Cracking Open the SharePoint Fortress

dreemteem writes with this excerpt from ComputerWorld UK:"SharePoint is a brilliant success, for a couple of reasons. In a way, it's Microsoft's answer to GNU/Linux: cheap and simple enough for departments to install without needing to ask permission, it has proliferated almost unnoticed through enterprises to such an extent that last year SharePoint Sales were $1.3 billion. But as well as being one of Microsoft's few new billion-dollar hits, it has one other key characteristic, hinted at in the Wikipedia entry above: it offers an effortless way for people to put content into the system, but makes it very hard to get it out because of its proprietary lock-in. This makes it a very real threat to open source. For example, all of the gains made in the field of open document standards — notably with ODF — are nullified if a company's content is trapped inside SharePoint." The article offers a slice of hope for getting around that, though, in the form of a new API for Google Sites which can slurp the data back out.

Comments

Re:That would be surprising.

[Disgruntled Goats]

Google Chrome is open source, as is Google Wave, Android, and plenty of other things I can't remember offhand.

Basically the products that they derive little or none of their income base from. Come back to me when they release the source code to AdWords, GoogleFS, or their proprietary Linux kernel fork that they run their servers on.