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Microsoft Launches Its Own Open Source Foundation
darthcamaro writes "Microsoft already had its own open source (OSI-approved) licenses, its own open source project hosting site and now it's adding its own non-profit open source foundation.
That's right, the company that is still banging the patent drum against open source now has its own 501(c)(6) open source foundation. Officially called the CodePlex Foundation, it's a separate effort from the CodePlex site and is aimed at helping to get more commercial developers involved in open source. Considering how they continue to attack Linux and open source, will anyone take them seriously?"
It's a trap, don't give them your code!
Are we in Soviet Russia now?
we'll make our *own* Open Source only ours will be better and it'll have beer and hookers! Ha! Forget the beer and hookers! ... wait ... that's not how that goes...
[signature]
That's right, the company that is still banging the patent drum against open source now has it's own 501c open source foundation.
As far as I've noticed, MS has just protected *other* patent-trolls by getting the patents what they need. I haven't noticed any misuse by them (if they have, please inform me too :)
Considering how they continue to attack Linux and open source will anyone take them seriously?
How have they actually attacked Linux? The same way that Linux attackes Windows, aka competition? Competition is good and will only improve products.
Just because Microsoft's main business model is in closed source, it doesn't mean a company that big cant contribute to open source at all. Their Bing search engine actually ignored MSN's Live platform, while providing that service to Facebook and Twitter.
The interesting thing is that MS really seems like trying to change their old ways, and if you look at it they're been pretty successful. Looks like they're dividing their different business aspects; Windows, xbox360, games, Bing.. They all are quite separate and are getting even more so, with only minor links between them.
From the link "The CodePlex Foundation will complement existing open source foundations and organizations, providing a forum in which best practices and shared understanding can be established by a broad group of participants, both software companies and open source communities."
Seems like a meta-organization for open source entities, under the watchful eye of Redmond.
Floating in the black seas of infinity without a paddle.
The FSF attacks open source, and some people still take them seriously. So why not Microsoft?
It is a way for Microsoft to reduce its tax bill - Donate a few hundred million dollars worth of code to a charity you control and get a nice tax receipt.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
I think Microsoft sees a lot of good work going on in the open source community and it wants to tap into that source of innovation. Regardless of what they say, Microsoft is sorely lacking in true, original innovation. Their best plays have been rip-offs of established ideas.
They have the money and they have to try, but I am doubtful that they'll do much else besides foster Microsoft-centric development of tools and programs similar to the Windows Powershell IDE by Dr. Tobias Weltner.
Best regards.
They have attacked Linux (or more specifically, Linux distributors) using the FAT long filenames software patent. I would call that an 'attack'; those who are a bit more twitchy about such things also use the word 'attack' for FUD-laden marketing materials and other run-of-the-mill corporate tactics.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
At least the CodePlex folks didn't skimp on the astroturfing budget.
"We believe that commercial software companies and the developers that work for them under-participate in open source projects," Microsoft stated.
While I applaud the intent to appear to be open source friendly, they haven't yet begun to address two of the major issues with Microsoft and open source:
Now, here we have Microsoft reinventing the wheel, aka sourceforge. I could even go for a BSD style license, or even public domain. But I have one question:
Would they host, and allow development on ReactOS? (for those who don't know, it's an open source Windows clone)
How Codeplex and Microsoft deal with this question would reveal far more about their true intentions than what their pundits say about their open source attitude.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
mod parent up.
The Microsoft Corporation owes its shareholders a genuine effort to make money and to do the right thing for the long term. I really can't see how anyone could make a business case for Microsoft to have released Windows or Office to be Open Source - It would have been a highly risky strategy, with no "un-do" possible.
Here, they are trying to dip their toes into Open Source, and the summary bashes them. Geez, guys, get a life!
... doesn't seem to be working so well against open-source stuff. Maybe Microsoft's new strategy is to split and balkanize the open-source community with a bunch of conflicting licenses and communities.
Division, Discord, and Destruction
My bicyles
Here, they are trying to dip their toes into Open Source, and the summary bashes them. Geez, guys, get a life!
The problem is that it is far too early to tell if this is just another attempt at "embrace, extend, extinguish" -- something MS has a very long and well documented history of doing, or the final stage of "ignorance, denial, attack, accept."
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
MS is tying up traffic in Seattle today to bring all of their people together in one of the city's sports stadiums. Anybody know if that is the usual monkey-boy chair toss or is something up?
Remember that butt ugly fish with a mouth full of razor-sharp teeth that lives way down deep and has a worm-like appendage that dances tantalizingly just in front of its mouth? That's what I thought of when I read this story.
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
If they were ever smart enough to do a Good Thing â the world would support them because they are so well known. As much as I hate Microsoft personally if they changed, I'd be a pretty loyal guy. Everyone would. We could use true and open unified computing if done properly.
However, since we have that thing called history, and it can't be cleared like our browsers one, most people tend to believe that leopards don't change their spots.
I give it 6 years for Microsoft to evolve or die, really.
I'm not sure, but my first inclination is that they probably want to encourage the development of Open Source software which is based upon Microsoft Technologies and Tools, so that such projects still require Windows to run, and maybe require Visual Studio, SQL Server, etc to build/implement/install?
I'm sure Microsoft wouldn't be *too* upset about Open Source software which depends upon Microsoft's software to actually work or be built.
Maybe they're trying to develop a functional open source movement within their development culture? After all, Microsoft sells a platform. The DOS free software movement was a boon to their platform, not a detraction.
We're not looking at a war of ideas, we're looking at a basic platform war. Take Apple, for instance; they sell a high-end commercial platform which heavily leverages the open source ecosystem to augment and flesh-out their platform. Commercial software can be obnoxious, even to a platform vendor: it works against its platform, it puts branding over adherence to user experience, and it makes computer usage frustrating.
If the Windows platform were viewed from the angle of its development community instead of as a vessel for shareware, then they might be able to preserve and further their platform against more open markets (even Apple) coming up against them.
The full F/OSS stack (Linux-FOSS-and above) is a weak platform technically, but a strong idea. Microsoft doesn't have to give up the idea of a professionally maintained platform to leverage an open source third party software ecosystem. Better within their sphere of influence than outside of it. Microsoft is offering an extremely friendly and accessible development environment to its users already; it would be a boon to foster an influx of new platform-defining free applications that add value while not becoming an issue of anti-trust.
People who develop and know how to use Linux are a different bred. They tend to be self reliant and innovative. Corporations like MS tend to naturally harbour fiefdoms around which barriers are effected that can stifle just the type of innovation Linux is driven by. The adage "faster nervous systems eat slower nervous systems" can apply where institutions allow barriers like glass ceilings to protect managers, the barriers erected can be seen as speed bumps and additional costs that Open Source skirts. Open Source may look haphazard in it's development but then so does evolution and both do OK in the long run.
A lot of Open Source people use Linux and similar OSes because they need to be able to innovate on the spot and not go begging and pleading with Corporate masters for permission to alter a bit of code. Open Source, in my experience, is about innovation and extensibility. MS expected Linux to die of SIDS in its crib. It didn't. I now think MS sees the power and benefits of Open Source and is looking to undermine Linux by offering a similar environment to lure academics and scientists to a similar platform while mining their innovations.
It's kinda like the serpent wants to take a bite out of the apple.
ideopath @ play
Sir, you make distinctions without a difference. All of Microsoft's work is derivative.
Yes, they are hugely popular and they have the major market share. They make billions of profit, yet smaller companies like Apple seem to be the ones coming up with new products.
Microsoft has been a drag on innovation for more than two decades. Its best, and seemingly only, plays continue to be copies of new technology.
Best regards.
Urg, remind me not to read your comments during lunch.
Aside from shamelessly "borrowing" their "innovations" from other companies, and their strong-arm restraint-of-trade distribution tactics, Microsoft have always been the masters of "good enough." For any of the products Microsoft offers (Visual Studio included) there are several commercial competitors that are demonstrably better, but better in ways that customers don't care about or are unwilling to pay more for.
To embrace and extend your hamburger analogy... over the weekend I had a really tasty burger at a restaurant. The waitress asked how I wanted the meat cooked, and it came out exactly right, the bun was toasted, the cheese melted perfectly, and the trimmings fresh and flavorful. And I paid $9.75 for this burger. For $9.75, I can feed my whole family at McDonalds.
Over my years in the industry, I've seen a lot of bloated and unhappy IT departments that lacked energy and flexibility. And I've always advised them that Microsoft is but a part of a healthy IT budget, and to resist the temptation to super-size it.
As for Microsoft's new-found love for open source, I'll treat it as skeptically as I do fast food joints' healthy salads.
From IRC 501(c)(6) Organizations â" page K-4
FAIL!
Link
Note that MS tried to keep the auction secret, but apparently someone within AST clued OIN in as to what was happening.
Even though AST claims they are not into litigation, there be demons within.
Codeplex will be no different.
Did you hear the news? Buy a copy of Windows7, and get a discount on new designer sheep clothing.
You are being MICROattacked, from various angles, in a SOFT manner.
http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/09/linux-foundation-to-microsoft-stop-secretly-attacking-linux.ars
While I dont think theres some grand plan to kill open source, I see absolutely no reason to trust MS at all.
Even if Ballmer swears on a stack of dried lawyers, that means nothing tomorrow if someone else gets the job.
The MS engineers probably mean well, but have no say in the end.
And ofcourse theres all the crap theyve pulled in the past, should this just be forgiven?
MS is tying up traffic in Seattle today to bring all of their people together in one of the city's sports stadiums. Anybody know if that is the usual monkey-boy chair toss or is something up?
The stage is dark. Suddenly, a catchy theme pours from the speakers. It's... could it be... YES! Rick Astley! The crowd groans uncomfortably.
One of the screens showing the Microsoft logo goes blue. "Stop 0x0000000A or IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL".
Steve Ballmer appears through a fine mist of perspiration twisted into delicate symmetrical whorls by an army of desperate interns, hair dryers in hand, all aiming at his armpits from just offstage. The humidity in the room increases by an order of magnitude.
"Seven, Seven, Seven! GIVE IT UP FOR ME!"
The stage erupts in blue flame. Mystical symbols are traced on the faces of aghast onlookers as Crawzogorium, the Infernal Keeper Of Ring 0 materializes above the podium.
"WHO DARES SUMMON THE MASTER OF THE HIERARCHICAL PROTECTION DOMAINS?"
Crawzogorium notices the bluescreen. "TAINT! WHO HAS DISREGARDED MY LAW OF KERNEL PROCESS ACCESS? I WILL PUNISH YOU NOW!"
The light in the rooms fades to a dark brown, and a tortured scream is heard. It's Ballmer. His interns have dropped their hair dryers and fled the scene. He's fallen to his knees and is scrubbing at his underarm area with the tatters of his shirt.
Things look bleak for our hero and his audience? How will it all end? Tune in next post!
This post brought to you by AXE - It's how dirty guys get clean.
How have they actually attacked Linux?
Microsoft claimed that linux infringes on 235 MS patents but refused to say which ones
Left hand, this is the right hand. You two should talk sometime, and find out what each other is doing.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
"That's right, the company that is still banging the patent drum against open source now has its own 501(c)(6) open source foundation."
Taking a few profitless applications from the bone pile and making them open source while patenting everything else like crazy was IBM's idea. Another example of non-innovation by Microsoft.
Since you have already been modded troll I shouldn't be feeding you but just this time.
Yes they are obligated to maximize profit for their shareholders, to that goal, it makes no sense to release Windows or MS Office as FOSS, that's not what I want, nor what the majority of FOSS users want either. Except for the minority of loons that actually do want that, the majority of FOSS users and developers understand MS is under no obligation to release Windows or MS Office.
Still we need a Free, Open Source operative system and office suite, a non hostile system that doesn't regards its users as thieves by default, An office suit that doesn't antagonize us, insert malicious secret codes in our documents, and OS that has the features we want, not the features someone else wants us to have and be limited to.
So we make our own. No actions from MS are required. But MS has acted. Against us, every time they poison and flood an open standards forum, every time they bribe a politician who is considering going free, every time they they build intentional incompatibilities in their software, every time they scare clients with bogus patent threats, every time they come up with deceiving names to inject noise in the conversation, like .net, like officeopen instead of openoffice, like shared source instead of opens source, and now this fake open source foundation.
That is what we are complaining about, we don't want them to release their products as FOSS, we just want them to stop playing dirty.
But... the future refused to change.
Don't worry. It's just Microsoft giving more fodder to the gullible Micropologists to futily argue to those who are rightly suspicious or even hostile to Microsoft's actions (I STILL don't trust Mono, for example.). I remember having an argument with one where he insisted that Microsoft not only stopped its "war" on Linux, but was now helping Linux.
Now, very recently I am sure you are aware Microsoft launched yet another "Get The Facts" style FUD campaign against Linux, this time aimed at Best Buy employees! It's filled with the same inane dishonest bullshit you'd expect from a Microsoft-created FUD campaign.
Microsoft isn't trying to bury Linux? Bullshit. Microsoft wants to help open source? Jury is still out on that one, but I still think in the end Microsoft has no long-term FOSS interests and just wants to find a good way to mutilate as many FOSS projects as possible.
Many think I'm blindly hating on Microsoft here. No. Blindly hating on Microsoft usually involves simply hating Microsoft simply because its "trendy" without actually understanding WHY I'm hating Microsoft. I *know* why I hate Microsoft, and in my opinion, it's a damn fine reason (Or reasons.). I don't trust Microsoft because I am all-too-familiar with their past behavior. And this looks like just another case of Microsoft starting the "embrace" in "embrace, extend, extinguish." They did in with so many other things in the same way it looks like they're doing it with FOSS. And I'm expected to NOT be suspicious of Microsoft when they do this? Their history has taught me one big thing: Microsoft "helps" until they get what they want, then they get backstabbing.
Thus, it takes more than a Micropologist saying Microsoft no longer wants to harm FOSS and a little inane Microsoft PR (Like their "community promise.") to convince me Microsoft is anything BUT harmful.
I am beginning to think that maybe Darl McBride was attacked viciously by a penguin as a child.
No doubt their motivation is self-centered, but that's not the point.
The bottom line is that IBM has contributed significantly to open source projects. The reason they can afford to do so is because the interests of the two are aligned - IBM has made Linux a strategic part of their business. If that were to change tomorrow they can't "discontinue" the good they've done since the contributions are GPL'd.
I'm not saying that IBM are morally better than Microsoft because of this, just pointing out that there are commercial companies whose interests are aligned with open source and have therefore been able to contribute in a way that champions of open source (e.g. the /. crowd) approve of. Just answering the question that was posed. What benefit does it do open source advocates to write code under an Microsoft "open source" licence that doesn't force or come with any reciprocity?
Want an alternate way for Microsoft to get some open source credibility, even if using a Microsoft open source licence? How about they donate some major pieces of software to the community up-front under their proposed licence, and continue to contribute on an ongoing basis? How about Microsoft open sourcing Visual C++, or C#, for example? They don't make their money in development tools, so why not? Sure they'd be giving up some Microsoft technology, but isn't that the whole point of open source - I share/contribute because YOU do too. Fundamentally, if they are not willing to share, then don't expect anyone to take them seriously when they say open source but really mean free software to benefit Microsoft.
Wrong. Microsoft sued first and TomTom responded with a countersuit.
See http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE52J1IE20090320
Cory Doctorow talking about cloud computing makes as much sense as George W Bush talking about electrical engineering.
That is complete bullshit. Geiko says their offering is better. They don't tell people if you buy from State Farm you'll contract AIDS and be dead by the end of the year. That is the difference between what legitimate companies do to market, and what M$ does. Make no mistake about it.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
The way it went was actually this:
1. TomTom warned Microsoft that the latter infringes on TomTom's patents. This isn't the same as suing, but it can only be interpreted as the first step towards doing that. The purpose of notification is to make sure that, as far as law is concerned, the infringing party infringes knowingly; if they don't stop, the penalties grow significantly (3x, if I recall correctly).
2. In response, Microsoft sues TomTom.
3. In response to that suit, TomTom sues Microsoft over the same patents it warned about at step 1.
> DOS was not a clone of CP/M
It was very much a clone of CP/M.
Both SCP and MS were DRI OEMs and had all the CP/M OEM materials that DRI supplied. At the time one could obtain 'decompilers' for the CP/M BDOS which contained hand coded source and comments that was sequenced by an actual BDOS (to avoid copyright issues). SCP put this source through the Intel 8080 -> 8086 converter and brought up an 8086 Zebra system by building it with CP/M and then swapping the CPU boards to boot it with QDOS. Later they swapped out the CP/M file system and replaced it with MS's FAT from 'Stand Alone BASIC' while retaining the FCB processing.
Early MS/PC-DOS systems could display a DRI copyright that had been buried in the CP/M code and they also had a bug in the FCB code that was in CP/M 1.3. When shown this IBM settled by rewriting MS/PC-DOS to remove copyrighted code, agreed to sell CP/M-86 alongside PC-DOS (but shafted DRI on price and never updated the product) and granted DRI the right to sell PC-DOS clones (which is why they were never sued over DR-DOS).
MS/PC-DOS 1.x software such as dBase II, Visicalc, WordStar, and PearTree were simple 8->16 converts using Intel converters because the MS-DOS process environment was almost identical to CP/M.
Later MS produced another clone of CP/M: MSX-DOS which ran on Z80 MSX machines and could run CP/M programs.
I have to laugh at comments like this.
You can bet that most open source versions of closed source programs are more efficient and less resource hungry, because they typically don't implement all the features of the closed source version. Samba is on different, with whole swaths of functionality not implemented. Also, SMB2 tests have shown to be significantly faster than Samba as well. If you want to read up on why, check this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block#SMB2
Hell, I have a Linux based NAS which uses Samba 3.1 and it's slow as molasses.
If you need web hosting, you could do worse than here
Believe it or not, there is a vast world of non-linux developers out tehre - people who have no interest in developing for linux - who actually are interested in building and using oSS Windows tools. People will take them seriously, and they'll meet with a fairly large amount of success amongst windows-only developers.