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Microsoft Investing In "Open Source" Lab In Philippines
jaromil writes "Following up its cozying up to OSCON, now Microsoft is launching its first 'open source' lab in the Philippines, paying for a huge media coverage. From the press release it seems they are also advertising the issue of 'interoperability' to outnumber one of the strongest features of open source in Asia: recycling old computers. Any suggestions for good stories about MS interoperability so far? :)"
Any suggestions for good stories about MS interoperability so far? :)"
There won't be one. Because everyone knows that Microsoft are just an evil faceless (and overweight and prone to sweating in excess) corporation, am I right? :V
Knows everything about nothing and nothing about everything.
My hope is that whatever comes out of that lab will be released under the GPL, though I know that chances of that happening are very slim to no existent.
So how does this relate to real actual open source in the traditional FLOSS sense again?
Ha-ha!
http://op-for.com/simpsons_nelson_haha2.jpg
"Any suggestions for good stories about MS interoperability so far?"
Windows has interoperated with my trash can just fine. Does that count?
Wonder what the significance of being in the P.I. is? Cheap labor? Lax IP laws? Got to be something. Or maybe the Philippians is a hot-bed of OSS interest, and I'm out of the loop...
If you want news from today, you have to come back tomorrow.
How different are the IP laws in the Philippines to those of the US? Does whatever gets created there stay there? Does the US have to license the IP from the Philippines?
Why does an American company need to outsource thinking? Will Americans be expected to pay for this?
This is why I have such a dislike of "big business".
Forget for a moment the wasteful philosophy getting people to upgrade for new shiny (and I am by no means saying the 'upgraders' are guilt free).
Dismiss the fact that Microsoft has no desire to "embrace" open source -- quite the opposite, it wants to control the market with it, or rather redefine the market on its terms -- sure, you can use all of our codebase that we provide as open source, but you only get to plug-in our components, using our tools, with our licensing restrictions.
What irks me most is this marketing bullshit that gets thrown into the air. Right now, reading through the PHB technical mags and rags, one can't go an issue without seeing something on "open sourcing" saving money here, or "interoperability" brings new efficacy to the table, or "free software" causing a major paradigm shift breeding synergy in the multi-faceted workplace.
And that is what this is. It has nothing to do with functionality, and certainly if one goes by Microsoft's track record with open source, it has more to do with embrace and extend.
Now, at this point it would be easy to say: "don't condemn them yet, IBM was once seen as Satan too!" (Not withstanding IBMs frivolity in the patent market).
All I can say to that is maybe, and I damn hope them have learned their lesson. The open source community, however, has been burned far too many times with MS' carrot and the stick act.
MORDOR, Washington, Friday - Microsoft today announced carefully-phrased promises to appear more open about its business practices and technologies, so as to expand its reach through developers, partners, customers and competitors' wallets.
The interoperability principles and promises are an apparent, lengthy, reluctant, and necessary step for Microsoft's sudden efforts to fulfill the obligations outlined in the September 2007 judgment of the European Court of First Instance (CFI). And to have half a chance of getting OOXML through ISO.
"These pronouncements appear to be an important change in how we share information about our products and technologies and a significant expansion in apparent transparency," said Microsoft CEO Heave Stallmore. "While we've promised considerable progress over the past several years, today's announcement takes our virtual commitment to a new level.
"For the past thirty years, we have carefully shared misinformation with thousands of now-bankrupt partners around the world. By promoting greater interoperability, opportunity and choice, we hope to share even more of their information to our benefit. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."
Microsoft has already embraced and extended the open source paradigm to its users' personal files, which can be accessed freely by hundreds of thousands of Web sites providing self-installing keyloggers, adware, rootkits and botnets. Work is under way on a graphic markup language for more powerful commands, such as embedding an individual letter "t" with a directive to send the last ten recorded fingerprints from the user's touchpad to a Nigerian Web server.
To enable third-party developers to connect to Microsoft products, Microsoft will publish !!!for free!!! voluminous documentation, setting a new low in information per page, to contaminate developers with claimed knowledge for which their employers can later be sued, should they not cough up what Microsoft considers reasonable and non-discriminatory (or not unreasonably so) royalties. Open source developers !!!may use these protocols too!!! precisely so long as they do not do anything that involves people not giving Microsoft money.
"Microsoft's new promises will benefit the broader IT community," said Vomit Togel, head of Microsoft partner Perception Management, "where 'IT community' is defined as 'Microsoft partners.' This provides remarkable opportunity for IT consultants and increased choice of us in the marketplace."
Microsoft will expand industry outreach and dialog through a new Interoperability Forum and Fee Collection Channel. In addition, an initiative will address data exchange between widely deployed bank accounts.
"Sincerity is the key," says Microsoft founder Jill Bates III. "If we can fake that, we've got it made."
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq MNPLY) is the worldwide dominator in software, services and solutions that make people and businesses help it realise its full potential.
http://rocknerd.co.uk
This is all about making sure all Open source apps work on windows so that the likelihood of there being a killer app that won't work on windows is reduced.
The downside for Microsoft is that now OSS apps can compete directly with windows apps and eventually if they take over then managers may very well wonder why they are paying for windows if everything they use runs on Linux anyways. But that is a much slower rate of loss than you would get from a much needed app that runs only on Linux.
Uh, what's that you say...?
.... when it's on windows.
Don't hold your breath on them ever producing something that could run on Linux or BSD.
Interesting that this is being done in the Philippines. Not to trash Filipinos but IT isn't exactly what comes to mind from that region.
Make no mistake, MS is not, and will not, become a good open source citizen. The only reason they will do something like this is to defend themselves from open source.
Do you wonder why they are doing this in the Philippines? It seems likely that Open Source/Free software is taking a hold there and Microsoft is looking to build a market. Who is going to buy MS software if it's incompatible with what they are currently using (or are in the process of moving to)? This puts Microsoft out of the game. But if they can get free software developers to do the work for them and make their projects compatible with MS software, they are suddenly an option, at which point, MS can do what they do best, which is compete and destroy.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. This is no different.
Embrace: Hey, we'll join your open source club.
Extend: Now that we're compatible, why don't you run some of our software too?
Extinguish: That software of ours that you are now reliant upon? Well, here's the new version, and it doesn't work with your open source software anymore, so pay up, junkie.
No matter what Microsoft's intentions may be with regards to the open-source community, the entire Mono codebase is licensed with GPL. That is supposedly Microsoft's future wrt all the MCSEs training with Visual Studio and C#. I'm not convinced .NET is an "upgrade" from VB in terms of performance - it is more an upgrade to security wrt the dangerous and stupid things programmers have been allowed to do in VB.
Whether people upgrade to the .NET world or just start sandboxing their Windows environment is up to individual users. Microsoft's concern is keeping the need for a Window's environment because that's how they make money. The fact that they are trying to foster open source now shows that the ball game has changed because the choices are so similar now.
How is that Evolution exchange-connector working since the deal with Novell and the promise of interoperability? That's right, it isn't
Right on Microsoft! Because most of the highest quality open source software is from the Philippines! No, this isn't a country businesses look for cheap outsourcing of support call centers, or for cheap outsourcing of poorly written business web applications - its also the BEST place to innovate on open source software!
Is their plan to lower quality standards on open source software too? This would certainly benefit their business model. If they can pollute enough open source products with bad forks, maybe they'll be able to sell some of their own software again?
Well you can always ensure that if it isnt GPL'ed or a BSD or similar license that you just toss it and make your own. That is the beauty of open source and with the courts opening their eyes and curb stomping retarded software patents (ZOMG ONE CLICK!) the future might not be so bleak for open source in regards to the patent minefield as well.
09F911029D74E35BD84156C5635688C0
+2 Troll is Slashdot's way of saying groupthink is confused
Probably their first project on this lab is to fork Firefox with a new release name called Internet Explorer 9.
You can tell Microsoft is new to this... I'm pretty sure that all software from the Pacific rim is "open source", heh heh.
stuff |
The only reason those pigs are into open source in pretty much third world countries, is because they see FOSS as a threat in those countries. They are afraid that companies and government will use Linux. They should be afraid, because Linux is better than Windows.
Does this mean that they have an "open source lab" that is unlikely to produce anything with a truly open license? Perhaps its the lab that is being built using shared technologies and resources and anyone can add their own wing.
Microsoft Windows is a Free Software.
definitely smell a rat in here... these friendliness towards OSS lately (which used to be the devil, according to ms) is puzzling. ...though it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this, right now it doesn't sound too exciting.
It's just that every single one of them involve MS doing something awful and FOSS having to reverse engineer and cleanroom re-implement.
Any suggestions for good stories about MS interoperability so far? :)"
uh, opening the smb protocol to the samba project(for a 1000$ fee though and because of some anti-trust actions by the EU)
There was an interesting study recently published on word processor interoperability. Here's a link to the abstact.. A download link for the full paper is there.
They found serious interoperability issues among open source programs, and serious interoperability issues among closed source programs. The best interoperability was between OpenOffice an MS Office, ironically.
This study tested two things. One test was to make a basic ODF word processing document in OpenOffice, and then check how well other programs (free and non-free) could handle that document. The other test was similar, but using an OOXML document generated by Word 2007.
Here is the conclusion from the paper:
Here's a very informative wikipedia entry with more details on the lab.
"One thing we have got to change in our strategy - allowing Office documents to be rendered very well by other peoples browsers is one of the most destructive things we could do to the company. We have to stop putting any effort into this and make sure that Office documents very well depends on PROPRIETARY IE capabilities."
Bill Gates, 1998, in a memo to the Office product group.
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Bill_Gates#proprietary-ie-capabilities
http://antitrust.slated.org/www.iowaconsumercase.org/011607/2000/PX02991.pdf
Completely ignoring the fact the FOSS community has it's own marketing trolls, spewing lies, fear, and hatred every chance it gets.
Nothing like being a megacorporation that could expand operations outside of Redmond, but inside the US and moves to go to the Phillipines.
Their GDP PPP is $3,400.
I would agree, but this brings up an interesting question: how can something be open source and still be Windows only? Answer: somehow it depends on a certain Windows behaviour.
I had thought about the opposite: if I wanted to promote Linux by making an open-source killer app, what subtly devious thing could I do that would keep someone from porting it to Windows? I could rely on features in Linux, such as symbolic links, which don't really exist on MS filesystems. For example, I might find some excuse to set up a large number of config files, most of which are symlinks to a small number of "real" files. I could update a large number of such files by updating the contents of one or two "real" files, so that the symlinks would be updated accordingly.
To reproduce this on a MS filesystem without links, the equivalent Windows program would have to set up multiple copies of the config files, which would not only take up more space, but also not automatically update.
Not quite devious enough to enter the Underhanded C Contest, but maybe enough to try a bit of Microsoft's own game of "ours works better than yours".
I'm happy to report that Windows is fully comaptible with upgrading to Ubuntu :-).
Sounds like the island of Dr Moreau
Professor 1: Kleiner! You gotta come see this!
Professor 2: What is it?
Professor 1: This code...it's like...completely readable, and they DISTRIBUTE it that way!
Professor 2: Really?!
Professor 1: Yeah, and they do it for FREE!
Professor 2: OMG no way!
If you quote this signature there'll be 72 copies of Windows ME waiting for you in Heaven.
When one is growing up you always have one kid in the neighbourhood who doesn't quite understand how to share. You will all be sitting down playing with your toys together, playing for a few minutes with each others pride and really having a good time. Then there will be this one kid will be sitting there not sharing his toys with the group. If you ask to play with his toys he is always using it and even if by some chance you get one of his pride an joys in your hands he will then dictate how you should play with it, then you will get annoyed and just hand it back because you find you are not having fun any more for some reason. Microsoft is that kid who doesn't know how to share, it is not their fault, its the way they are and the way they have been taught survive. So when when Microsoft stands up and says "Im going to share my toys with everyone", I have to sit back and think of that kid who never shared and smile.
I'm not trying to say anything against Philippines and its Open Source developer community, but if Microsoft even tried to make it look serious they would have created the lab in one of Open Source powerhouse countries or regions. Germany, Denmark, Estonia, even Russia and East Europe countries are more known for Open Source than Philippines.
-- Sig down
My first instinct reading the summary was, well, now that they've embraced/extended the word "open" so that -- astonishingly -- their tarball of an XML format qualifies in common parlace, I suppose they'll start in on making "open source" mean something other than what it actually means.
For Act III, I don't imagine they'd have much difficulty in redefining "free software" so that it means "MS software with a price tag of $0"
My turnips listen for the soft cry of your love
I open MS Word documents in OpenOffice and one time it was readable.
Embrace.
Extend.
Extinguish.
I am the unwilling control for my Origin.
Yeah, they should all run DOS just fine...
Think of the "Microsoft open source lab" more like an "alien autopsy" lab than, say, Mozilla labs.
If Microsoft is genuinely interested in getting into open source (including adoption of the GPL or something similar) then I congratulate them. However why is it when I hear about Microsoft "doing" open source it must always be in a "lab"? To me that word implies that what they're doing is based upon unproven processes or is of the quality of something one might knock together in a university CS lab. These days I think we're a bit beyond this and people (including businesses) are taking open source products such as Linux and Apache very seriously. This stuff has a proven track record and if Microsoft is sincere they will need to drop this "lab" crap and integrate it into their day to day activities.
What annoys me most in "Microsoft going nice to Open Source" type of news is how unimportant and void this news always are. Code something and release, this and only this would be news. (I mean something better then Vista). If you just 'open lab' or 'have plans', who cares?
True interoperability comes only when all the parties involved respect open standards. And this is never possible with M$. If you are required to get a license/permission/assistance from M$ to achieve "interoperability", then that's not interoperability.
The largest prime factor of my UID is 263267.
At least they have been forced to use OUR *nix networking stack.
I know full well that tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack
There is no *nix about that... it was pulled from BSD.
The BSD stack is different than the Linux/Unix Stack.
Still, BSD is *nix, see http://en.wikipedia.or/wiki/Unix-like, but tnx for the info
I know full well that tobacco is bad for you, so I smoke weed with crack
MSFT is simply taking advantage of one of FOSS "freedoms" - namely, the principle that open source does not mean free. MSFT has nothing to lose but everything to gain as long as developers work on open source projects that operate on the perpetually proprietary Windows and Visual Studio. Sadly, with money, Wall Street, ignorant journalists and officials, and short-sighted corporations on its side, MSFT will soon OWN the word 'OPEN', just like how it stole other common, decent terms (some people actually think that MS invented SQL). FOSS advocates must create new terms to combat this psychological/cultural warfare, something like PFF - Perpetual and Forever Free license, UPOS - Unconditional Persistent Open Source agreement, etc.