, you can say that KDE has such-and-such that Windows doesn't, or that doing something is easier on Gnome -- but in the end, it's pretty much the same old stuff.
We can't make Open Source better if we don't recognize its weaknesses -- and one weakness (among several) is a lack of truly original R&D in mainstream FOSS applications.
No one OS or application is perfect. And so my desktop has two computers on it, one running Vista and the other running Gentoo Linux, giving me the the best of both worlds. And as long as the free software community insists on turning a blind eye towards its own problems (which include a lack of innovation), I'll need both of those computers to get my work done.
All about me
I was an early coordinator for the Info-Zip Workgroup (which developed the first "universal" multi-platform PKZIP-compatible open-source public domain zip and unzip utilities).
I've often wondered, once I saw the .zip "compressed archive" capability in Windows appear, where the code came from. I can't believe MS back-engineered and re-invented all that themselves. But I sure don't see any obligatory "Info-Zip" signature in the binaries.
Oh well ... at least the capability is there. But a decent company would've given credit where credit was due.
Maybe they _did_ rewrite it all. One never knows. But it sure doesn't seem very likely. You don't make all the money MS has made by doing things the hard way.
Toad
Ahh yes, another Evangelical Atheist pointing out the "One True Way". Hypocrisy FTW!
A perfect example of the achilies heel of open-source..
[Sir Garlon] is the marvellest knight that is now living, for he destroyeth many good knights, for he goeth invisible.
Well, you can't blame people for using you as a punchline. You've earned it.
Web2.0: I love when people Flickr my cuil and digg my boingboing until my google is reddit and I start to yahoo
I don't understand why people are grabbing onto this "free software" idea as if it is an entitlement. I mean, what if I said all lamps should be free. How would that make sense? Yet with software somehow it is a great idea. What is next calls for "free health care" as if it to is a right? Grow up people, life requires you work and effort, it is insane to assume otherwise, because doing so means you are a selfish prick living off of other people's work and efforts.
Respect the Constitution
The only real innovation they do is making each new version of Windows more bloated than the previous version
You cannot believe that
Visual Studio (It is one of the best, if not the best IDE out there and is reasonably priced. OK, yes I do use Eclipse, but VS is much more solid, cleaner and has great features that speed development/troubleshooting.)
Exchange (Hands down better for office resource management and scheduling than any other product out there.
Respect the Constitution
In other words, "We see the train coming, but we aren't going to do anything to modify our business strategy and are instead just going to stay in the middle of the tracks and get clobbered." It is frustrating to read ignorance from people who are in charge of billions of dollars in operating revenue. Change is inevitable and either you recognize that and get with the program, or you attempt to fight and it get taken apart.
I always hate to try to predict the future, but it seems to me like most of the "killer apps" for the commerical world have already been developed. There are only so many ways to efficiently do business, a limited number of ways to effectively collaborate, a fairly limited number of communication channels, etc. The applications to get things done have already been developed. Those applications are the office suites, the email applications, the webservers with their wiki's and document respositories, the databases to glue everything together. For the most part, it is already all there. The foundation has been laid. Most of what is taking place right now is polish and fine tuning. Any lead that Microsoft has will continue to decline as competitors continue to improve upon the foundation that is already there.
At the risk of being flamed to the 9th circle of hell here on /. lets be honest with ourselves, Linux = innovative. Open Office = pretty blatant rip off. Microsoft has a point. They innovated their way to dominance over Word Perfect with Word, and they innovated their way to dominance over Lotus 123 with Excell. And Open Office is just a rip off of the Office suite, plain and simple. That being said, its one hell of a good one. And yes I fully acknowledge that MSFT has indeed ripped off its fair share, as well as used its monopoly to, well monopolize... but they did not get to where they are out of pure evil. They actually did some good things along the way, and one of them was Office (well, at least until the most recent version).
You have invited a lot worse than the 'attacks' I've made upon you by your constant trolling and abuse of the system here. I honestly hope you get help someday though, because unlike you I'm not a vindictive asshole.
".NET Framework (The concept of the CLR for multiple languages .."
..
.. IDE out there .."
..
.."
.. :)
A virtual machine + a cross-compiler + an interpreted mode, like in BASIC
".Visual Studio
Yea, it's an IDE with losts of pre-fabricated bits, great for RAD development, as long as you don't know what you're doing. God forbid you actually have to look at the code
".Exchange
A GUI email + collaboration client, I don't use it, I've seen the staff use it, they're so busy updating their little boxes that they don't have time to do any real work
davecb5620@gmail.com