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? :)"

Comments

GPL

[bogaboga]

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.

Re:GPL

[Ghubi]

I think the Microsoft Public License or the Microsoft Reciprocal License might be more likely.

Re:GPL

[gbjbaanb]

this isn't a lab like that - MS has several similars labs, eg the performance lab I attended once.

This is a place where you can bring your open source apps and test them working against MS products. eg, if you made an Outlook clone, you could bring it in and test it against Exchange.

Of course, it also allows MS to have a sneaky look at the competition.....

Re:GPL

[harlows_monkeys]

My hope is that whatever comes out of that lab will be released under the GPL

Why? Don't you think it would be good for BSD and Apache and many other free software projects to benefit, rather than just those free software projects that are under GPL?

Re:GPL

[Bodrius]

Of course, it also allows MS to have a sneaky look at the competition.....

Sure. Because if there is anything open source projects are about, it is secrecy and control of information...

It's not like open source software is... I don't know, *open*, during its development.

Smoke and Mirrors... Otherwise Known as Buzzwords.

[VE3OGG]

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.

MS promises to feign interoperability better

[David Gerard]

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.

Make no mistake.

[node 3]

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.

Interoperability is not Open Source vs. MS

[harlows_monkeys]

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:

This study sought to investigate interoperability for various implementations of ODF and OOXML. After all, to receive the perceived economic and technological benefits, there is a need for multiple independent, interoperable implementations. The results clearly indicate that both ODF and OOXML implementations need to improve interoperability.

This study only tested a small subset, basic word processing features, of what is needed for multiple interoperable implementations. Additionally, this test did not consider the writing performance of implementations, only the read or import function was tested. Nevertheless, the only implementations of ODF that provided good compatibility with OpenOffice were the Microsoft Office plug-ins. Similarly, the only implementation of OOXML that can provide good compatibility with Microsoft Office 2007 was OpenOffice with the Novell plug-in. A number of other implementations of ODF and OOXML such as Wordperfect, Google Docs, and KOffice lacked good compatibility.

It is surprising and ironic that the best implementations of ODF are when using Microsoft Office. Similarly, the best implementation of OOXML is OpenOffice. (Pages provided similar results but lacks the ability to write OOXML, a needed feature for an interoperable implementation.) The domination of Microsoft Office and OpenOffice is especially troubling for users of other operating systems, such as Mac OS and Linux. These users do not have a choice when using ODF or OOXML. The results here show that developers need to work together to improve this situation.

Our results show that while the best implementations may result in formatting problems, the worst implementations actually lose information found in pictures, footnotes, comments, tracking changes, and tables.

Supporters of both ODF and OOXML have suggested improved conformance and interoperability testing, there has been little progress on this front. Governments and other interested organizations need to encourage this testing. Without more pressure and funding for testing, the promise of ODF and OOXML will be lost. Instead, users of these standards will be locked into the dominant implementations of OpenOffice for ODF and Microsoft Office for OOXML.

There is still much research and testing to be done. Each of these implementations is continually being improved and needs to be continually reassessed. Future research needs to expand the tests to spreadsheets and presentations. Research also needs to test both reading and writing documents to determine if features such as styles and tracking comments are working properly. This work serves as a first step in providing empirical data on interoperability for ODF and OOXML. It is hoped that this will serve as a wake-up call to governments and developers to improve the current state of interoperability for document formats.