Why Microsoft Cozied up to Open Source at OSCON

This year at OSCON it seemed that you couldn't throw a stone without hitting someone from Microsoft (and in fact, I'm sure several people did). They were working very hard to make themselves known, and working desperately to change public opinion of Microsoft's involvement in the open source community. Linux.com's Nathan Willis took a look at what they were preaching, with a hefty dose of skepticism, and tries to postulate what the "angle" is. Of course, the powers that be at Microsoft may have finally seen the writing on the wall and felt the pressure from Google enough to alter their strategy a bit. For now I guess we'll have to wait with guarded optimism (or laughable contempt, depending on how old/jaded you are).

Comments

Re:MS cannot be trusted

[harlows_monkeys]

*IF* MS wanted to be open source friendly, things like OOXML would just vanish

So, to be friendly to open source, they should get rid of the only open document format that can handle billions of legacy documents without losing fidelity???

Re:All together now:

[A nonymous Coward]

Microsoft has, what, 30 years of history? They earned their rep the old fashioned way, they worked hard for it, and now they are stuck with it. 30 years of Microsoft lies and thievery and fraud in general, and full time slander ("cancer", "fraud", you name it) since they first became aware of the GPL and free source software ...

It'll take more than one convention to turn their rep around.

And MS fan boys, don't accuse me of exaggeration with that "lies and thievery and fraud" until you can explain away their full history of lies and thievery and fraud.

Re:What it really looks like. All Guns Blazing.

[ibane]

I can answer all of your bullshit.

The only link I can find for 'selling inferior tools to Lotus' is to a Roughly Drafted article that, as usual, fails to cite sources. Can you provide any? I'd be interested to read them.

Email from the guy who did it has been presented in court twice. He's the one who called developers "pawns and one night stands".

You say that Microsoft actively smear advocates of freedom - can you show me one example?

Peter Quinn, RMS, Bruce Perens, Eric Raymond and so on and so forth. Anyone who stands up to M$ is smeared, directly and by proxy. Your assault on twitter is the same kind of thing and shows just how petty you bastards are.

What you call co-option others call co-operation. Can you explain why you feel that Microsoft helping Novell to create an OSS version of .NET is 'poison'?

Mono is a good example of both poison and fight feeding. It is patented and M$ will tell you that only SLED can use it. Advocacy of such crap by people like you wedge driving. You want people to waste their time developing, thinking and fighting about M$ junk. It's not going to work.

Can you give me an example of Microsoft creating fights between OSS developers? All the ones I have seen publicised on Slashdot have been the inevitable result of the politicisation of OSS and FOSS by people such as yourself.

I would describe such fights as driven by M$ misinformation. Not many people fall for it and after a decade of bullshit, more people than ever understand software freedom.

We all know you hate Vista, but what in your view is wrong with IIS and Visual Studio?

Both are only useful for Windows users and both are inferior to free software offerings.