Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's New Attempt To Dominate Robotics
An anonymous reader writes "IEEE Spectrum reports that Microsoft's Robotics Group is announcing new world domination plans — at least for the robotics world. The company is making its Robotics Developer Studio (RDS), which includes Microsoft's CCR and DSS runtime toolkit, available to anyone for free. Why make it a freebie? Because the company wants to expand its RDS base and get a grip on the robotics development space, hoping big things will come out of it."
Wow, that is one biased summary.
In addition to creating a single RDS release, the robotics group is also making the source code of selected program samples and other modules available online, hoping to improve collaboration among users. In particular, Microsoft wants to entice the growing community of hobbyists, do-it-yourselfers, and weekend robot builders.
They are releasing code. Which is worth mentioning in the summary, since we are talking about Microsoft. Obviously they are not opening the whole thing, because after they extend, they want to make money, but still it is interesting.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
They offer Internet Explorer for free undercutting Netscape's business model. They offer Outlook with a pretty user GUI and integrated with Office to push users to ask for Exchange. An email program that's easy to setup the first 50 users, but a nightmare for large corporations. Active Directory simplifies an all Windows environment, but mangles LDAP so you have to jump through hoops to add any other desktop to the environment. Sharepoint is really cool and easy to setup until you have to set controls and expand it enterprise wide. RDS is cool for simulating robotic programming and could be nice for education, but you'll end up with something that's easy to get started with, but a nightmare to really implement.
Didn't RTFA, but I'm assuming that the main idea here is lock-in to MS products and technologies. That means it'll be harder to share work and ideas down the road because of artificial dependencies on MS to run the code, etc. Hopefully folks in the field will hold their ground and build their work on top of open, sharable, neutral platforms
Long live the BSD license
By the summary's logic, Linus Torvalds must be the next Dr. Evil, because he's been giving away Linux for over a decade.
Honestly people, there are more than enough valid reasons to dislike MS without adding imaginary ones. TFS takes the free release of what's probably at least nifty and interesting software and turns it into an irrelevant blurb about "world domination". As far as I can tell, MS dominates two (closely related) industries: home/office desktop and laptop OSes and utilities, and office software. They have also entered into many other markets, sometimes producing good products, sometimes bad, but never really getting the necessary leverage to "dominate" other, often better competitors for long. (e.g. Xbox, Zune, hotmail, Silverlight, Windows Mobile, Windows Server, even IE at this point.) I'm sure there is no shortage of asshats who go with MS simply because of an easy contract, but I'd like to think that robotics engineers and researchers aren't among them. If the tools are solid, great. If not, no one will care.
Seriously. Hate on MS because of sleazy monopoly abuse. Hate on them for releasing disappointing public-beta style software. But the sort of hyperbolic nonsense on the frontpage makes *NIXers look like unbalanced zealots.
mucking foron - did you see what microsoft did to its last attempt at putting out open source stuff? just killed it not too long ago. so... sure, yeah, whatever.
As with most religions, F/OSS zealots like what they like and hate what they hate without regard to fundamental principles.