Microsoft Claims 'We Love Open Source'

jbrodkin writes "Everyone in the Linux world remembers Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's famous comment in 2001 that Linux is a 'cancer' that threatened Microsoft's intellectual property. While Microsoft hasn't formally rescinded its declaration that Linux violates its patents, at least one Microsoft executive admits that the company's earlier battle stance was a mistake. Microsoft wants the world to understand, whatever its issues with Linux, it no longer has any gripe toward open source."

Comments

Meet the 4 stages

[suso]

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.” -- Gandhi

We've already gone through the first 3 stages over the past 15 years. And just so you're not confused, winning != world domination.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[masmullin]

winning != world domination.

I for one... oh wait, what? really... damnit!

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Never forget. Microsoft has never helped open source. They have only contributed to their own version of it, which is very much unlike open source as it was defined 10+ years ago.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[drewhk]

1. First they ignore you
2. then they laugh at you,
3. then they fight you,
4. then you quote Gandhi
5. ???
6. Profit

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[suso]

Never forget. Microsoft has never helped open source.

Um, maybe you didn't think of it this way, but Microsoft is the reason why the open source community is so strongly driven. Open Source users don't have the reputation of hating Microsoft for nothing. So in a large way, Microsoft helped Open Source in a huge way. Its all part of the balance.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

The assumption is that Open Source would never have been created, that there'd be no advancement, that the world needed a Microsoft to foster a competitive environment.

I followed the industry from the very beginnings of Microsoft and have been part of that industry for nearly 3 decades. What I can say is that had it not been for Microsoft the industry would be much bigger, more competition would have been fostered, greater improvements in the computer and interface would have been made, there'd be more markets and more competitors in each market, which easily would have dwarfed what Microsoft "might" have done in the off-hand way you describe. I give them no credit.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Lennie]

It was more like:
1. First they ignoe you
2. then you quote Gandhi
and so on...

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[larpon]

I wonder if the same would apply had it been Commodore and their Amiga brand who'd ruled the PC/Console (Console because of the more or less locked hardware) world today?

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[CAIMLAS]

I thought the Four Stages of Microsoft were:

1) Ignore
1a) while quietly fighting in the dark
2) Embrace
3) Extend
4) Extinguish

We're well into #2 right now. All the efforts to "embrace" have done nothing in the long run but help Microsoft further, while curtailing competition: Mono is still nowhere near viable, and neither is Samba 4. Novell is stumbling. So-called open projects Microsoft has released or contributed have only gone to fuel their closed technologies, contributing nothing substantial to the IT environment as a whole. Their "embrace" has solely been a token gesture.

Side thought: Wouldn't it be funny if Microsoft released a Linux-based phone?

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[martiniturbide]

...good South Park quote.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[poetmatt]

that's kinda like saying without war there would be no need for adversity. It's a bit of a backwards argument. Who is to say that open source wouldn't exist without microsoft? An independent licensing scheme involving free software? I'm sure that would happen even if windows was free.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[marcello_dl]

Your argument is as useful as "War helps camaraderie".

Please get a lil dose of actual impact of Microsoft on computing experience instead.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[camperdave]

Who is to say that open source wouldn't exist without microsoft?

The claim was that open source is more strongly driven, not that it wouldn't exist.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[ma1wrbu5tr]

5.???.... we'll leave that up to the engineers.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[massysett]

Microsoft Research pays people to work on Haskell and the leading Haskell compiler, GHC. GHC is licensed under the BSD license, which is "free" and "open source" by any definition.

To say this company has "never" helped open source is a bit extreme. Like any profit-making entity, it helps open source when doing so is in Microsoft's interest.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[exomondo]

Never forget. Microsoft has never helped open source. They have only contributed to their own version of it, which is very much unlike open source as it was defined 10+ years ago.

Im certainly not saying they have pushed open source development but they have contributed, like for example the release of the DLR under an Apache 2.0 license.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[toadlife]

To paraphrase another slashdotter's sig...

"If Microsoft did not exist it would be necessary for the market to create one."

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[binarylarry]

Yeah but it also will *hurt* open source when it's in Microsoft's interest.

Say Mono becomes very popular and starts cutting into .NET's revenues in some fashion.

Bam! No more Mono.

Similar to what Oracle is doing to Google and their open source Java alike.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[MrHanky]

I don't have the impression that open source users hate Microsoft so much. Apple fans, though ...

Now that Microsoft no longer dominates the web with IE, and Office documents are mostly interchangeable through OpenOffice.org, they really aren't that much of an annoyance. As long as I can use my computer without being hampered by closed or non-standard formats, I really couldn't care less about the other systems. The main problem in the foreseeable future is DRM-encumbered media, which usually is tied to certain closed platforms.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

Hey Johny-Come-Lately, open source predates MS. It predates your so-called involvement in the industry. We just didn't have a little mascot back in the day.

Was it a really neat time to see things come together? Absolutely. But modern day open source? Not so much. Modern open source is tied down to dick wagging and political pettiness. Real enthusiasts are left to either slave for shit projects or to get a job making real coin and software who's source code will never see the light of day.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

Never forget. Microsoft has never helped open source. They have only contributed to their own version of it, which is very much unlike open source as it was defined 10+ years ago.

Microsoft has helped itself to open source, after which they make enough fiddly wide-spread changes so that it's no longer the open source code, at which point they assert their claim to it as proprietary.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Arthur Grumbine]

1. First they ignore you
2. then they laugh at you,
3. then they fight you,
4. then you quote Gandhi
5. ???
6. Profit

First they came for the historical-figure quoters, and I did not speak up, because I did not quote historical figures.
Then they came for the South-Park-quoters, and I did not speak up, because The Simpsons already did that.
Then they came for those who Godwin threads, but there were no mod points left to mod me up.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

You are implying that only Microsoft and no other company could have done what Microsoft did in those years. That seems a bit ridiculous. If Microsoft didn't do it, some other soulless group of opportunists could have.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[spazdor]

I don't know if this is fair. Certainly there have been people in history who did natural science as part of a practice grounded in Christian theology, but I don't know that Christianity has ever had a hand in the part of science which, well, makes it science.

That is to say, there have been plenty of early scientists who were motivated by the conviction that they were exploring and understanding the Almighty's handiwork, in addition to the more practical advantages associated with understanding nature, but I don't think there's much reason to believe that Christianity has ever informed the practice of science beyond that. When people have used their faith on the "what" of science, rather than merely the "why", they've pretty consistently gotten it wrong.

You can hit a home run for Jesus, or for your own notoriety as a baseball player, or just for love of the game, but regardless of your reason, the specifics of where you should swing the bat and when, depend entirely on the pitch. If you're not just swinging the bat for Jesus, but also relying his advice about where to swing, you're gonna strike out.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[bruthasj]

Are you speaking from the MS angle or the Linux angle?

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Livius]

So, Microsoft has held human civilization back about 10 years, and the open source community has, with a massive and inefficient duplication of effort, recovered a few of those lost years in spite of Microsoft's efforts to stop them.

I for one am not grateful.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Eivind Eklund]

As far as I can tell, we're in perfect agreement. Christianity doesn't overall lead to science; if interpreted literally or taken as a guide for scientific methodology or fact, it goes wrong. However, Christianity has for most of its time not been in active opposition to science (some individual examples notwithstanding) Christianity did provide motivation for many early scientists.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[maiki]

Ignore, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... so THIS is what IEEE stands for?

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[NotBornYesterday]

Side thought: Wouldn't it be funny if Microsoft released a Linux-based phone?

Wouldn't it be funnier if it were a huge success?

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[jrumney]

Never forget. Microsoft has never helped open source.

They have helped open source in the past, when it suited them. The original port of GNU Emacs to Windows NT was done by interns at Microsoft to show that real Unix software could be easily ported to their new OS.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

I've been in the industry as long as you have and I see it the opposite way. Like it or not, Microsoft did a lot for computing technology. Certainly a lot more than any other company or organisation.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Runaway1956]

You're entirely right, of course. Murderers and thieves are the reason we have such a powerful police force. Cops don't have a reputation for hating killers for nothing. So, in a large way, murderers helped police forces in a huge way. It's all part of the balance.

As GP says - never forget. Microsoft has never helped open source. Open source is the cancer that eats at Microsofts profits. Never forget.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”

Tell that to disco.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

Who's the Ford today (equaling the Ford of the past)? Who's the Standard Oil today? Certainly no American company.

And, it is total fiction that we'd have some other company doing the same thing. Microsoft got where it was by abusing it's monopoly power. We all know that. If we didn't have a Microsoft we'd have more markets with more players in each market and competition would be greater providing us with more innovative products propelling computing to a much more sane plateau.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Runaway1956]

Mmmm. Christianity has tolerated science in recent centuries better than it did in previous centuries. But, I for one will never forget that the Christians burnt books at every opportunity during the dark ages and the crusades. If we were looking for a religion that is friendly to science, I would have to point out that Islam preserved a lot of learning during Europe's dark ages, despite all book burning Christians.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[William Stein]

Microsoft has given significant funding to support the development of Sage and R. In the case of Sage the funding has always been "no strings attached". (I am director of the Sage project, and Sage is licenced under the GPL.)

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

I think it is more like saying that without a monopoly we'd have more competition. And in fact, Open Source would be stronger for it.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

Which is a total straw-man. There's no evidence that the market would have created one, regardless of that other person's sig.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

We'd all be running Apple Macs today if it were not for Microsoft.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

If you are replying to me, and if you read the post before mine, the one I was replying to, you would understand what I said.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

But it's still Haskell... with all it's meaningful whitespace and people using spaces instead of tabs... Makes me want to kill someone.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[MBGMorden]

It sounds nice, but for every lost cause that makes it to step 4, there are 100 that get permanently stuck somewhere between steps 2 and 3.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[RabbitWho]

Never helped open source? What about all that good work they did making sure that Netscape would go open source? We even wouldn't have firefox without Microsoft, bless 'em.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Runaway1956]

"If not Microsoft CRASH!"

Where have we seen that before? Oh yeah - what was the name of that code that prevented Windows from installing on top of DR-DOS, or any other DOS except MS-DOS?

Apparently, Microsoft is running out of original ideas, so they are recycling old ones.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[h00manist]

There's two items to discuss. More developers and more users. The rest is a waste of time. Preaching "Microsoft sucks" hasn't worked.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Runaway1956]

Your gratitude is neither needed, nor wanted. Your pompous attitude toward hackers and developers isn't appreciated either. The FACTS are, MS has stifled development in areas that might compete with their own potential for profits. Ask Sun/Oracle about Java Virtual Machines. That case was won because the offended party had enough clout (read, "capital") to fight back.

Embrace, extend, extinguish didn't work to well with Sun. Of course, now that Sun is history, that entire fiasco will soon be forgotten.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[ciggieposeur]

If you've been here 30 years then you'll know that the various Eternal Septembers were unavoidable. GUI was going to come to wipe out the more efficient text interfaces; personal computers would have to climb the long slog to mainframe-like architecture one baby step at a time; the network effect was destined to come along and wipe out whole sectors of competition in word processors, spreadsheets, operating systems, and network protocols.

Essentially everything not made by Microsoft was better in a technical sense, but for every user willing to spend ten minutes to learn how their software worked there were a hundred users who just wanted to click on the first thing they saw and then complain to the help desk when they had no clue what was going on.

Microsoft raked in the cash, but it was the users in the end who were to blame.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[realmolo]

There would also be almost NO interoperability.

Say what you will about Microsoft, and Windows, but it's a STANDARD. Before "PC compatibles" dominated, the world of microcomputers was chaotic as hell. Every manufacturer used their own proprietary hardware and OS. Yes, that meant that advancements could be made more quickly. IN THEORY. The reality was, all the various manufacturers tried to lock you into their HARDWARE, and the price never dropped, because their were no clones. And OS improvements? Why would they bother? They were making money on the hardware.

Basically, we owe it to Microsoft for showing the world that it was the SOFTWARE that mattered; specifically, the OS. Before MS started licensing DOS to everyone, the computer industry was driven by expensive, incompatible hardware. It was an exciting time, but it was also frustrating as hell.

And, for that matter, would any other company be better than MS? Apple is all about lock-in. So was IBM, back in the day. Sun was/is no better.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

If you can make the assumption that there "could have" been more competition without Microsoft, then the assumption could also be made that another company like Apple or IBM "could have" had a monopoly without Microsoft as well. The fact is that nobody can make either of those assumptions with any amount of precision.

Whether you believe that Microsoft had a monopoly or not is irrelevant because history cannot be changed. It is what it is and Microsoft did a lot to bring up computing standards and to bring it to the masses. Personally, I don't think they ever had a monopoly. They have a large share of the market, but nobody was forced into using their products at any point in time. You can and have always been able to buy computers with your choice of OS or without one at all. Some people might say that their workplace requires them to use Microsoft products, but a career is a choice. Don't like what you use at work? Work somewhere else, in a different industry or start your own business.

I've used operating systems like CP/M, DR-DOS, MS-DOS, PC-DOS, Windows, OS/2, Windows 9x, BeOS, Windows NT/2K/XP, BSD distros, Linux distros and now Windows 7. I don't use Microsoft products because I have to. I use them because I like them and I know a lot of other people who feel the same way.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Locutus]

don't be so sure. Microsoft has billions in cash and _will_ spend lots of it attempting to keep GNU/Linux and other Linux based products off the market as it tried to get Windows 7 on netbooks and tablets and also Windows 7 Mobile on phones. Remember how they bought up contracts to stall Netscape's Navigator browser growth and then started paying ISP's for every copy of MS Internet Explorer shipped? Remember how Asus sold millions of netbooks with GNU/Linux on them and then Microsoft came in an signed a deal with them which resulted in cost and hardware increases to handle Windows XP and then how Asus pushed their GNU/Linux option aside?

It _will_ cost them billions but they will spend it to try and limit or stall Android, ChromeOS, and GNU/Linux on these tablet devices and other devices which are so trendy these days. And just look to how many Linux based products which keep getting delayed until next year for a hint as to how Microsoft might be working behind the scenes. Not too unlike a couple of years ago when Android finally hit the market late in the year but at the world's biggest telephony conference, all we heard was Windows 6.5 and _NOBODY_ would talk or mention Android.

Just saying that this bitch has more tricks up her sleeve and will be using them. This fight is on and it is bringing both Microsoft and Intel to the battle field. Linux, Android, or web based tech for Microsoft and ARM for Intel. IMO

LoB

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Alex Belits]

Christianity taken over development of science, art, engineering, education and politics, than ran it terribly wrong for more than a milennium. Then it continued trying to do so, though less successfully.

Development of humanity will massively accelerate when society will ban indoctrination of minors with religion (and eventually it WILL happen -- at least for the part of humanity that will determine the rate of progress of the whole civilization). Until then we should just take into account that politicians use demagoguery to elevate acceptance of stupidity and mental deficiency in society (what freedom of religion is) to the level of supporting blatant fraud and brainwashing as long as it suits those politicians' goals.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Alex Belits]

We just didn't have a little mascot back in the day.

Umm...., we did! It has horns and looks kind of like Richard Stallman...

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Alex Belits]

There would also be almost NO interoperability.

Oh wow!

Microsoft is the only company that can't release its standards BECAUSE THEY WERE NEVER DOCUMENTED IN THE FIRST PLACE.
At worst days of Unix fragmentation, there was more interoperability between all Unices and Unix-like systems (yes, including HP-UX) than there was between Microsoft and Borland toolchains on Windows. For the above mentioned reason. And that was before Microsoft started to actively fight Unix.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Alex Belits]

Microsoft Research pays people not to work for Microsoft competitors or open source projects that compete with Microsoft. There is no other purpose to that organization, as Microsoft can't benefit from anything people working for Microsoft Research do in the first place.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[TheLink]

They could actually build a mobile (or even desktop) OS on top of Linux. The GUI bits could be 100% proprietary. And the applications (e.g. MS Office) too.

Apple has done something like it with Darwin/OSX.

Microsoft don't need to at the moment though.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh no, we would all be fags?

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[vivek7006]

You, sir are a genius!

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[cbhacking]

I don't exactly see how things like IronPython, which MS has most certainly contributed to, are "their own version... very much unlike open source" at all. The source code is available to those who want it, you can fork it if you want, it's not tied to MS in any inextricable way, and the license is now Apache v2.0, which is about as open as it gets (not that the MS Public License, also OSI approved, is much more restrictive).

There are other examples, but that one kind of stands out. It's obviously beneficial to MS, but IronPython also runs quite well on Mono, which is typically used on non-MS platforms.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

I'll recommend a book at this point called "Rebel Code" by Glyn Moody. It's 8 years old but covers the history of open source quite thoroughly. Open source didn't generate out of anything to do with hating Microsoft, but was more influenced by it's own UNIX background and the licensing that surrounded UNIX.

I started using Linux back in 1996. It was not a viable alternative to Windows on the desktop at that stage so hating Windows was pointless. Windows 3.11 and Windows 95 offered quite a unique user experience which personally I preferred to the Mac (and much cheaper). It seems that Linux popularity due to anti-Microsoft feeling has really only been an issue for the last 6 years or so, though I could be wrong.

As for Microsoft, I really don't feel they have ever offered anything towards open source and their version of the meaning of the term seems a bit weird. Microsoft will most likely never even provide any of their products completely open source because their entire business model is based on proprietary software. They shouldn't be punished for this because it's the way their model works and there are now decent alternatives like in the late 80's (Mac, Atari, Amiga platforms etc). However, I think they should provide some evidence for making claims like this one.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Fri13]

And I tought it would have been "Invest, Embrace, Extend, Extinguish"....

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[shutdown -p now]

In a similar vein, if you look at the list of contributors to Glasgow Haskell Compiler, you'll see Simon Peyton Jones and Simon Marlow there - both working on it full-time, and both from Microsoft Research. MSR also runs internships to enhance GHC.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[shutdown -p now]

5. Then they realize that you're not Gandhi.
6. Then you lose.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[aeoo]

I am highly skeptical of Microsoft. I think I'll look at changing my mind when I see some Microsoft cash cow, like MS Office, released to run natively on Linux. Even then, this would need to be solid and consistent for 10 years straight. Then I'll be convinced that Microsoft bears no ill will toward Linux and the open source community.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Elektroschock]

I would be happy if the company would stop to intervene in politics of nations where it is a guest, and also drop it's riddiculous resistance against EU open standards policies or stop to buy trolls to harrass open source policies in Europe.

Oh, and please leave fat guy in the US. He is no European citizen.

I know what Paoli did with Open XML to my nation. Get us our money back!

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Pigskin-Referee]

Excuse me, but what drug are you are on? Open source has been playing catchup with Microsoft since day one. Every time Microsoft makes an improvement in its GUI, KDE, Gnome, etc try vainly to mimic it. Usually with only mediocre results. The best word processor open source can produce, OpenOffice, pales in comparison to a MS Office10. In fact, it barely equals Office97 in functionality. Microsoft is the engine that drove the software industry. Are you so naive as to believe that the average end user whats to spend hours trying to configure hardware (mice, printers, etc) when they can just put a CD in the drive and have it virtually configured by itself. Getting even a simple wireless setup working on a FreeBSD machine can be a new experience in pain, not to mention that FreeBSD does not even have functioning drivers for 'N' wireless devices. Why rush, its only been a few years since they were commonly available. And lets not even mentions the availability of drivers for other open source operating systems. I know, you will probably blame the vendors for these problems.The root problem is that the over whelming majority of open source users are socialist at heart. They want everything for nothing. Sorry, but in a realistic world, you get what you pay for.

I use open source software where appropriate and feasible. However, in terms of ease of use, availability of drivers (fully functional ones, not the ones so commonly offered for *.nix systems), I usually cater to a product designed to work on a Windows platform. Perhaps in ten years or so, and assuming that the open source community actually produces a fully functional office suite; i.e. word processor, spread sheet, and their associated programs rather than the pale offerings they presently provide complete with fully functioning drivers for new hardware I might reconsider my position. Until then, I find its usefulness in a business environment limited and more suitable as a 'hobbyist' tool.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, come on. Why wouldn't they help open source?

I was at a conference about 3 years ago where the MS speaker when asked a question concerning open source practically claimed they invented it.

Therefore, if they practically invented it, ergo, they own the copyright/patent/TM etc on it! :-)

(p.s. I'm not kidding about what the MS speaker said.)

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

Sit down and shut up boy, the adults are speaking.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[dangitman]

1a) while quietly fighting in the dark

So, is that what the kids are calling sex these days?

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[gbjbaanb]

but for every user willing to spend ten minutes to learn how their software worked there were a hundred users who just wanted to click on the first thing they saw

ironically, Microsoft is now getting rid of the internal consistency of their apps. Stuff like the windows themes - where you set the font in the display properties and it applied to every application; or the traditional menu that always had "file|new, open, print" on it has gone.

We have an app where there are 3 radio buttons to create a new event (create, update or select buttons), users are flummoxed when they first see it because there's a file menu, but no "File->New event" option. Its that "it always works the same" thing that made Microsoft so popular. Training as very much reduced and people actually could use the apps without really knowing what they were doing (which is what happens even after training :) )

Now we have orbs that may or may not have a menu of some sort behind it; themes for Office that give you the choice of 'black, blue or silver'; 2 different font dialogs, one of which gives you popcorn-bucket style sizes but no ability to change the font or make it smaller.

I think they've lost their way, they're no longer a business-oriented company, but a consumer one. Fortunately, for them, businesses are so tied to them they can't do anything about it.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[jedidiah]

> There's two items to discuss. More developers and more users. The rest is a waste of time. Preaching "Microsoft sucks" hasn't worked.

Nope.

The only real issue is "more apps".

Will embracing or merely tolerating Microsoft lead to more apps. How open will they be.

The whole debacle with dot.net handily demonstrates that there is no point in bothering with Microsoft on the desktop.

That bit of Microsoft embrace and extend never yielded anything of real value or anything you might want to compromise your principles for.

Microsoft is really just trying to have it both ways here: pretend it's playing nice while avoiding the obvious consequences of that.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[ciggieposeur]

Some people might say that their workplace requires them to use Microsoft products, but a career is a choice.

"Some people might say that their grocery stores force them to eat FDA-approved items, but buying food is a choice."

"Some people might say that their wiring forces them to use 110V AC appliances, but having electricity is a choice."

"Some people might say that their medical condition forces them to go to the pharmacy, but buying drugs is a choice."

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[jedidiah]

> Excuse me, but what drug are you are on?

        Enlightenment. Perhaps you've heard of it.

> Open source has been playing catchup with Microsoft since day one.

        It rather depends on how deeply you were looking at the system.

> Every time Microsoft makes an improvement in its GUI, KDE, Gnome, etc try vainly to mimic it.

        See my first point about how utterly bogus that idea is. A lot of
        allegedly spiffy and new MacOS or Windows ideas are just VERY OLD
        Unix things with a bit of repackaging.

> Usually with only mediocre results. The best word processor open source can produce, OpenOffice,
> pales in comparison to a MS Office10.

        Even this FUD is old and recycled. Lemmings have been repeating this little
        nugget about competiting products since the 16-bit days.

> In fact, it barely equals Office97 in functionality. Microsoft is the engine that drove the software industry. ...except when it's copying and putting out of business the companies it gets
        all of it's ideas from like the companies that built the original office
        productivity apps.

> Are you so naive as to believe that the average end user whats to spend hours trying to
> configure hardware (mice, printers, etc) when they can just put a CD in the drive and
> have it virtually configured by itself.

          Why should they have to futz with any sort of external media?

          When it is supported in Linux, it "just works".

          Also, qute often that allegedly easy peasy "just download something" or "put in a CD"
is actually a bit more complicated and much more error prone than the Lemming propaganda
would leave you to believe.

          Someone like HP might also decide that something relatively simple and standard and
common for 15+ years might be something that you would never do and thus make it impossible
to do at all with their WinDOS drivers. (gotta love that one)

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[jedidiah]

When people are interfered with, they are bound to hate that source of interference.

Using Unix is about liking Unix. The same goes for MacOS.

Some people choose something different. The same thing goes for cars (GM) or burgers (MacDonalds).

Microsoft has conspired to make it impossible to avoid them. Dislike for something is bound to be magnified if you are forced into it.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[jedidiah]

The top level proprietary bits are probably the most problematic ones actually.

The NT/VMS kernel has a lot going for it. Most problems are in the "Windows" personality layer and end user apps.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[shrodi]

Every mention of the Foxconn vs Linux issue should also be accompanied by the following link, which tempers things a little: http://mjg59.livejournal.com/94998.html

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[vegiVamp]

There is much truth in what you say. However, I suspect that, in a more varied landscape with no single dominating offering, users would have at least gotten more used to looking for, say, "bold" functionality instead of "fifth button from the left".

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[mcgrew]

There would also be almost NO interoperability.

Nonsense; that was IBM's doing, not Microsoft's. Had IBM gone with their first choice of OS, you'ld all now be running CP/M instead of DOS.

It was IBM's BIOS' cloning that standardized PCs. It wouldn't have mattered what OS IBM used. In those days, the mantra was "nobody ever got fired for buying IBM."

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

Microsoft didn't create any of that interface consistency. They copied from Apple.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[mdwh2]

Heaven forbid...

Well, PCs had already achieved dominance in business in the 80s, and there were other operating systems for PCs. Some of them were dire, but then so was DOS, and there were better alternatives to DOS (e.g., OS/2 - yes we laugh now, and I laughed at the time when I compared it to AmigaOS, and saw how they were bragging about 32-bit and multitasking in 1994, but they were still ahead of Microsoft, who did the same thing in 1995).

So most likely we'd still be using PCs, running some other operating system.

And even though other platforms may have benefitted from a lack of Microsoft, there was far more than Apple - e.g., the Amiga, BeOS, Linux - who also would have benefitted.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

Wrong. It was copied from IBM. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_User_Access

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[mdwh2]

Sorry, you're confusing Microsoft, with PCs. Yes, one advantage PCs had over other platforms was that they could be made by anyone, and worked to a common standard.

But that would still be true, with or without Microsoft, and whether we had a monopoly OS company or not. There were other OSs you could run on any PC.

And, for that matter, would any other company be better than MS? Apple is all about lock-in.

Well, I agree that Apple are far worse in this respect (look at the IPRODUCTS), but equally, it's wrong to claim that Microsoft are responsible for creating interoperability. They've done plenty to resist open standards regarding their operating system and file formats, too (e.g., restricting use of NTFS).

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

This is wrong on so many levels. In fact, it is almost insanely wrong. Standards would have emerged. In the DOS world there were emerging interface standards. There were menus, there were consistent menu choices, programs were being written with common functionality (such as save, print, etc.). Programmers were learning when and when not to write directly to hardware. There were other companies writing GUIs. Other companies were developing things such as fonts, page layout, etc. Microsoft wasn't inventing them, they were copying them. True type font didn't come into this world without a fight.

Standard ways of doing things were dictated by other industries, such as paper size, keyboard layouts, hardware designs. It was inevitable that we would have ended up with a consistency similar to what we have today, even without Microsoft and likely without any abusive monopoly.

Standards bodies existed before Microsoft. It was inevitable that they were to be created by the software industry.

Damn, I keep reading your post and I can't help but think about how misleading that is. Just look at computer hardware. There's no "Microsoft" of hardware yet we get parts that are interchangable. The ISO was created as a body to approve standards.

You weren't paying attention back then or you weren't involved. Microsoft actually hindered standards by obfuscating them to the point that the industry would be force to adopt theirs. There were file system standards for word processing that had issues because of Microsoft's interference. There was the W3 which was responsible for standardizing HTML back then which Microsoft tried to manipulate. Even within recent years they have tried to contravene the standard's process to favor themselves.

Microsoft was a monopoly that abused it's power to gain the position it is in. While building that position (and monopoly) they broke the law, and that injured everyone. The only problem is that the punishment for their crimes wasn't harsh enough to open the software market back up. The damage had been done.

The world would have been better off without the abusive monopoly created by Microsoft. Monopolies are not better than the competition that is fostered without them.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

blah blah blah FUD blah blah blah lemmings...dude just shut the fuck up

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

"Sit down and shut up boy, the adults are speaking."

Spoken from a 10 year old's perspective.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who has submitted research articles to the respected journals of the IEEE, I would say...yes, that roughly summarizes the experience!

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

I remember taking apart executables in DOS with a debugger. I noted how they were designed (and used with switches /this or /that) just like unices. I remember the arguments about how Linux is too complex and how people don't even know what the /etc folder is for (people saying Linux is too complex to learn, but in reality Windows has its own /etc folder (\windows\system32\drivers\etc) and a very complex directory structure that most people won't learn). (And note that they are called folders just like Apple named them, when for years they were called directories.) I remember seeing compiz and beryl come out with 3d accelerated desktops and attractive visual effects. I remember thinking about Windows Vista and Win7 having copied those ideas. Even simple ones were copied by Microsoft.

The point here is that Microsoft still isn't inventing. What Microsoft does best is polish a product they've had in development for 20+ years by copying others. And they've clearly given credit to open source by making public claims that Open Source has made them a better company -- I've always took that to mean that open source is giving them more ideas to copy.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

The idiocy of that statement is quite telling. You could just as easily say that about Microsoft. Just flip Microsoft and Linux in that sentence and you have a statement that is just as idiotic.

And to even remotely compare Linux to Hitler is offensive.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[tokul]

To say this company has "never" helped open source is a bit extreme. Like any profit-making entity, it helps open source when doing so is in Microsoft's interest.

Making sure that code is BSD licensed is major interest for Microsoft. It is open in a way that they like. But lots of commies are not that careless, choose to use GPL and it does not fit MS interests.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[WNight]

If you can make the assumption that there "could have" been more competition without Microsoft, then the assumption could also be made that another company like Apple or IBM "could have" had a monopoly without Microsoft as well.

There was competition before and around Microsoft, that they killed. Without Microsoft there were other companies.

Yes, others would have stepped up to be as monopolistic as possible, but if we'd actively prevented Microsoft's abuses we'd have prevented theirs too.

I don't think they ever had a monopoly.

Sure. But they had enough market leverage in one area to exert undue influence in another. That's doesn't require anywhere near 100% control.

You can and have always been able to buy computers with your choice of OS or without one at all.

Not for the proper price. All computers cost roughly as much as one with MS-Windows because Microsoft would stop giving the manufacturers their quantity discount otherwise.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[fallungus]

I think IBM gets the credit for opening up the hardware. MS-DOS was just in the right place at the right time. They would be nowhere without IBM.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[tehcyder]

Microsoft made possible the idea of at least one computer in every home. I think is why geeks can't forgive them, they took computers away from the knowledgeable elite and made them a mainstream commodity.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[tehcyder]

We'd all be running Apple Macs today if it were not for Microsoft.

And they would cost at least three thousand pounds for a basic model and mainly be used by rich wankers in graphic design studios.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

Whether or not they copied from IBM is moot. They didn't invent it, they didn't conceive it, they didn't learn how to do it themselves, they instead copied it, then conveniently forgot how to implement it in their own products.

Repetition begets consistency, therefore it was an obviousness issue.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

MS-DOS was purchased at the right time. Microsoft, when they entered the deal with IBM, didn't own QDOS. They bought it as a result of the commitment to IBM.

The benefit Microsoft gave to DOS was that it was a power house of programming back then and maybe the only real company capable of advancing it to the point that was needed to foster growth. They certainly weren't as distracted as some of the companies back then--and a special note is that they weren't even the first one approached by IBM. This all happened long before standards, open source, or even the PC became the dominant platform.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[CAIMLAS]

Yes. And that was, indeed, an intentional sarcastic back reference on my part.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[HermMunster]

One would have to be utterly blind to not realize that Microsoft not only is a monopoly, but was one, operated as one even before being declared one. The court ruled Microsoft a monopoly and then ruled that they were operating as a monopoly prior to being ruled one, even though they were trying hard to ensure they were not ruled a monopoly. It's when the court rules you a monopoly that you are bound by the rules of a monopoly, which are slightly different than for those not ruled a monopoly.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

The court was wrong in their decision. All they really wanted was the money from the fine.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[TemporalBeing]

I would probably say "in active opposition to the interpretations of science"; though there has been in history as well "active opposition to science", but namely where science challenged rulers not Christianity itself. Christianity was also at the heart of Enlightenment at first too - as you was said:

motivated by the conviction that they were exploring and understanding the Almighty's handiwork, in addition to the more practical advantages associated with understanding nature

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[WNight]

The problem wasn't Microsoft's market-share - that could have been 99% without a problem. The problem is what they did with it. The contracts they forced manufacturers into were abusive an anti-competitive.

Any potential fine would have been trivial (look at what we gave the banks). All benefit would have come from breaking Microsoft up into smaller competing companies. That would have helped the industry immediately and probably Microsoft too, in the long run.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[TemporalBeing]

We just didn't have a little mascot back in the day.

Umm...., we did! It has horns and looks kind of like Richard Stallman...

Open Source far predates Richard Stallman. He just helped create the legal framework for individual developers to do Open Source in a heavily proprietary environment. Open Source itself traces all the way back to the start of computer source code - after the era of manually re-routing wires to program the boards.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[MakinBacon]

Until then we should just take into account that politicians use demagoguery to elevate acceptance of stupidity and mental deficiency in society (what freedom of religion is) to the level of supporting blatant fraud and brainwashing as long as it suits those politicians' goals.

No, freedom of religion is the freedom to practice any religion you like, or no religion at all. It is what allows me to be a Christian and you to be an Atheist without fear of persecution. In fact, when you consider the fact that the vast majority of Americans (and humans in general) practice some form of religion, you realize that freedom of religion is (amongst other things) the acceptance of Atheism. So unless you are trying to label atheism as "stupidity and mental deficiency"), this statement is contrary to your argument.

Also, contrary to what you may think, there have been several Atheist nations throughout the 20th century. Not much "massive acceleration", if you ask me.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[MakinBacon]

But the market did create a Microsoft!

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[davester666]

Well, we had to bitch-slap IBM around before MS started with their shenanigan's...

Re: Meet the 4 stages

[Fancy Llama]

I'm not too concerned, mostly because the recent Google vs. Apple war puts MS in distant third place in any metric that matters.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Alex Belits]

No, freedom of religion is the freedom to practice any religion you like, or no religion at all. It is what allows me to be a Christian and you to be an Atheist without fear of persecution.

No. American society's dependence on science and modern technology keeps me, an atheist, from being effectively persecuted. If not that, Christians would exercise their freedom to persecute me, just like they did for at least a millennium when society did not care about technology. On the other hand, "freedom of religion" is what keeps you from being treated as you deserve.

Also, contrary to what you may think, there have been several [wikipedia.org] Atheist nations throughout the 20th century. Not much "massive acceleration", if you ask me.

I lived in one of them (USSR). Best time I ever had, and probably the only reason I got decent education. Not that an American would know anything about it -- all you "know" is actually your projection of a fictional world of 1984 onto unknown for you reality.

Re:Meet the 4 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

http://blogs.msdn.com/b/larryosterman/archive/2004/08/12/213681.aspx

Windows was, by artifact of its features, extremely invasive of the underlying OS's internals. It didn't matter if other DOSes had the same public API. A single change in a global data structure would turn the DOS+Windows combo into an unstable mess. They could afford that with MS-DOS 'cause they had the source code for it. Not so for the rest. Is it wrong to guarantee the stability of your products?

Not too surprising?

[Mongoose Disciple]

This shouldn't surprise anyone too much. Ten years ago some people really thought that Linux was going to replace Windows on everyone's desktop, open source projects were going to kill Office, etc.

Which never happened.

The reality is that there's room for both open and closed source software in the world.

Re:Not too surprising?

[MightyMartian]

One should explain that to Microsoft, who still continues to make not-so-veiled patent threats against Linux.

Microsoft is the enemy of open source, pure and simple.

Re:Not too surprising?

[h4rr4r]

Your right, but it sure is getting them at the top and bottom. Lots of servers and many phones, tablets and other devices where windows CE once played.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Your problem is that you seem to view each of Microsoft and open source as monolithic united entities with a single mind and vision.

Sure, I'd fully expect MS to try to slap the shit out of, say, OpenOffice if it's infringing on one of their Office patents. Note that I'm not arguing for whether that would be right or wrong, only that you should expect it.

But there's open source software that does a million other things that Microsoft isn't directly trying to sell a product for. And why wouldn't they, especially internally, be a fan of and use the hell out of any of that?

Re:Not too surprising?

[Monkeedude1212]

Ten years ago some people really thought that Linux was going to replace Windows on everyone's desktop, open source projects were going to kill Office, etc.

Which never happened.

I've been noticing more companies are dropping the Bundled Office for a discounted price and using OpenOffice instead. Don't get me wrong, I agree with windows being unlikely to disappear. But I could see Office becoming a free product included with Windows in order to stay competitive with the Open Source Alternatives.

And if by some magical cosmic occurence that everyone switches to Ubuntu overnight, I could even see Windows becoming free (as in beer) to stay afloat, while they pull something out of their hat to make enough money to sustain themselves.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Lots of servers and many phones, tablets and other devices where windows CE once played.

It's very possible that I just don't know enough about the mobile space, but was Windows CE ever, at any point, a commercial success? If so, I blinked and missed it, but I do freely admit I don't know a lot of the history there.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Mongoose Disciple]

I've been noticing more companies are dropping the Bundled Office for a discounted price and using OpenOffice instead.

It's very probable that my experience does not represent the whole, but I have literally never seen OpenOffice in use in any of the many businesses I have worked for. Even when I've worked with IBM employees they were still using Outlook instead of Lotus, much less OO.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

There's a group of companies that contribute some of their patent portfolio to protect Linux. Attempts at squishing Linux with Microsoft's patent portfolio will only result in a nuclear meltdown in a patent war. Just don't live with the false impression that Linux can't defend itself. And remember, Microsoft is on the loosing end of most patent lawsuits.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

Microsoft sustains itself on billions of dollars every quarter. I doubt a free Windows and Office would lead to other services and products that could sustain them.

It is inevitable that Windows and Office will fall by the way-side. That's one of the major complaints about Microsoft. When those products go what else do they have? A patent war?

Re:Not too surprising?

[Bert64]

Despite constantly losing patent lawsuits, microsoft are still pro software patents... As much as MS lose out from patent lawsuits, linux is worse off... While MS can afford to license patents like those on h.264, linux as a whole cannot, and individual distributions would need to sacrifice many of the cost benefits of linux in order to fund the patent licenses.

Re:Not too surprising?

[MichaelSmith]

was Windows CE ever, at any point, a commercial success? If so, I blinked and missed it, but I do freely admit I don't know a lot of the history there.

I have a presumably Chinese made $99 GPS in my wife's car. They must be selling millions of the things. It runs Windows CE.

Re:Not too surprising?

[morcego]

More than having room for both ...

Having both gives an opportunity to better use the right tool for the right job.

Re:Not too surprising?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Given that most corporate stances toward(or against) OSS tend to be about the old adage "commodify your complements", I would assume that MS is largely similar. Linux is a more or less unmitigated evil; because it provides a relatively easy migration path onto cheap x86 or A64 boxes for legacy unix guys, and the cheapest commodity web-serving platform, as well as doing pretty well cutting into WinCE's marketshare. On the other hand, if people want to run Drupal or something on IIS and Windows server, why would they complain?(unless its to upsell them to sharepoint).

In point of fact, MS makes available a tool for automatically installing all of the following 3rd party webapps, largely OSS stuff, on Windows server/IIS. Commodify your complements...

Re:Not too surprising?

[Mongoose Disciple]

It is inevitable that Windows and Office will fall by the way-side.

Based on what, exactly?

That's one of the major complaints about Microsoft. When those products go what else do they have? A patent war?

When people stop using databases, what does Oracle really have?

When people stop searching for things on the internet, what does Google have?

At this point there's still no credible threat to Windows on the desktop or Office on the horizon, and anyone who says otherwise is either trying to sell you something or has adopted Open Source as a religion rather than a merely very good idea.

Re:Not too surprising?

[plover]

But there's open source software that does a million other things that Microsoft isn't directly trying to sell a product for. And why wouldn't they, especially internally, be a fan of and use the hell out of any of that?

Because they make their living off of providing proprietary software, and to be more precise, they are living off of incremental improvements to existing proprietary software. And the open source model is gradually showing people that they don't have to pay $$$ for good quality software.

What I think has happened is Microsoft sees the pace of the open source threat is making it less of a risk than they once thought. People still buy machines pre-loaded with Windows, and they pick up a copy of Office Home & Student edition for their kids to use in school. The price is low enough that most of them can afford it. And business licensing still rakes in truckloads of cash.

Speaking of business, most are still loading up on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, etc., and the pace of change is not heading to Linux at an appreciable rate.

On the other pan of the scale, it costs Microsoft a lot in terms of money and goodwill to do battle with people who just want to give away free software to poor kids in Africa. P.R.-wise that's an unwinnable battle. It's best to smile and nod, and pat the little ESR-wannabees on the head and say "that's a good boy, go out and play with your GNU friends, the grown-ups want to sell Mommy and Daddy some real software."

If Ballmer is now B.F.F. with Open Source, you can bet that they've done the math and this works out better for them on the bottom line.

Re:Not too surprising?

[h4rr4r]

We use it here for CSRs. I have worked in many place were low level employees got OO.org, or students.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Americano]

If Linux ever became a large enough presence on the desktop in the enterprise or the home, you can almost bet that they'd roll a version of Office for Ubuntu or whatever the "big" Linux distro was. Same as they do with Mac Office - Macs are a "big enough" factor - at what, 8-10% of the desktop / laptop market? - that they support Office on them. If Linux achieved a similar market share, you'd see them writing software for the platform.

This doesn't mean it would necessarily be *good* or *open source,* but make no mistake about it - they'll go where the money is. If Windows died tomorrow, they'd shift gears to porting their apps to the new "dominant" player.

Re:Not too surprising?

[AmonTheMetalhead]

It happened on my desktop, and it's happening to desktops everywhere, the difference is the rate of adoption, which is still a snail's pace.
Difference between now & ten years ago is that linux has come a large way, and is suitable for day to day use, such as surfing the net & simple office work, it still falls apart when it comes to gaming & specialized fields, but overall, if you don't need gaming, you can pretty much do everything with linux already.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

H.264 patent licensing will bring (in the not so near future) some very negative impacts on the software industry. Licensing others' patents isn't what I'm talking about. Besides there are always competitors that are free, such as the Codec placed into the open source community by Google. H.264 is patent encumbered and the Google competitor isn't. Patents are encumbrances not vehicles to the future.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I also have a $99 Chinese GPS. It is such a hack job, I doubt very much they paid Microsoft anything.
Maybe I will figure out how to put Linux on it some day. :)
As much as I dislike Microsoft, I will give them credit for one thing, they really were key in turning the PC into a commodity. Without the PC becoming a commodity, it would never have become cheep enough for OSS to really take off. I am sure I am not alone in having installed Linux onto a spare computer.
What a concept, A spare computer. Thanks Microsoft.

Re:Not too surprising?

[_Sprocket_]

It's very possible that I just don't know enough about the mobile space, but was Windows CE ever, at any point, a commercial success?

I've seen WinCE in early smart phones, thin clients, control interfaces to IT appliances (i.e. tape library), just to name a few. I didn't like them. But they were there.

Re:Not too surprising?

[countSudoku()]

Speaking of business, most are still loading up on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, etc., and the pace of change is not heading to Linux at an appreciable rate.

Really? From my vantage point I see the best way to make very little money in IT is to be a Windows admin. And from the enterprise perspective Windows is just holding it's own, for now, while huge swaths of virtualization are coming in with very little in terms of an increased footprint for Windows. I've made a killing doing Solaris virtualization, and see only good things for the VMWare/Linux installations I'm managing now, and for the future. Windows is not a serious threat in any IT realm. Look at the recent product failures from Redmond; Vista, Zune, Kin, it never stops raining up there, huh? ;) Microsoft is out of touch with the way the enterprise will be moving in the next decade. They have lost focus on their core products. New Office is not that interesting, even with the "scary big button" of nonsense. Windows 7 is just trying to gain back the loss of Vista to XP. It's catch up time for MS, they are not about to take any lead in any industry. Except with an insecure operating environment for Symantec and McAfee to profit from.

Oh, I do love my xbox though. That's a good product. And their mice. Good mice. That is all.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because the first tool I always reach for is the Pretend And Play Hammer.

Sure it can hang around as a games platform, but there are proper tools out there for real engineering work.

Re:Not too surprising?

[tepples]

was Windows CE ever, at any point, a commercial success?

Handheld computers with built-in barcode scanners, used in numerous warehouses, tend to run the Windows Mobile distribution of Windows CE. I worked for a company that used them.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Nerdfest]

People still buy machines pre-loaded with Windows

In their defense, it's extremely difficult to buy many machines, especially laptops, without Windows. This is one thing that would be really nice to change.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

What most fail to see is that each journey begins with a simple step, and you can't complete that journey without completing many steps. Just consider that that journey has begun and Linux is making the necessary steps. Before you know it, Linux will be everywhere and in everything. People will be using it without even thinking about it. That's a milestone that's somewhat been achieved. As time goes by more milestones will become visible and achievable. What the pro-Microsoft camp representatives would have you believe is that Linux is just about providing free to kids in Africa. That's more manipulation than it is reality.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Nerdfest]

If you'd ever used Notes, you'd understand why they used Outlook. I think the guys that wrote Notes use Outlook.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

And if by some magical cosmic occurence that everyone switches to Ubuntu overnight,

Short of someone with $10m USD lying around and the will to hire the right bottnet to push a Microsoft 'update' (Ubuntu + Windows 7 theme + automatically joining the ISO P2P tracker for same) to a lot of desktops?

Well, now that you think about it...

Re:Not too surprising?

[plover]

And I see a lot of lateral moves. Some companies are loading up on VMWare hosted on a nice fat Linux box, but use it to replace a dozen physical Windows servers by hosting a dozen virtual Windows clients.

Even if nothing else changes, a lateral move to Windows Server 2008 today means that in 2013 these same virtual boxes will pay for new licenses to migrate to Windows Server 2013. The spice must flow.

Re:Not too surprising?

[frank_adrian314159]

And the open source model is gradually showing people that they don't have to pay $$$ for good quality software.

I'd dispute this somewhat. Sure, mundane, run-of-the-mill stuff has been nailed. But OSS stuff can still have a lot of rough edges (see just about any Linux audio app for an example). And I still can't find apps in particular categories from open source (i.e., accounting, audio production, etc.) that work as well as various proprietary packages. This is why I still pay money for some packages.

The one good thing that OSS has done is to lower the egregious margins on some product categories (namely, OSes, system/utility programs, etc.), but contrary to popular opinion, neither OSS or Google have taken a significant bite out of MS Office revenues. In addition, Apple has built a very nice living on a partially proprietary stack. So, all-in-all, I'd say that the impact of OSS on computers has been somewhat muted. And it's pretty much been a no-op on newer platforms (like phones, tablets, etc.) where most customers pay a manufacturer's app store for software that runs within their walled garden.

Re:Not too surprising?

[catbutt]

I think it is happening, but slowly. Firefox and Android being good examples of open source stuff that is eating into microsoft's stranglehold on the industry.

I don't really think there will be room for both as time goes on, at least not in microsoft's core businesses. Microsoft may still have large market share, but they can't charge what they want anymore. And as computing moves toward mobile and tablet platforms, I think they will lose out in the same way the AOLs and Compuserves lost out to the open internet.

The problem (for us) is that these things take time. I'm guessing office and windows have another 10 years before microsoft can't milk them anymore.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Alanonfire]

I feel most the time that MS goes after someone, they're just attempting to hurt them financially. Since MS can piss away a few million to financially destroy a competitor if they really felt like it.

Re:Not too surprising?

[h4rr4r]

Speaking of business, most are still loading up on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, etc., and the pace of change is not heading to Linux at an appreciable rate.

Server 2008 is for MS only shops, SQL Server is an also-ran to Oracle, Postgres and MySQL, IIS is just a joke. Unless it is an MS product it does not go on IIS. We have far more linux boxes than MS ones, and most of those MS ones are VMs. Letting MS software touch metal is crazy.

Re:Not too surprising?

[msobkow]

Our boss is happy to see people using Open Office because it saves him a license fee, but if you want Microsoft office instead, it gets approved. It's about a 50-50 split in our office between people who find OO "good enough" vs. people who want the extra bells and whistles of a full MS Office installation.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Mongoose Disciple]

I have and do. :)

I remember that the last version of Notes I had to use would crash constantly, and then refuse to start up again until the computer was rebooted.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Kjella]

Unfortunately true, and after Sun has been eaten by Oracle I very much fear the future of OpenOffice too. Already before the takeover there was a Go-oo build to include all the patches Sun for various reasons didn't like, and I'm not sure what exactly Oracle is thinking of doing. If they won't carry on then either the others have to take over, or join ranks with KOffice or something. Either way, MS can rest easy a while longer.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Alanonfire]

That's not true. MS Office on Mac is a bi-product of MS bailing Apple out and putting Steve Jobs back in power after Apple almost went bankrupt. It was almost like a crutch for Apple, because people had to stop saying, "We don't use Apple because it can't run Office."

Re:Not too surprising?

[Americano]

Yes, a by-product that is still actively developed and kept roughly feature-equivalent.

Do you *really* think that if Windows dies off, Microsoft is just going to walk away from a still-hugely-lucrative enterprise office suite market without a fight? "Well guys, we tried. Let's just pack it up and go home?"

The premise was that Windows magically dies overnight. MSFT - as a company - would not simply give up and liquidate, they would continue writing software for the dominant platform, which, in the given premise, is Linux.

As I said, that doesn't mean it'd be good, or open source, but they're certainly not just going to close up shop due to eroding Windows market share.

Perhaps one of the best things for them in the long run would be to have some competition in the application space, and make them compete on software features, rather than lock-in to a single platform. I don't think anybody would disagree that newer versions of IE are immensely better than their IE5/IE6 versions.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

I think you put the cart before the horse. Hardware costs have come down. It was through open source that OEM bundle costs came down because software costs came down due to OSS forcing the issue. Why pay $500 for Office when Open Office will do the trick. Why pay $399 for an OS when you can install Linux for free.

If you had to consider the costs of the computer to be the hardware and the actual software costs, then the cost would be quite significant. In the days of yore when the 286, 386, 486 etc were being sold a lot of full featured software was bundled. Trial-ware was non-existent (unless you consider share-ware trial-ware).

In actuality, it was OSS that drove down the cost by providing a quality free option. Though I'd not postulate that it was the only or even the major reason, but, certainly I don't believe for a minute that hardware costs came down because software costs did, and that's what lead to the success of OSS (in other words, if hardware costs were high we'd still have OSS, and most likely it would be even more successful). It is just a matter that the end-user no longer pays for the software bundle, rather, instead they are bloated with trial-ware (which when purchased should be considered part of the cost of the computer, just as the OS is considered part of the cost of the computer).

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

IBM has mandated the use of Lotus Symphony (which is just OOo under another umbrella). It take sometimes decades to switch and the switch is likely hindered by legacy file formats. When the file format is open and standard rather than proprietary the switch will likely happen faster.

I use open office in my business and I install it on every computer I repair. Many businesses I do business with use it. They realize they can continue to use it without having to pay the hefty price (as you can't use the Student and Home edition for commercial purposes). If they need to write letters, create spreadsheets, etc., small business can greatly benefit from the freedom from costs and lock-in.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

Lotus Notes provided a lot of workflow capability when it first gained prominence. You could put together (with little training) a decent workflow set up for a small group of people. With the advent of other facilities Lotus Notes looses it's raison d'etre. No doubt business entities that relied on it would migrate to those other options.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not sure, but I have a funny feeling my new Samsung LED-LCD TV has Wince in it. On powerup the TV makes a few notes of sound that remind me of back I used to work in an office where people used Windows. I don't remember what that sound was exactly, but this is eerily familiar, somehow. And it has an network connection which can connect to Samba shares (but not NFS) and play WMV codecs. That doesn't all necessarily mean Windows is in there, and there aren't any MS logos around ... but I'm suspicious.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

It also saves him from having to deal with compliance issues. He doesn't have to audit that which he doesn't use. He should be made aware of that. And, to get people trained in OOo is a great thing because they take that home with them and they educate their family and friends about it.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

You cannot sustain the Windows and Office cash cow forever. All manner of products will whittle away at it over time. Given open and ISO formats the need for Office dwindles (by some measure, some degree). Given the cloud Office dwindles. By advancing the state of OOo and other derivatives Office dwindles. Office can't be sustained indefinitely. Once Ford was the king of automobile industry. Today that's not the case, for a reason. Once Standard Oil was a massive monopoly and yet they no longer exist.

The same cause and effect will occur in every product Microsoft offers. No one wants to keep paying for incremental changes to software when the costs are so high, when the alternatives are raising the ante, and when the incremental changes are interface oriented or minor functionality.

You would have to be pretty blind or prejudiced to not understand that everything changes. Sooner or later there'll be an end to Microsoft as it is being challenged left and right. Even they understand that. We've seen some of the flailing. Once the lock in technologies are removed the market competition factors play a bigger role. As OSS and other software options gain parity the monopolist looses it's foothold.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

Last time I checked CE Automotive was the biggest market for CE by a pretty big margin, and this was back when Windows Mobile was actually sort of popular in Smartphones, pre-iPhone and so on.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

I'm sure there are forks ahead in the road.

Re:Not too surprising?

[drdrgivemethenews]

Everyone switching to Ubuntu probably ain't gonna happen. But some people will, and others to Debian, RHEL, SUSE, and a half dozen others. Why, testing against Linux has gotten as complicated as testing against Microsoft. What's not to love about that, if you're Microsoft?

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

On the other hand, if people want to run Drupal or something on IIS and Windows server, why would they complain?(unless its to upsell them to sharepoint).

They would complain because it's cross-platform. Once their customer is using Drupal, they are that much less locked in to Windows than someone using software that doesn't also run on Linux. Why do you think they continue to produce new versions of IE for free instead of just contributing code to Firefox?

I mean this is how Munich is transitioning to Linux: Keep running Windows, but roll out OpenOffice and Firefox instead of Office and IE. Replace Windows-only client software with cross-platform software on your own schedule. By the time you eliminate the last app that doesn't also run on Linux, you can switch out the underlying OS and the users will barely notice the difference.

Re:Not too surprising?

[cheater512]

I wouldnt quite say that.

Open source software has made quite a respectable dent everywhere.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

This doesn't mean it would necessarily be *good* or *open source,* but make no mistake about it - they'll go where the money is. If Windows died tomorrow, they'd shift gears to porting their apps to the new "dominant" player.

They would have a bit of a problem though. Today you buy a PC and it comes with Windows and Office. If tomorrow a PC comes with Ubuntu then Ubuntu comes with OpenOffice. Today Office maintains its dominance largely because everybody has it and Office is the only software that properly reads Office file formats. If the situation was reversed, even if Microsoft produced excellent ODF support in Office, there would be no hook. It would be like trying to sell for money a competitor of WINE that fully implemented the win32 APIs on Linux -- who would buy it if no one has Windows?

Re:Not too surprising?

[rubycodez]

many of our large clients (hundreds to thousands of users) are going to thin clients. They run Linux, so there's your Linux on desktop (oftentimes delivering a Citrix virtual desktop running a windows app, haha)

add to that the PDA and cell phones running Linux, and Linux is a huge player in end user computing, but maybe not the way some had hoped.....

Re:Not too surprising?

[WraithCube]

There is now a handy little executable called killnotes.exe floating around IBM (not sure if it's official), but it is unofficially standard for IBM employees on their computers. It just kills all notes processes so that it can start back up again. (after crashing notes would leave processes still open which is the reason for not being able to start back up. or at least its that way now - versions 7 and 8).
Problems with notes are the bane of my workday

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

The reality is that there's room for both open and closed source software in the world.

No you fool! Only by cutting the head off Steve Ballmer will you gain his power... There Can Be Only ONE! Now get on your feet! Ahhaaaaaaaaaaa.....

Re:Not too surprising?

[LinuxIsGarbage]

I thought Office for Mac was a bi-product of Microsoft spying on early GUI technology? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Office#Macintosh_versions

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

I'd rather say the open source model is gradually showing people that they don't have to pay $$$ for "okay quality"(*) software.

Which is great. If people are used to getting mediocre stuff for free, proprietarists just have to be better. Win-win.

*) okay is somewhere below good but above abysmal

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

And the open source model is gradually showing people that they don't have to pay $$$ for good quality software.

HAHAHAHAHA! Good one!

Let me know when open source software exists to rival the likes of Ableton Live, Avid Media Composer, Adobe Audition, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Premiere, Autodesk Maya, Microsoft OneNote, Unreal Engine or Mass Effect 2.

Re:Not too surprising?

[TENTH SHOW JAM]

A friend of mine picked up his laptop for work a couple of months back. Asked me to have a look at it to declare what cool stuff he could do at home with it. IE icon was hidden. Firefox icon was renamed Internet. Opened the Microsoft Office fly out to discover that someone had carefully installed Open Office, and then renamed the icons. Writer now read Word, Calc now read Excel etc. Somebody in IT had saved themselves $300 a laptop. The user did not know or care.

Enterprise worries about compatibility. SMBs don't care as long as it's cheap and works.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Americano]

It would be like trying to sell for money a competitor of WINE that fully implemented the win32 APIs on Linux -- who would buy it if no one has Windows?

Somebody who wants the features it has. It would force them to compete on feature sets again, rather than coasting on the "everybody has Windows..." mindset. Wouldn't that be a great thing for users, if MSOffice & OpenOffice - or some other competitor(s) - were forced to innovate and come up with new features and functionality? If Microsoft suddenly stopped developing Office, sure, OpenOffice would inevitably win, because it would continue to get "good enough"-er for more and more people while Office stagnated. Look at IE6 versus IE8 - Firefox (and to a lesser extent, Chrome, Safari, and Opera) pushed a lot of those developments you see. From a consumer's perspective, that's good stuff, even if you don't use IE8, they're competing, rather than just coasting on an installed user base.

They might still fail, but I think it'd be foolish to assume they wouldn't even *try* if suddenly Windows weren't an option. They're not just going to throw away multi-billion dollar assets and give up.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Nerdfest]

I've used KillNotes as well. I see I got modded Troll for the comment, which is a little suspicious. IBM should be ashamed for releasing and selling Notes.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Eskarel]

SQL Server is gaining ground on Oracle at a rather dramatic rate, it's cheaper, works just as well in most cases, and Microsoft is a hell of a lot less evil than Oracle. MySQL sucks and always has, it's not remotely viable for anything even remotely resembling a large data set and pretty much no vendor anywhere supports it. Postgres is quite good, but has almost no market penetration.

IIS isn't as good as Apache, but IIS plus .NET is far better and easier to work with than any JEE container I've ever used. As static web pages become less and less of the volume of the web, Apache's superiority is greatly diminshed.

As for the rest of it, if you're going to be working in a VM environment, then letting anything touch the bare metal that doesn't have to is pretty much crazy. Microsoft supports all their products on VMs so why wouldn't you virtualize them?

Re:Not too surprising?

[jackbird]

Well, the interface is truly a mind-bending experience for those who didn't learn 3D on it, but Blender is capable of serious production work in the right hands, and evolved from an in-house tool. And if you never need to make ink hit paper in a printing press, the GIMP is a viable photoshop-alike for most other uses.

Re:Not too surprising?

[shiftless]

If you had to consider the costs of the computer to be the hardware and the actual software costs, then the cost would be quite significant. In the days of yore when the 286, 386, 486 etc were being sold a lot of full featured software was bundled. Trial-ware was non-existent (unless you consider share-ware trial-ware).
In actuality, it was OSS that drove down the cost by providing a quality free option.

No it wasn't. I remember those days you speak of. A bare bones desktop computer system with NO software sold for $2000+ "back in the day." It wasn't the software licensing that made computers so expensive. And popular shareware software was often leaps and bounds better than a lot of the open source hackery people use these days.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

HAHAHAHA! Wow, your grasp of the concept of gradual is hi-larious. Apparently it's not unpossible for you English to fail.

Re:Not too surprising?

[dissy]

But I could see Office becoming a free product included with Windows in order to stay competitive with the Open Source Alternatives.

Maybe a year ago that was the case, and maybe Microsoft is still a bit slow to respond and this is simply a reaction to the state of things back then.

Unfortunately, OpenOffice does not have much longer to live now that it is in the hands of Oracle.

I really wish it weren't true, but Oracle has killed off every other flagship Sun product and OOo is simply next on the list :{

I don't know if Microsoft realizes it fully or not yet, but they now can get their fingers in some really interesting places in Open Office, and truly it is no longer any threat what so ever.

So unless there is some other open source office suite out there I am unaware of, that is at least close in quality to what OOo has been, MS Office just for its defacto status back

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why do you think Google's competitor doesn't infringe? Has anyone litigated this? If not, you can make no statements about whether or not it infringes.

There's one thing that would convince me that WebM doesn't infringe - if Google would offer patent indemnification for implementors of the format.

Until Google puts it's money where it's mouth is and offers patent indemnification for implementors of WebM, I don't know of any company that would risk it.

Re:Not too surprising?

[konohitowa]

That's not true. MS Office on Mac is a bi-product of MS bailing Apple out and putting Steve Jobs back in power after Apple almost went bankrupt. It was almost like a crutch for Apple, because people had to stop saying, "We don't use Apple because it can't run Office."

You're 100% correct.

Well, other than the part about the origins of Office (it's been on the Mac since before Windows was more than a demo), and MS bailing Apple out (it was a stock agreement that was never executed), and MS putting Jobs back in power (Apple bought NeXT and Jobs was part of the package deal -- or, they bought Jobs and NeXT was part of the package deal -- take your pick), and Apple almost going bankrupt (Apple still had at least $1 billion in cash/liquid assets).

But yeah, other than that, you're right on the money.

Oh, I suppose you could argue that Office on the Mac is a bi-product, what with all the Mac gay jokes and such. But certainly not a byproduct.

Re:Not too surprising?

[konohitowa]

f Linux ever became a large enough presence on the desktop in the enterprise or the home, you can almost bet that they'd roll a version of Office for Ubuntu or whatever the "big" Linux distro was. Same as they do with Mac Office...

And therein lies the problem. If MS had been broken into an applications and an OS company, then this would be a no-brainer. However, Office is intentionally limited on the Mac strictly to support Windows' lock on the business market. Mac Office comes with neither Access nor Project -- both of which are deal breakers for the vast majority of businesses (at least by size -- consider that a single F500 company can have upwards of 50,000-75,000 Office licenses, most of which are expected to support Access & Project) and that the mail client (Entourage/POS) is just too different from Outlook to be pragmatic. Top that off with the fact that Mac Office 2008 removed support for VB Macros/Scripting and it's obvious that they've artificially limited it purely to keep Macs from encroaching on Windows in the business market.

The exact same would happen on Linux, even if they did roll Linux Office -- it would be intentionally crippled to make sure that Linux couldn't replace a Windows license in their lucrative business market.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

The Linux community does not speak for the entirety of the open source community, but nice straw man.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Uh... you do know that Standard Oil was broken up by the government. The reason they don't exist has nothing to do with superior alternatives or market forces. Standard Oil is actually an excellent argument against your thesis because left to its own devices it would almost certainly still be ridiculously dominant.

You say that no one wants to pay for incremental changes to Office or Windows, and yet people spend billions upon billions of dollars doing exactly that every year.

In short, you're arguing that the market will be rational or behave the way you think it should, rather than looking at how the market actually has and continues to behave.

Probably Office will be gone someday... but that day is not coming soon. Just like the day that we stop using so much oil is not coming soon. You don't even have to like Office or Microsoft to understand that -- you just need to deal with the world as it actually is.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Postgres is quite good, but has almost no market penetration.

Out of curiousity, do you have any idea why that is? Is it just that MySQL for a long time had the mindshare as "the free database", LAMP stack and all that?

It seems like everyone I talk databases with agrees that PostGre is pretty good and a great alternative to post-Oracle-buyout MySQL, but no one seems to actually be using it for anything.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Locutus]

not in Microsoft's world. They refuse to port anything to any other OS but their own and for historical reasons they keep Office on Mac. It does not matter what the market share is, they will not port to the platform and instead will spend billions attempting to kill the alternate platform. They make 10's of billions in profits from Windows, anything else is a threat to that so DO NOT TRUST THEM WHEN THEY SAY THEY ARE FRIENDLY TOWARD ANYTHING OTHER THAN WINDOWS. It's a big fat lie. IMO

LoB

Re:Not too surprising?

[Mongoose Disciple]

The problem (for us) is that these things take time. I'm guessing office and windows have another 10 years before microsoft can't milk them anymore.

I'm just really skeptical there because people were saying that ten years ago, too.

A lot of people who post here seem to simultaneously think that Microsoft is a white cat away from being a Bond villian, and stupid enough to watch helplessly as market share in their big moneymaker industries just evaporates.

I feel like people really underestimate all the different directions they're going in as a company and how all of those efforts build off each other and support each other. Sharepoint is a perfect example of something that's gone into practically every business I've worked for in the last five years (I've never done and would not want to do Sharepoint-related work, but I notice that it's there). Everyone's quick to dismiss it as a shitty CMS, point out better CMSes, or just turn their nose up at it because it's not sexy technology and most of us would rather do just about anything than do work with it, without really taking in the full scope of what it does and how it integrates with Office, etc. A company that's using Sharepoint (MOSS) to manage workflow can't easily replace it and probably needs/wants Windows on desktops to go with it, Office on those same machines, Windows servers, etc.

There's dozens of things out there like that in some way drive people to Windows or Office and even if a few stick they'll live past your ten years.

I don't think it's impossible for free software to overtake either of those products, but I don't think they can do it while pretending it'll be easy, inevitable, or that they're not chasing a moving target. You don't win a war by pretending your enemy is stupid if they're not.

Re:Not too surprising?

[ebbomega]

Sure, I'd fully expect MS to try to slap the shit out of, say, OpenOffice if it's threatening their proprietary formats as a global standard.

FTFY.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Mongoose Disciple]

Uh... you know there's more to Open Source than Linux, right?

There's a huge, huge gray area between "Let's open source all our software, make all of our patents public domain, and port all of our software to Linux" and "Open Source is the cancer and we're going to burn that shit."

Re:Not too surprising?

[Alex Belits]

Windows CE single-handedly wiped out first generation of PDA and mini-laptops, leaving only Palm (then still without celphone functionality) alive. People were buying devices to run "Word", "Excel" and "Internet Explorer" instead of more capable devices based on Symbian or even Linux (Windows CE-based iPAQ was originally developed as Linux-based Itsy), then got disappointed by complete mismatch of those devices' capabilities with their expectations. All those devices ended up as massive failures, iPAQ stuck longer than others but was hardly a success considering the amount of engineering that went in it.

Later Microsoft had some success pushing Windows CE on smartphones by marketing those devices to cellular carriers who didn't care about users' experience as long it was possible to advertise "Windows" and easily gain customers locked into multi-year contracts before seeing the device.

iPhone pretty much wiped this market -- or what left of it after Blackberry eaten a huge chunk. So now Microsoft's new generation of Windows Mobile, marketed in the same way but facing competition and disillusioned users, is hopefully doomed.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Americano]

That's all nice, but the question I was answering specifically stipulated "And if by some magical cosmic occurence that everyone switches to Ubuntu overnight, I could even see Windows becoming free (as in beer) to stay afloat, while they pull something out of their hat to make enough money to sustain themselves."

In other words, if they lost so much market share that Windows was relegated to the status of bit player, they would simply move to developing for the dominant platform.

I'd also suggest that Access & Project are pretty specialized tools - Outlook, Excel, Word, and Powerpoint are MUCH more commonly used in the large enterprise I work for (~60k employees, last count I saw) - for every 40-50 users using those 4, there's one or two who use Project actively (more than "I need to look at the project plan"), and Access hasn't been used for much outside of "something quick for my own use and tracking" in a long time, though that might have something to do with centralized DBA support & an enterprise agreement with Oracle.

The loss of VB macros was a pain, but they *did* promise (and the announcement back in Feb. of this year of Mac Office 2011 confirms) that they'd add it back in. It was dropped in the 2008 version, ostensibly for PPC->Intel porting issues, and I'm tempted to believe that, since they're adding it back in the 2011 release. I don't think the VBA stuff is necessarily evidence of a conspiracy to cripple that software for non-Windows use.

I think if/when you see a significant drop in MS's desktop OS market share (most likely that loss will go to Mac OS X unless Linux comes up with something really compelling on the desktop in the next year or two), you'll suddenly see them get a lot more excited about the notion of "cross-platform" development. They'll try to control the OS choices as long as possible, but if it becomes apparent that they can't, they'll start competing on features. They did it with IE when suddenly Firefox came along and started eating their lunch. I have no doubt that they're pragmatic enough to drop the "MS-only" principle when it's a choice of "MS-Only" vs. "Survival".

Re:Not too surprising?

[camperdave]

Well, the interface is truly a mind-bending experience for those who didn't learn 3D on it,

I'll say! I used to use kpovmodeller, and it was a breeze. Now that it's been dropped from ubuntu due to lack of development, I've been trying to learn Blender. It's like trying to switch between emacs and vi. Nothing you know works anymore.

Re:Not too surprising?

[imthesponge]

The thing about OpenOffice is that if someone opens your doc up in Word and it looks like shiat, they'll probably just think you're a retard.

Re:Not too surprising?

[konohitowa]

I was specifically answering your followup, not realizing you were the OP. My mistake -- sorry about that.

That said, it seems to me that the magical occurrence of 'Ubuntu Everywhere' would absolutely require that Access & Project be available on something other than Windows as a prerequisite. Like you, I've worked in multiple large companies (on the scale of 50k to 130k users) and I agree with your anecdotal evidence -- the bulk of us don't give a shit about Access nor Project. Project mostly, Access somewhat less so [I did work on a project that revolved around Access as the front end to an Oracle back end]. However, the minority of the group that were dependent upon Access and Project were also the people in control of the money... managers. At the end of the day, they're the ones that decide what platform is the "standard". Remember the days (circa 1994) of managers sending out 3 line emails from Outlook using Word format and then demanding that everyone receiving it that couldn't read it [AKA , Unix developer nerds] be switched to Windows?

Combine that with the MCSE trained, (brainwashed?) IT department, and no change is going to occur until the PTB & IT can be convinced that those stinky, ugly, non-Windows machines can run the exact same software as the machines that they're replacing. As someone who has been in a corporate environment, I'm confident that you know, full well, the empire builders that any IT department devolves into. They're all about control for the sake of building up their support budget. I had a Mac G3, bought and paid for by my department, sitting under my desk next to my Dell GXnnn [the ones with the motherboard capacitor fail problems -- if that can even narrows it down -- I think they were 320's] that I video-switched into my Dell CRT. The head of IT happened by on a tour of my department at some point and my G3 caught his eye. He reacted as if a cockroach had just run up his leg: "What's that doing down there?! We've got to get that out of here! We don't support that!" [stomp stomp stomp] It took my technical lead's full force to calm him down and move him away from the area. He was hell bent on making sure that I couldn't use it, even though it was more productive for me than my Windows machine, running Exceed, to connect into our Sun development environment.

I'm in agreement with you as to my sounds of conspiracy-theory in regard to my comments about the loss of VB in Office. I didn't mean to make things sound that way, nor did I realize I was doing so, but you're right: it sounded like a conspiracy. However, if you were in charge of a company that had a product that sold for anywhere from $89 to $250 dollars per seat -- and knew you could get $450 per seat for it just by porting some software-- to a market that pays a premium to buy 10 million computers per year, would you spend the development dollars to make sure that each version was backward compatible, or would you roll a release that didn't work with previous releases while promising that, down the road, it would again be compatible? I don't know about you, but with a market like that, I would throw every resource necessary at it to make sure that I squeezed out every available dollar. The fact that Microsoft doesn't do so is, to me, quite telling.

Again, I don't disagree with your premise of what would happen if Microsoft got squeezed. However, until they get squeezed in the mega-corporation environment, I don't see them getting squeezed to the point of desperation. The business environment is their last bastion, and an incredibly profitable one at that. And the main barrier to that bastion, in my NSHO [as if I needed to state that I'm arrogant], is a full version of Office on a platform other than Windows. I still maintain that Microsoft intentionally cripples, even if by reducing resources and funding to their developers, the Mac Office suite in order to support their Windows hegemony.

Re:Not too surprising?

[TheSeaCucumber]

On this subject, does MS use Linux at redmond to compile windows distros? I can't imagine so many smart(ish) people that would keep themselves deliberately isolated from an OS so well optimised to create stuff, not just to use stuff. If so, it would explain some of the similarities between Windows and some of the Linux distros ideas (although i suppose they could have just been doing research)

Re:Not too surprising?

[xtracto]

Trying to be a bit unbiased here:

During the 80s and 90s, Microsoft *hated* Open Source/Free Software mainly because their CEO (Bill Gates) was completely against it. Then came 2000 and Ballmer became CEO; as he also dislikes Open Source, the company stance was very similar (but I guess more openly, as Ballmer is an impulsive guy).

My belief is that the next CEO of Microsoft would be one who will be more "leveled" or unbiased against open source. Ultimately, it is the CEO the one who drives the company.

In addition to that, when the next CEO starts, Microsoft would need to have migrated from a pure software company (MS Office, MS SQL Server, MS Windows) to a more SaaS company (web services, AJAX or whatever is the current fad-name); else, MS would become irrelevant.

I am really sure *a lot* of workers at Microsoft like Open Source. They use it and they can see the advantages. However, it is the policy of the company, dictated from the to executives what drives them.

Re:Not too surprising?

[xtracto]

What would it mean for Linux to "license h.264 as a whole?"

Who needs to license it? The guys at kernel.org?
Or the guys at X.org
or the guys at KDE or or Gnome?
Or Ubuntu?

What pisses me off is that whoever dares to get a license to use h.264 in Linux will be trolled as a pro-microsoft pro-closed source, son of satan company (e.g. like poor Lindows)

Re:Not too surprising?

[someone1234]

Yeah, i guess the Hordes of Mono and Haskell programmers don't have any grudge against M$.

Re:Not too surprising?

[jimicus]

Server 2008 is for MS only shops, SQL Server is an also-ran to Oracle, Postgres and MySQL, IIS is just a joke. Unless it is an MS product it does not go on IIS. We have far more linux boxes than MS ones, and most of those MS ones are VMs. Letting MS software touch metal is crazy.

Hate to break the news to you but (with the exception of people who want to develop a database-driven application) NOBODY chooses a database because of its features.

They choose a database because it's the only one (or one of a small number) which is supported by the application they want to run. And there are thousands of business applications that only support MS SQL on the backend. SQL Server may be a joke if you're used to dealing with multi-terabyte datasets but 99% of businesses in this world aren't dealing with multi-terabyte datasets.

Ditto IIS. Unless you're developing your own application, an HTTP server is going to be chosen on two criteria:

1. What does the application I want to run support?
2. If I have a choice, which am I most familiar with?

More often than not, commercial applications either require IIS or come bundled with their own web server (which is frequently a pre-configured Apache...)

Re:Not too surprising?

[Dr_Barnowl]

And the corollary : which database do people choose to develop their new application?

The one they are running already, of course.

As a government org that is trying to cut costs wherever possible, and realising most of these cuts via redundancy, it saddens me that my employer still pays a very large Oracle/Solaris bill when the vast majority of things (if not everything) we use it for could be done equally well by PostgreSQL/Linux. The problem being that we have an enterprise license, so that making a saving on it would imply significant cost and effort porting most, if not all, of our existing databases and applications. It might be cost effective to hire a couple of developers to port them - it might even cost less than our support contracts - but no manager is going to take the RISK involved.

Meanwhile I see new apps get pushed into the Oracle instances because they are a piece of infrastructure that is already there, which just tightens their grip on our cash.

Re:Not too surprising?

[shutdown -p now]

On this subject, does MS use Linux at redmond to compile windows distros?

No. Among other things, most (all?) C/C++ code in MS is compiled (of course!) with Visual C++.

I can't imagine so many smart(ish) people that would keep themselves deliberately isolated from an OS so well optimised to create stuff, not just to use stuff.

What advantages, exactly, would Linux have over Windows on a build farm?

Re:Not too surprising?

[shutdown -p now]

Did you check the link GP has provided? It's an automated installer, written and distributed by Microsoft, that enables one to install many popular free and FOSS software packages on Windows/IIS with a few clicks. And it specificall includes Drupal!

Really, you're looking at it the wrong way. Most businesses who use all-MS solutions today aren't actively looking to switch, so exposing them to products such as Drupal doesn't do much. The point is rather to convince those who're unsure to stick with Windows.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Dr_Barnowl]

If they don't need to edit it, export it to a PDF.

But I agree. I used to do my CV in OOo and send it out as .doc - then I saw it on a recruiter's instance of Word and it did, indeed, look shite.

Re:Not too surprising?

[devent]

Speaking of business, most are still loading up on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, etc., and the pace of change is not heading to Linux at an appreciable rate.

That's no wonder, because most of the school in the western countries are only teaching IIS, AD and MSSQL. The business schools are spitting out the graduates in the 10,000 every year. MS spends a lot of money with subsidized licenses and licenses agreements. In my school they teach networking with DOS and free technologies like Java are just covered with the basics.

Of course they could just teach Linux, Apache and MySQL which is all for free. But then it's the oft used argument that they need to teach what the graduates later need in the workplace. But of course what we had learned was just point&click games and I'm certain that no graduates in my school will solve a complex tasks by him/herself.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

..looses it's raison d'etre..

Please fix your English before even trying to mash it up with another language.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

..As OSS and other software options gain parity the monopolist looses it's foothold.

Seriously,buddy. What the hell?

Re:Not too surprising?

[jedidiah]

> What pisses me off is that whoever dares to get a license to use h.264 in Linux will be trolled as a pro-microsoft pro-closed source, son of satan company (e.g. like poor Lindows)

Ubuntu already sells this sort of thing and has for quite awhile actually.

Re:Not too surprising?

[jedidiah]

> SQL Server is gaining ground on Oracle at a rather dramatic rate, it's cheaper, works just as well in most cases,

Both of these are blatantly false.

Microsoft is not infact any cheaper than Oracle. This is just propaganda spread by Microsoft and the clueless.

Microsoft also cannot scale nearly as well. Either it's trivial enough for gratis-ware or SqlServer just does
not scale adequately for the job.

Re:Not too surprising?

[jedidiah]

This is really silly of course because real computer science departments rarely "teach to pander to industry".

For many, the is one of the key criticism of a "school in western countries".

Re:Not too surprising?

[jedidiah]

> No it wasn't. I remember those days you speak of. A bare bones desktop computer
> system with NO software sold for $2000+ "back in the day." It wasn't the software
> licensing that made computers so expensive. And popular shareware software was
> often leaps and bounds better than a lot of the open source hackery people use these days.

Simple historical revisionism.

"back in the day", that "robust" shareware didn't even come with a modern UI.

Only the most primitive modern Free Software can really be compared to that stuff.

Also, a lot of that stuff was payware for stuff that people just take for granted on any Unix.

Re:Not too surprising?

[jedidiah]

> Even when I've worked with IBM employees they were still using Outlook instead of Lotus, much less OO.

That would be "fun" considering how much IBM employees depend on various Notes databases.

Lotus is much more than an email client (unfortunately). If you are trying to treat it as such, you probably have absolutely no clue and have never actually ever seen a Lotus based environment.

Re:Not too surprising?

[jedidiah]

> The thing about OpenOffice is that if someone opens your doc up in Word and it looks like shiat, they'll probably just think you're a retard.

Not at all actually.

This is a big fat lie. Infact, MS Office is so bad that no one is surprised when there are major and visible problems with it.

Microsoft has simply conditioned people to expecting their computing experience to be crap.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

That's common use in the English language. Back off to school sunny boy.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

And if they have an older version of Office and open a newer file format it looks like shit, if it even opens.

And, this has been the case for years with competing office products. There have been interchange formats for as long as PCs have been in use (and longer).

Really, let's not be stupid. Most documents aren't complex. Most are basic letters, memos, etc. Most don't have complex formatting. As a result the vast majority will open and look good in Open Office. Most that don't can be quickly edited to correct the formatting. And document authors can be trained to create attractive documents that can transfer flawlessly.

Let's please not do the straw-man here--emphasize a little problem to divert from the bigger picture.

Re:Not too surprising?

[tehcyder]

I have no idea what Lotus Notes is like for a programmer or systems administrator, but I have to say that for a user it never seemed any worse than Outlook or Groupwise or whatever other company-wide system people used.

Re:Not too surprising?

[mcgrew]

And remember, Microsoft is on the loosing end of most patent lawsuits.

Microsoft isn't loosing any of their patents, but they loose their lawyers ocasionally. At least FOSS looses its code; MS doesn't loose anything but lawyers and marketeers.

Re:Not too surprising?

[mackyrae]

And this is why we have sellers such as

• ZaReason—request just about any Linux distro you want, even if it's not in the drop-down field (my fave—the only OEM I've found selling systems with KDE and Xfce based distros in addition to GNOME ones)
• System76—all Ubuntu
• Dell—they finally have a desktop with Ubuntu 10.04, and there's some 9.04 & 9.10 laptops

Re:Not too surprising?

[Americano]

Again, I don't disagree with your premise of what would happen if Microsoft got squeezed. However, until they get squeezed in the mega-corporation environment, I don't see them getting squeezed to the point of desperation.

Agreed - Microsoft won't fully devote itself to competing on features until they are squeezed, and hard, by other platforms.

Interestingly, Mac OS has recently posted some interesting gains in the government & enterprise markets - if this trend continues, perhaps Microsoft is seeing that they're going to get squeezed in the enterprise space - perhaps this is an early signal of them acknowledging these trends? It'll be interesting to see if these numbers are a trend, rather than a single-quarter anomaly.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

Office isn't going away. You made the point that people still buy it, which is correct. But that's not the whole story.

People don't buy every upgrade. Only large companies that make money from their use of that software are buying all of the incremental upgrades.

I'm going to use myself as an example with the assumption that most individual users will do the same thing.

I have Office 2000. It's been getting quirkier with each progressive update to Windows. It got very shaky after XP SP2. It doesn't run well at all under Windows 7. So I bought Office 2010. Now count the skipped upgrades. Office XP(2002), 2003, and 2007... I will never buy them. But someone with Office '95 might have skipped '97, 2000, and XP(2002), and upgraded with 2003. They might hold out until 2012 or 2014 to buy another upgrade, since they have one that works for them. When Windows has advanced far enough to make it troublesome to run, they'll upgrade again. And I hardly think that an upgrade every decade is unreasonable.

Now, granted, you don't get all the whiz-bang features from every update. And sometimes you have to learn a different UI. But these are fairly trivial concerns. Yes, even the training issue, if it's only once a decade. And cost? I spent $300 on Office 2000. Office 2010 only cost me $120. So for (presumably) two decades of useful software, I shell out under $500. Two decades of housing will cost far more. Two decades of transportation will too. Hell, two decades of clean underwear will cost more than that. How is this an unreasonable cost?

You don't need cutting edge, let alone bleeding edge office software. Just be reasonable about upgrading and it's not that bad.

Re:Not too surprising?

[HermMunster]

I think your point about Standard Oil is moot. They were broken up. Did you know that Microsoft was broken up in the initial ruling? That's moot too. Whether a better business model might have come along and usurped Standard Oil is a definite possibility. Standard Oil didn't get to be the monopoly by providing a superior product. It was their business model that accomplished that. Had Standard Oil been allowed to exist they would have damaged the consumer (by way of damaging the industry) in the same manner that Microsoft did.

Frankly, I see breaking up Standard Oil as flaw. Technically, the industry would have managed that itself, but alas Standard Oil was breaking the law.

Software, especially the OS and all that goes with it (programming API, applications with their dependent proprietary formats), are much harder to counter than countering Standard Oil's monopoly.

I'm arguing that it is inevitable, period. That it will, period. That one day, sooner or later, it will, even if that time-frame is very long.

Microsoft's day is inevitable. I think they know this. You can't saturate the market and sell incrmental changes forever. People will realize that what they have works. Sure, Microsoft will vary the model some here and there, such as trying to get you to rent software, or outdating the OS so that your old application versions won't work.

I actually think your comments are somewhat naive. It seems you see the industry in a box with all these boundaries and that business and the consumer will always function within that box and that if the box must be altered it will be by Microsoft.

Standard Oil was broken up because Standard Oil's business model failed them--in regards to how it was perceived as a business, how long they got away with doing something illegal, and the changing perception of the needs of the consumer over the rights of the company. If they'd have let Standard Oil continue or if they hadn't been caught breaking the law, then Standard Oil would have had a significantly detrimental affect on the world.

Re:Not too surprising?

[mcgrew]

I have literally never seen OpenOffice in use in any of the many businesses I have worked for. Even when I've worked with IBM employees they were still using Outlook instead of Lotus, much less OO.

I have three spreadsheet programs on my work PC -- Lotus suite, Quattro Pro (Corel Suite) and MS Office. I have Open Office at home, but I can't really judge the OO spreadsheet because I have little use for a spreadsheet at home, but of the three others, Lotus is far and away the very worst of the three. It's a shame, their spreadsheet used to be the best out there.

I wish they'd switch to OO at work.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Locutus]

yes I know but it does not matter because to Microsoft open source, GNU, and Linux are threats to Microsoft's primary revenue stream. Grey areas or not, Microsoft will say they're friendly toward open source but ANY and all open source is a threat to their revenue because it eats at their ability to charge for their software.

So in reply to your comment, "The reality is that there's room for both open and closed source software in the world.", I will repeat, not in Microsoft's world. IMO

LoB

Re:Not too surprising?

[plover]

Teaching to industry is the job of a trade school, not of a university. But it's surprising how many people (including students and especially their parents) don't understand the distinction.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's common use in the English language. Back off to school sunny boy.

"Looses it's.." was considered perhaps common but definitely *wrong* when I was in school, *sonny* boy.

(Idiot.)

CAPTCHA: answers :)

Re:Not too surprising?

[Bert64]

Well they can't, it would need to be royalty free and transferrable...

Commercial software vendors know that price matters, and that they cannot compete with open source on price or target specific companies for takeovers... They simply cannot compete with or even really understand the open source model.

So they use patents like this which effectively forces open source to follow the model they understand, selling the software for a price, even if that price is only to cover overheads (eg patent licenses and admin overhead)...

Re:Not too surprising?

[Eskarel]

Alright, you're technically right on the price. If you have absolutely no windows servers whatsoever, adding one is hideously expensive(CALs and whatnot), adding an extra one is actually very cheap, it also uses a lot less resources.

It's also true that at the extreme upper end there is just absolutely no alternative to Oracle, as has been the case for the last 20 years or so. That extreme upper end however is shrinking with every release of SQL Server.

Re:Not too surprising?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of business, most are still loading up on Windows Server 2008, Microsoft SQL Server, IIS, Active Directory, etc., and the pace of change is not heading to Linux at an appreciable rate

If anything it's "mixed IT" that's been gaining ground in recent years in the area that was most dominated by MS server stuff -- SME IT networks. Many shops pick open source business solutions going all the way to OpenERP. Many have found no CALs and free lunch OS very appealing. Most people don't really need LDAP backed directories or tight-ass shared security system so Active Directory doesn't have that unviersal appeal, Samba4 being around the corner or not.

One thing that MS likes about all this is that many of it's solutions have become de-facto standards (CIFS, Active Directory bastardization of Kerrberos and LDAP etc) so why shouldn't they let open source companies play the role of substitute mee-too software.

My question

[schmidt349]

This is what I want to know: Is Microsoft's new stance a sort of "this is the way the world is going, we'd better at least pretend to get with the program," or is it more like "we need to do a better job with PR of covering up our continuing efforts to break and absorb every platform that isn't ours?"

Re:My question

[MightyMartian]

Microsoft has been doing this once or twice a year since somewhere around 2003. Just wait, the latest turncoat from the open source community to get hired up for whatever craptastic OSS lab Microsoft is setting up this week as part of its never-ending propaganda campaign will come on here and want us all to submit questions, to which he will give misleading non-answers, just so the vile pigs at Redmond can go "We're trying to engage the community!"

Re:My question

[luther349]

they cant brake and absorb linux. they tried for the last 5 years to do it and failed hard. they cant buy it away they cant sue it away etc. they even tried to patent troll but i think after they watched other company's patents get shot down they gave up on that. so what else can they do other then damage control being linux is pretty much on everything now really the case with the phone market. it isn't the little nerd os anymore.

Re:My question

[Bobfrankly1]

This is what I want to know: Is Microsoft's new stance a sort of "this is the way the world is going, we'd better at least pretend to get with the program," or is it more like "we need to do a better job with PR of covering up our continuing efforts to break and absorb every platform that isn't ours?"

Yes.

Re:My question

[spun]

Microsoft has been doing this once or twice a year since somewhere around 2003. Just wait, the latest turncoat from the open source community to get hired up for whatever craptastic OSS lab Microsoft is setting up this week as part of its never-ending propaganda campaign will come on here and want us all to submit questions, to which he will give misleading non-answers, just so the vile pigs at Redmond can go "We're trying to engage the community!"

As in, "Redmond expects that every developer will do his duty" and "Engage the community more closely."

Re:My question

[grcumb]

This is what I want to know: Is Microsoft's new stance a sort of "this is the way the world is going, we'd better at least pretend to get with the program," or is it more like "we need to do a better job with PR of covering up our continuing efforts to break and absorb every platform that isn't ours?"

The exec was mis-quoted. He actually said, 'We embrace Open Source.'

... And we all know that Microsoft's embrace is like an anaconda's.

Re:My question

[Anonymous Coward]

What's the difference? They are a large public corporation with fiduciary duty to shareholders and all that. They'll do what they will do to that end.

Re:My question

[cababunga]

"this is the way the world is going, we'd better at least pretend to get with the program," or is it more like "we need to do a better job with PR of covering up our continuing efforts to break and absorb every platform that isn't ours?"

It's more like: "See what Oracle is doing? We would never do like this."

Re:My question

[Charliemopps]

More like Microsoft may be starting to get a glimmer of the reality that they are much like the Roman Empire.

Re:My question

[Alex Belits]

They are large corporation that can only feed itself by perpetuating its monopoly position. If they lose Windows dominance, they will fail no matter what else they will do -- at best turning themselves into faceless omnivore consultancy shaving tiny margins from lending out sysadmins and system integrators (competing with IBM and its likes), at worst going down in flames trying to build a Windows-servers-based advertisement network to compete with Google.

There is no more important task for Microsoft than prolonging the lifetime of Windows monopoly, and that means, they will remain being dangerous enemy of everything related to computing until the end.

It's a trap!

[Anonymous Coward]

I see what you did there.

Re:It's a trap!

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they will say, "I love you!" just like what I said to that hooker before I strangled her last night.

Re:It's a trap!

[Anonymous Coward]

The fact that it has coincided with Iran's "Bomb of Peace" announcement certainly rings of parallelism...

Riiight.

[vadim_t]

I don't see how would this favor MS. For IBM, it made sense as IBM is a services company and works in their favor.

For Microsoft, their business is in selling software, and everybody else is a competitor. In the case of Open Source, a very annoying competitor they can't get rid of easily.

They can start by ending all the funny business with software patents. That would be a first step, but I doubt very much it'll happen. Much more likely that there's some kind of trap here.

Re:Riiight.

[Some.Net(Guy)]

obligatory: http://i.bnet.com/blogs/its_a_trap.jpg

Re:Riiight.

[Mongoose Disciple]

For Microsoft, their business is in selling software, and everybody else is a competitor. In the case of Open Source, a very annoying competitor they can't get rid of easily.

However, open source hasn't been a serious (as in market share) competitor in the areas where Microsoft traditionally makes most of its money. I mean, sure, they'd make a huge pile of money and love it if everyone with Linux servers dumped them for Windows servers, but that's never going to happen.

Also note that Microsoft isn't likely to GPL Office or anything like that. They're probably just coming to see its adoption as orthogonal to their core business more often than not.

Re:Riiight.

[hedwards]

That would require them to get an entirely new business model, and at this point the one they've got still works plenty well. They bring in large amounts of cash every year and their market share is still large enough to represent a formidable opponent to any that might try and compete with them. Sure it won't go on like this forever, but at this point there's very little incentive for them to do anything too radical. The only change I'd think they should be making is dumping Ballmer for a geek or nerd, or at least somebody that gets the technical aspects of their business. Which I'm not personally convinced he gets. Steve Jobs over at Apple for better or for worse over all gets it or at least for the most part is smart enough to let people who do know that stuff get things accomplished.

Re:Riiight.

[BitZtream]

The problem is, you don't realize that there isn't anything in OSS that really competes with MS when it comes to home users.

You may shoehorn your friends and family into running Linux, but you didnt' really do them a favor and just because they don't bitch at you doesn't mean they like it.

Microsoft likes OSS software because it sets the bar incredible low. Its not an insult, its just reality. Most people try something OSS, get tired of having to look all over the Internet just to get it to START working, let alone fix some annoying attribute of it and go back to MS because as much as it suck, it sucks less than the alternatives.

Estimated time till marked as troll: -15 seconds.

Re:Riiight.

[Nysul]

Hasn't Microsoft used BSD-variant code in several of their programs (or at least in the past)? I imagine high quality free code with few restrictions is beneficial for them, even if they simply assimilate it. I haven't RTFA but I imagine this isn't about that, or linux desktops, it is trying to establish more integration with linux server environments.

Re:Riiight.

[LWATCDR]

As long as it runs on Windows they don't care.
Google Docs is seen are more of a threat than OpenOffice ever was.
PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby... They run on Windows so they are all good with that.
Firefox? Better than Chrome and it runs on Windows. Plus they don't sell IE and Microsoft knows that it has lost the "standards" war when it comes to browsers.

Re:Riiight.

[h4rr4r]

Because you are trolling. I know normal folks who are very happy that they don't get viruses anymore. Nor have to pay for anti-virus software, etc.

Sure some OSS software is crap, about 90% of it, but that is the same ratio for closed software. For MS the ratio might actually be worse. Outlook is a piss poor imap client and Sharepoint is a lousy CMS. Add to that the other evil stuff they do, like requiring signed drivers for x64 and you see that they like setting the bar low too.

Re:Riiight.

[Jeng]

Obligatory pictures are not obligatory here.

Care to make an ASCI version?

Re:Riiight.

[luther349]

or they did give up on that being there watching other company's patents being crushed in the courts. and some conturys have gotten rid of soft where patents entirely meaning now even if they did win the victory would be moot. they would just go to a country without software patents. so even a patent troll defense would fail. its been proven those brod patents do not stand up in court anyways.

Re:Riiight.

[Mongoose Disciple]

Outlook is a piss poor imap client and Sharepoint is a lousy CMS

And democracy is the worst system of government, except for all the others that have been tried.

(Alternately, Outlook is more than an imap client and Sharepoint is more than a CMS.)

The world is full of products that everyone seems to hate that nonetheless enjoy a ridiculous level of marketplace dominance because even if they are terrible, they still seem to be the best for what most of the market wants. Flash, for example.

Re:Riiight.

[spun]

Last millennium called, it wants it's critique of OSS back. It also wants its snowclones back, but it said I could use them this one last time because it's for a good cause.

Re:Riiight.

[Anonymous Coward]

MS have discovered that PCs are replaced every X years, and we have kids, and they get PCs for the most part. Guess what company has a near monopoly on dumping their OS on these 100s of millions of machines each year? Yes, it's MS. They've got an near indestructible income source for the foreseeable future. Even if you don't use doze, chances are if you're not buying some obsolescence built-in Apple product, you're paying the Microsoft tax. Very few people bother with building their own rig compared to 10 years ago. Unless you want a screaming gaming rig, you can't even make parity on cost.

Linux has taken over the server market, an area MS was never taken seriously other than noddy file servers and exchange servers always down. Desktop is still controlled by the applications people need, and today more than ever, compatibility rules the roost, even if OSS has perfectly usable equivalents (except games of course). Linux is still limited to the shit FPS from a decade ago "with pride".

Re:Riiight.

[Reapman]

Not troll, just, at least partially, wrong.

Your vision of Linux is rather laughable, and reminds me of Linux fanboys that think of Windows as a Win95 box. Both OS's have progressed passed that point in history.

I just spent a week of evenings fixing up two Windows XP comptuers because they were completely unusable. Windows isn't some holy "it just works" operating system.

Another example, my mom is now running Ubuntu, at least temporarily. When I setup her computer I set it up with Dual Boot capabilities in case something happened to her Windows. Well it started slowing to a crawl, and I couldn't figure out why. I ran out of time to diagnose, so she's setup in Ubuntu and is doing what she did before just fine. I showed her how to get back into Windows if there's something she needs, and watched her do it to make sure how, but so far she hasn't felt the need.

Another example is XBMC's Live CD, where I was able to get a fully functional Media Center PC by simply putting in a CD, everything just worked. Now install Windows 7 and their Media Center offering. It'll work, and it'll work great, but I'll already be done watching a couple episodes by then in XBMC.

No, I don't go around installing Linux for my friends and family, Windows has real advantages over Linux (and vice versa). but to dismiss it without a second thought is doing yourself a diservice.

Re:Riiight.

[shutdown -p now]

For Microsoft, their business is in selling software

Sometimes you can sell more X by giving some Y (that depends in some way on X) for free. Case in point: IronPython is OSS, but depends on .NET which is free but not OSS, which depends on Windows which is not free (Mono is technically also supported, but most people who pick .NET also go with Windows in practice). Presumably, also, any server-side software written in IronPython would run on Windows Server (very much not free), and quite possibly use MSSQL for database (pricey!). So there's your cash flow.

In some cases, it can be more subtle. E.g. Visual Studio Express is free, but it results in more applications written for Windows, which increases the latter's attractiveness to end users. If making tools OSS increases their popularity even further, then why not?

But, really, it's all rather basic stuff that should be pretty obvious to anyone.

Re:Riiight.

[Bobfrankly1]

The problem is, you don't realize that there isn't anything in OSS that really competes with MS when it comes to home users.

How about Open Office? I know many home users that prefer a free install of Open Office to a pay for upgrade to Office 2010. With the docx file format coming attached to e-mails, many users were forced to upgrade their version of Office. Those of my clients who needed an upgrade opted for the free, and haven't looked back.

Re:Riiight.

[Bert64]

Most home users only need an IMAP (or pop3) client to talk to their ISP, there are many people out there using outlook for a task it's extremely poorly suited to.

Sharepoint is often used as a CMS too...

If you want an IMAP client or a CMS (as MANY people do), the MS tools are overpriced and considerably inferior to the alternatives.

Re:Riiight.

[_Sprocket_]

The problem is, you don't realize that there isn't anything in OSS that really competes with MS when it comes to home users.

By "home users", I assume you're talking about a standard desktop computer. For the sake of argument, let's say you're right about that. The thing is, there is so much else going on in the industry that home users and their desktops just aren't that important. Or, at least, they're not important beyond introducing future IT decision makers and developers to the Microsoft ecosystem.

You may shoehorn your friends and family into running Linux, but you didnt' really do them a favor and just because they don't bitch at you doesn't mean they like it.

YMMV. Me - I've given up on evangelizing and shoehorning friends and family. The funny thing about that is that last year, one of my household asked me to wipe her laptop and install Ubuntu. And she's been absolutely thrilled with it (although she does have her WinXP desktop for iTunes).

Re:Riiight.

[Locke2005]

...most people who pick .NET also go with Windows in practice...

Only because the phrase "Miguel de Icaza gave us free Mono" is sooooo open to misinterpretation... seriously, couldn't they have thought of a better name for that project, e.g. ".NOT"?

Re:Riiight.

[_Sprocket_]

Microsoft has included BSD and GPL applications in their products in the past. And despite the dangerously viral nature of the GPL, much of Microsoft's products remain proprietary.

Re:Riiight.

[h4rr4r]

Outlook is a lot more, but folks use it as an IMAP client, when it sucks in that role. Same thing with Sharepoint, most installations use it only as a CMS, which it sucks at.

Re:Riiight.

[h4rr4r]

Dangerously Viral?

You mean if you want free code you have to give away the code you used it in?

Oh noes, people may be forced to write their own code if they don't like that deal. What a tragedy.

Re:Riiight.

[h4rr4r]

Seems pretty accurate. What is the misinterpretation? That is is not an infectious disease on open source? That is not a fucking trap?

Re:Riiight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Because you are trolling. I know normal folks who are very happy that they don't get viruses anymore. Nor have to pay for anti-virus software, etc.

Yeah, I know people using Macs too!

Re:Riiight.

[_Sprocket_]

Apparently, developers have a hard time paying attention to licenses. You'd think more of them would run afoul of the law considering the proliferation of proprietary licenses out there. But it seems only the GPL is dangerous like that. Or so Microsoft would have us believe.

(You should be reading my two posts with a sarcastic tone, just in case you haven't picked it up on your own.)

Re:Riiight.

[h4rr4r]

Yeah, but most of my friends and family aren't that rich nor pretentious.

Re:Riiight.

[allusionist]

Firefox better than Chrome? Surely you jest!

Re:Riiight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, I see - you meant that THE ONLY thing they were happy with was the lack of viruses... I'm sorry to hear that your friends can only afford Linux. It must be a very difficult time for them. :(

Have they considered food stamps? I know it's difficult to swallow your pride and go on the dole... but maybe it'd be worth it.

Re:Riiight.

[c0lo]

As long as it runs on Windows they don't care.

Which, I'd argue, is a huge step forward from the position: as long as it runs only on Windows.

And now, confusion kicks in, in regards with run on Windows and MS care about. The way I understood, as long as something runs on Windows, MS doesn't care. But the set of examples doesn't support this idea.

Google Docs is seen are more of a threat than OpenOffice ever was.

And GoogleDocs runs on Windows the last time I checked.

PHP, Perl, Python, Ruby... They run on Windows so they are all good with that.

The same way GoogleDocs runs on Windows, as well as on other OS-es.

Firefox? Better than Chrome and it runs on Windows.

And Chrome does as well. So, is MS concerned about Firefox? Is MS concerned about Chrome?

Re:Riiight.

[LinuxIsGarbage]

Upgrade from Office 97? Because the compatibility pack is offered free to office 2000-2003 users. And of course docx is interchangeable between 2007 and 2010, and users aren't FORCED to upgrade.

Re:Riiight.

[stephanruby]

However, open source hasn't been a serious (as in market share) competitor in the areas where Microsoft traditionally makes most of its money.

What about SQL Server? A traditional cash cow for Microsoft. A license for SQL Server 2000 Standard Edition used to cost $10,000. When SQL Server 2005 came out, it was more like a couple of hundred dollars for SQL Server 2005 for the Workgroup Edition (which is really just as good as the Standard Edition used to be).

In the Windows-based web Startup I used to work for, the cost of adding new Windows servers (with all the requisite licenses for the proprietary software we were using) became increasingly worrisome for us. When our competitor's traffic grew, they just added linux boxes. For us when our traffic grew, our expenses just kept on growing linearly just in licensing costs.

This is not to say that Microsoft lost significant marketshare, I honestly don't know if they did, but at least, I'm pretty sure that they lost revenue by selling their brand new versions of existing software for pennies on the dollar. And this change in pricing structure is not isolated just to SQL Server either. For almost every Microsoft product out there, there is at least one or more open source alternatives.

And in a startup, or even in a large corporation that's not doing too well, IT is looking to cut costs whatever way they can. It doesn't mean that they have to switch to open source software to save money, for Microsoft just the implied threat that their customers might switch to open source software is enough to make them slash their prices down to almost nothing.

Re:Riiight.

[Eskarel]

Try the 4.0 beta, it's getting pretty close.

Re:Riiight.

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if you're running into the Microsoft Update issue I did the other day. On machines with 512 MB of memory or less (typical for an XP machine of a certain age), Microsoft Update has recently been causing massive thrashing by gobbling up hundreds of MB of memory, and then failing to make progress.

Cue Automatic Updates running on startup, and you have a recipe for computer performance hell.

The solution is to go to the update.microsoft.com site, change settings, and uninstall Microsoft Update. Plain Windows Update works just fine.

Apparently, this only started happening in the last few weeks. I'm guessing the size of the Microsoft Update manifest blew up...

Re:Riiight.

[msormune]

If Open Source went away Microsoft would be slapped with more monopoly law suits. They don't want that, so it's easier to keep it alive and well.

Re:Riiight.

[Anonymous Coward]

Outlook is way more (and same can probably be said about Sharepoint). The point is, IMAP is just a bullet in the Outlook & exchange brochures and they do a piss poor job o fthe actual implementation.

If we were comparing IMAP clients / servers, Microsoft products wouldn't be in the top 10... the problem is that were comparing "server software that works with Outlook, Sharepoint and AD and maybe does real email as well" and surprisingly OSS products suck in that category. Who would have thought?

Re:Riiight.

[cbhacking]

I'm amused (and saddened by the fact that you appear to take yourself seriously) that you talk about how much Linux (and Windows) have advanced in one sentence, then talk about how much work you had to do on a 9-year-old version of Windows two sentences later! The fact that such blatant hypocrisy reaches +5 on /. is really annoying, sometimes.

The rest of your post is generally accurate, although an out-of-the-box Linux install is most likely still going to have more driver troubles than an out-of-the-box Windows install of the same release cycle (i.e. not XP, unless you want me to go dig up a copy of RHEL 2.1 to compare it against). Your claim about TV viewing is particularly silly for two reasons. First of all, custom-built distros aside it's far, far harder to get TV working well on Linux than it is on Windows. I've tried setting up MythTV, because it sounded cool and I wanted to compare it to Windows Media Center. Unfortunately, the process of just getting to the point of having an executable I could run took longer than the entire WMC setup (which is roughly 5 minutes). Normally, installing software on Linux is easy, but that was *not* my experience in this case.

Then, there's that driver issue. The last two laptops I've bought have TV tuner cards. I didn't buy them for that features; it was simply included and I wasn't going to turn down an already excellent deal on that basis. In both cases, Windows could find drivers for the cards quickly, and WMC would use them with no fuss. Neither one works at all under Linux, though. There's an incomplete port for the general family of one, but it doesn't work on my particular card and it requires downloading tarballs, applying patches, building, and loading a kernel module to even get to the point where it will claim to handle the hardware (although it still fails to actually work). These are AVerMedia cards, not exactly some obscure, unknown brand. Things are definitely improving, for example a few years ago wifi and webcams were both in similarly bad states of support (some worked great, some had to be coaxed, and some flat-out failed to work). These days, most don't even need coaxing anymore and for the rest, it's possible with a little effort. Seriously though, TV tuner support under Linux is not exactly something one should be highlighting as a strength right now.

, plus about 30 for the complete OS install and any extra drivers or updates to download

Re:Riiight.

[jimicus]

Thing is, Microsoft are in a tough position. Partly because of their size.

Publicly-traded companies are generally under immense pressure to grow the business. But in Microsoft's case, how would they grow it?

They're as close to saturation point as they'll get with PCs. Which realistically leaves servers, smartphones and the embedded market. All places where Linux is much stronger, and where "we're going to crush linux! ugh ugh ugh!" "Look out for that chair!" doesn't impress anyone.

Re:Riiight.

[jimicus]

Outlook is a piss poor imap client

That's because it is not an IMAP client. Which anyone who's ever used Outlook in conjunction with Exchange will tell you.

Outlook is a sales tool used by Microsoft to sell you Exchange, and as such it is an Exchange client which connects to IMAP as an afterthought. It's great for people who want a communications mechanism comprising telephone, meetings and appointments and email all in one rather than just a simple email client - and more often than not, those people are the senior managers who chose Exchange.

Re:Riiight.

[shutdown -p now]

Which, I'd argue, is a huge step forward from the position: as long as it runs only on Windows.

"So long as it runs better on Windows" is good enough. And did you notice? FF4 is getting hardware acceleration... via Direct2D - so Windows only.

And Chrome does as well. So, is MS concerned about Firefox? Is MS concerned about Chrome?

Check IE9 previews, and judge for yourself...

Re:Riiight.

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm amused (and saddened by the fact that you appear to take yourself seriously) that you talk about how much Linux (and Windows) have advanced in one sentence, then talk about how much work you had to do on a 9-year-old version of Windows two sentences later!

That's part of the reality though. Lots of people still run XP and if you do support you will have to deal with that. Of people who run Linux on the desktop the majority will have an up to date version. The price differential ensures that this will always be the case and price is a quality of the Windows operating system.

I've been given the task of removing a rootkit from my brother in law's XP box. The fact that it probably wouldn't have been a successful infection if it was a Windows 7 box is irrelevant. I don't even know why it has XP on it because he brought it new last year. It was a budget deal so maybe that's why, he wouldn't have known the difference between XP and 7 anyway he just takes what he's been sold.

He got rid of Fedora in favour of XP because it was "easier" but he can't run it without help anyway. It's not really easier, but when a mate sends him an xls file with a funny game and some malware in it, it's just too hard to get it to run in Linux.

Re:Riiight.

[LWATCDR]

Sorry I should have made that more clear.
Microsoft likes Firefox better than Chrome. They doubt that many large organizations would ever standardize on Firefox since it is FOSS. They do worry about Chrome since I could see a big company making that the standard browser.
BTW Chrome is my default browser but I still use Firefox sometimes.

Re:Riiight.

[LWATCDR]

Google docs isn't FOSS.
Chrome isn't FOSS.
Microsoft just has not seen a huge uptake of in Use of OpenOffice by large organisations. Same with Firefox.
However With Google behind it Chrome and Google Docs is far more of a threat.
Most people using OpenOffice would have just gotten a copy of Office from work so they are not a lost sale.
Most people using Firefox are home users and in to tech "but that is changing" so that isn't a real worry.
PHP, Python, Ruby, Perl, and Apache means that you can run things like Wordpress and Drupal on a Windows server as well as you Linux and then add in little pieces of ASP.NET to tie it to you real systems.

Chrome and Google docs do have the potential to take business away from Microsoft because Google is a business.
That is what people don't get. Microsoft worries more about RedHat than Linux.

Re:Riiight.

[Reapman]

Please... many MANY people were told to stay away from Vista, so it's a fact of life that a LARGE install base of Windows XP still exists, heck many enterprise organizations still run XP (such as mine), XP still exists - what you want has no bearing on this. So basically are you saying that I should be telling my friends and family to buy new computers that can run Windows 7? That's as ignorant as telling them I only support Linux systems. My goal is not to be an OS evangalist, but to actually provide the service they want. If everyone ran Linux instead of Windows I'd still be cleaning up their damn computers. My point was Windows isn't a magic bullet solution, and to make it appear as such (And to say Linux has no place on the desktop) is ignorant.

MythTV and Tuners, ya total PITA. Note tho I never mentioned Tuners. If I seriously wanted to get into THAT, I would likely go Windows 7 Media Center. I find XBMC with DVD's I've ripped far easier to use then hunting in my shelves for what I want to watch tonight. However I think computer based tuner solutions no matter the OS are too much work either way.

Re:Riiight.

[Bobfrankly1]

Many of them use an archaic version that they copied over from a dieing computer. Many others just use wordpad to open documents sent to them. Never underestimate what a user will do to keep money in their pocket.

Windows wouldn't have a network stack without BSD

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course they love Open Source. Free software supply: Imagine the margin.

Uh huh

[MightyMartian]

Oh look, Microsoft out there putting a hand out to the open source community, except for the largest, most important OSS project; Linux.

Why does anybody even bother reporting this crapola? Microsoft is not open source's friend, save within the very limited capacity of what it figures it can control. Microsoft has been and remains one of the great enemies of open source.

Re:Uh huh

[Tuan121]

Microsoft has been and remains one of the great enemies of open source.

Perhaps it is a necessary enemy. A large model like Microsoft was absolutely necessary to allow software to get to the stage that open source could actually become a viable alternative.

You can complain all you want and say that Microsoft is an enemy of open source, but the fact of the matter is open source wouldn't be anywhere without Microsoft (or insert giant-corporation here).

Re:Uh huh

[MightyMartian]

I call BS on that. Linux didn't require Microsoft to get widely used, what it required was a lot of IT-savvy folks looking for a cheap *nix alternative that they could get their hands on the source code.

Re:Uh huh

[Anonymous Coward]

Linux is, in your opinion, the most important OSS project.

Linux is not, in my opinion, the most important OSS project.

I don't know why subjective things get an "Insightful" mod.

How's that go again?

[johnhp]

I remember "embrace" and "extend", but I can't seem to remember the third phase...

Re:How's that go again?

[mrsteveman1]

???

(next comes PROFIT!)

Re:How's that go again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exfoliate.

Re:How's that go again?

[Locke2005]

I think phase 3 is "Taking all the customers you have successfully locked into using your software and giving them the butt-fucking they so richly deserve,"

Re:How's that go again?

[Bobfrankly1]

there were actually 4. The complete ideal is embrace, extend, enfiltrate, and eradicate.

Re:How's that go again?

[Mongoose Disciple]

I think phase 3 is "Taking all the customers you have successfully locked into using your software and giving them the butt-fucking they so richly deserve,"

Your ideas are intriguing to me and I wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

Re:How's that go again?

[plover]

Exterminate!!

Re:How's that go again?

[johnhp]

Wikipedia shows the version that I'm familiar with, which is "Embrace, extend, extinguish". http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Embrace,_extend_and_extinguish

Re:How's that go again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Enfiltrate isn't even a word arsehole.

Re:How's that go again?

[Anonymous Coward]

Excrement?

Obligatory

[Tablizer]

In related news, they also claim they are against flying chairs.

Re:Obligatory

[Bobfrankly1]

In other news, the original After Dark crew is getting back together to make a flying chairs screensaver...

They really DO love "open source"

[Locke2005]

The just have a different definition of what "open source" means than you and I. "Open Source" to Microsoft means that they are free to incorporate other people's work into their software with any reciprocation or release of the modified code. Unfortunately many companies feel this way open source code.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[shutdown -p now]

"Open Source" to Microsoft means that they are free to incorporate other people's work into their software with any reciprocation or release of the modified code.

Actually, if anything, MS is rather FOSS-phobic when it comes to using source code written by external parties. Any use of outside code requires legal review (as it should be), but particularly strong attention is paid to anything with open source licenses, and you'd better have a really good reason as to why you need it before the whole approval process will even get started. Consequently, there are very few cases of MS using open source code in its products (relative to overall code size) compared to industry average.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[OutSourcingIsTreason]

That isn't my experience. Several years ago I worked at a software house that was acquired by Microsoft. The first thing they did was audit our source code to identify all the modules derived from open source. Before the sale could go through we had to rewrite those modules from scratch.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[dkleinsc]

In other words, they love BSD-style open source, where they can grab the network stack and incorporate it into their proprietary operating system. I doubt they're so keen on GPL-style open source, where they can grab a network stack if they share their entire operating system source with the public.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[UnknowingFool]

MS is rather FOSS-phobic when it comes to using source code written by external parties.

This was one of the reasons for the Kin debacle according to rumors. MS bought Danger and it started to make the next generation of the Sidekick. Well, Danger used Java as development platform. Early on it was thus decreed that only Window Mobile/CE should be used. At the same time, the head of Windows Mobile didn't really want both Window 7 Phone and Kin. So he essentially refused to provide the Kin team with support. Not only did the Kin team have to put in a brand new OS and development platform, they got no help from the resident experts of that platform. So the Kin was 18 months delayed which is several generations in cell phone lifetime.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[bmajik]

Unless you have personal knowledge that this is true, as in, you've seen the Windows source code, and even know what a "networking stack" is, you should stop repeating this oft-made claim. I beleive what you are doing is called "heresey"

Hint #1: Windows had a multi-proc re-entrant networking layer (including driver model) long before any BSD did. How did they get that from BSD?

Hint #2: running "strings" on windows ftp.exe and finding the BSD copyright has nothing to do with "the network stack". Nobody cares about ftp.exe except unix folks like us, so it's nearly a straight port to winsock.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[Locke2005]

Ok, it looks like I may be wrong about this. The widely held notion that Microsoft used the BSD network stack in NT and Windows 2000 has since been refuted. While Microsoft has felt free to steal ideas from others, I cannot cite any specific proven cases of Microsoft "borrowing" open source code. Can anyone else provide examples of where they have done this?

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[batkiwi]

Well, if you had "modules" derived from open source then there's bigger problems than microsoft auditing you if your entire product wasn't open source.

MS was right to do so, and you should have done so long before.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[domatic]

Not necessarily. Much open source isn't copylefted and often the only real requirement you have is to preserve a copyright notice. These days Apache style licensing is getting more popular. That isn't copylefted either but now has poison pills against patent aggression. I can see how MS wouldn't like that.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[Sarten-X]

Adding to that fine point, it's entirely possible that that company simply didn't distribute their product. Under the GPL, you are only required to distribute source is you distribute (in a legal sense) the product.

If you're merely selling access to the software (like selling hosting, or software-as-a-service access, or any of many other back-end technologies), you can use GPL code without releasing your modifications to the rest of the world. It's somewhat underhanded, but perfectly in line with the license. That's why the Affero GPL exists. It specifically requires releasing the source to users, even if "distribution" doesn't occur.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[Anonymous Coward]

Microsoft loves open source the way Hannibal Lecter loves having people over for dinner.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[weicco]

Isn't this obvious? Linux is competing with Windows so it's no wonder MS doesn't like it. But not every Open Source app is competing with MS and why wouldn't they "love" those? After all Linux is not synonym to Open Source and vice versa.

To me Open Source is about the choice. The choice for the copyright owner to determine which licence to use while others have the choice to follow that licence or seek alternatives with other licences. Personally I use MIT a lot just for the reason that anyone, including Microsoft, is free to take my code and do what ever they like with it, just as long as my name is found somewhere in the code or in release.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[bongda68.vn]

The just have a different definition of what "open source" means than you and I. "Open Source" to Microsoft means that they are free to incorporate other people's work into their software with any reciprocation or release of the modified code. Unfortunately many companies feel this way open source code.

:-) i hope they can!

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[devent]

So you say MS is spending a few Million $ just to rewrite the wheel? Why they make such a waste of time and money? Don't you know that most the libraries you can use in a proprietary project because most of them are licensed MIT, Apache, BSD or LGPL? Or was it just the policy that we don't use any open source code because we are Microsoft?

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[dangitman]

The first thing they did was audit our source code to identify all the modules derived from open source. Before the sale could go through we had to rewrite those modules from scratch.

Ummm, that just proves exactly what the post you were replying to was claiming. Microsoft rewrote those modules, because it doesn't want to reciprocate or release modified code to the community. They want to incorporate others' work without having to abide by open source licenses.

Re:They really DO love "open source"

[Anonymous Coward]

running "strings" on windows ftp.exe and finding the BSD copyright has nothing to do with "the network stack".

The best citation I could find for this was here.

But they do like Open Source

[WillAffleckUW]

... they like it for Breakfast.

Privatize profit and code written by open source coders, outsource risk to the American public, and hire lots of H1-B workers from overseas instead of Americans ....

The five stages of grief...

[quarkoid]

Reading this and thinking back, I can't help but think of the Kuebler-Ross model. Back in 2001 MS were in denial. We've been through anger, bargaining and (arguably) depression. Is this now acceptance?

Re:The five stages of grief...

[srodden]

As an earlier commenter observed, MS' core business is selling software, not services. Thus FLOSS (and to a lesser degree OSS) is the antithesis of their business model. For MS to now be courting the OSS world, it means they can smell money in sizable quantities. I suspect it's a ploy. False acceptance if you will. Any offering they make will have some gotcha. Perhaps their contributions to OSS will be offered under a MSOSS licence instead of a GPL. Or they'll offer technologies and promise to not enforce the patents then hold off long enough to let the techniques become entrenched then renig on the offer.

We Love Open Source

[Nerdfest]

... it tastes like kittens.

Re:We Love Open Source

[Anonymous Coward]

I literally L'dOL at this :-D +1

Re:We Love Open Source

[Locke2005]

Netcraft confirms it: BSD tastes more like a cross between Spotted Owl and California Condor!

Prove your love ....

[RichMan]

Open source to Microsoft
      prove your love,
sign your patents over to some open source license agreement.

Love is all about the commitment.

Re:Prove your love ....

[jpate]

yep. based on past behavior, I think it's fine to demand a pre-nup...

Which open source?

[inode_buddha]

Do they love the development model? Or do they love the BSD licenses? Apache? MIT? Do they love the community spirit, the excitement an passion that "anyone can do this"? Notice in all of this however, that they don't seem to mention "Free as in Freedom".

Re:Which open source?

[rantomaniac]

They love the open source software that is created around their products of course, just look at codeplex. It's full of Office, Sharepoint, WPF and XNA stuff.
And well, maybe it's fine, you can't prevent people from writing open source apps for their platforms. But it feels weird, this whole open source ecosystem springing up, that is completely incompatible with the Linux/BSD centered one. They're probably aiming for their community to displace ours as the number one thing people think when they hear "open source".

fannee doolee

[trb]

Fannee Doolee hates open source, but she loves free software.

You know what they say...

[supersloshy]

Embrace, Extend, Extinguish... If Microsoft doesn't make Windows or most of its core products libre/open-source, then they are talking out of their ass and just want people to stop hating them so much for their obvious anti-free stance.

Re:You know what they say...

[domatic]

MS doesn't even have to that. They could simply refrain from patent aggression and having their highest officers make asses of themselves with veiled legal threats.

Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[Infonaut]

Microsoft is the enemy of open source, pure and simple.

I think that used to be the case, but Microsoft seems to have a more nuanced view now. They recognize that Linux is a strategic threat, but that doesn't mean that any and all open source projects are similarly dangerous to their core interests. They have far more than Linux to contend with these days, and they're finding allies in unlikely places.

That said, Microsoft has flip-flopped so many times on open source it remains to be seen whether they truly understand that they've lost the ideological war over open source (and more importantly, free software).

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[Anonymous Coward]

They continue to attempt to squash an open project they can, not just Linux. Take the OfficeOpenXML format vs the OpenDoucment format.

While they might no longer be funding SCO's lawsuit, they haven't admitted Linux doesn't invade their patents, despite stealing much of DOS from Unix.

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[h4rr4r]

No DOS stole from CP/M.

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[dosius]

Borrowed liberally from XENIX too. That's why it's had stdio abstraction and Unix file handles since version 2.0.

-uso.

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[Alanonfire]

Linux is not a threat to Microsoft. Linux could only be considered a threat to Apple, if Apple were to be solely a software company. MS dominates the home computer market by a long shot. Its going to take many years for anyone to become a direct threat to Microsoft's livelihood.

I feel they make these announcements on purpose. They want to win back some lost support from people who have fled to the Free and Open Source worlds.

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[Anonymous Coward]

It is fun that a "community" which is so much against software-patents and intellectual property in general and which defends using 100% compatible clones of proprietary software would accuse anyone of "stealing" file handles from UNIX or the GUI from Apple.

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[DAldredge]

XENIX was a Microsoft Product.

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[Eskarel]

So Microsoft continues to battle against products trying which are competing directly with it's core revenue streams(Windows and Office)? What a shock.

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[Alex Belits]

File handles in DOS was probably the first instance of Microsoft disease -- take a useful feature, design or concept from a different environment, then implement it MONSTROUSLY, TERRIBLY WRONG, completely defeating the purpose of all decisions that led to that feature, design or concept. It's probably slightly more ironic than their later attempts because they were borrowing from "their own" (well, more SCO than their) product.

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[neonmonk]

Servers, dumbass. Do you realise how much money Microsoft makes from server licences?

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[Dr_Barnowl]

Microsoft probably do love some open-source projects, but not ones that compete with them. They love projects that increase the value of Windows at no cost to them.

They probably don't mind too much about Firefox, Chrome, Opera, etc. The worst you can say about them is that they don't direct the user to Bing by default. But they all make Windows nicer to use, at no cost to the user or to Microsoft, as do many other projects. There is a thriving set of open-source projects that ONLY target Windows, would you believe, and MS love these (until they compete with something they do), because they are a reason to stay with Windows.

They do, of course, hate OpenOffice, because it eats into their market.

Re:Fight to win, sue for peace when you can't

[jedidiah]

> It is fun that a "community" which is so much against software-patents and
> intellectual property in general and which defends using 100% compatible
> clones of proprietary software would accuse anyone of "stealing" file handles
> from UNIX or the GUI from Apple.

Not really. It's just a declaration of hypocrisy.

Lemmings like to whine about how Linux is derivative.

Those of us with computer science backgrounds from those
serious Universities that "don't pander to industry" all
understand just how unoriginal it all is.

It's Microsoft and it's Lemmings that spout stupid nonsense
about "the right to innovate".

The problem with Microsoft plagarizing something is that they
will manage to get a patent on it and then sue the person that
invented it.

Fool me once, shame on you...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who listens to what Microsoft says? Judge by actions and not rhetoric and even the most idiotic person should realize Microsoft is ant-GPL and Opensource except for instances where it benefits them directly.

I'd like to see official NTFS drivers for Linux

[ydrol]

as opposed to rev.eng. ones? Then I'd believe. Too many NTFS removable drives floating around, and FAT barfs on 4G files.

Re:I'd like to see official NTFS drivers for Linux

[StayFrosty]

as opposed to rev.eng. ones? Then I'd believe. Too many NTFS removable drives floating around, and FAT barfs on 4G files.

FAT also is a good way to end up at the wrong end of a patent lawsuit. It would be nice to see some sort of patent agreement from MS.

Re:I'd like to see official NTFS drivers for Linux

[Ant P.]

Use UDF and all those problems magically vanish.

Typical Microsoft, last on the train.

[kawabago]

nuff sed

Re:We Love Open Source -- obligatory

[DCFusor]

What's wrong with being drunk? You ask a glass of water that. I love red meat -- kill it, cook it, eat it, turn it to, well you know. My wife loves ice cream -- same issues. We're better off when they are honest about hating us, that way they fool fewer people into their traps.

Open source without income?

[ingilizdili]

Do open source authors have some sort of revenue out of their hard work in return for which they seem to demand nothing? SSL certificates, for example; do they provide some kind of income? And if that is the case, microsoft has a right to adopt some sort of defensive (or offensive) stance, I think.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[shutdown -p now]

Which one is the question?

Put your money where your mouth is

[Beelzebud]

And release Direct X under the GPL. Until then I don't believe they care much about open source at all. :)

Re:Put your money where your mouth is

[Anonymous Coward]

They said Open Source, not unFree Software. Only when they release it under a 2-clause BSD, I will believe them.

Sure

[Razorm]

Embrace, extend, then extinguish.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[Anonymous Coward]

dont worry about mac osX most of those students are dual booting to 7 and in 5 years when mac breaks compatibility with themselves ,... again they will be less prone to buy what Jenny has cause it looks cute, they are going to buy a windows machine for 2000$ less that does everything they were already using windows for

Is Anyone Still Scared of Microsoft?

[jjohnson]

Since killing Netscape, have they succeeded at anything they've said they'd do, or that it was implied they'd do? Their list of failures is long, and each one has a multi-billion dollar price tag on it. Even after all these years, the only inarguably profitable lines are still Windows itself and Office.

About the only thing I can think of is X-box, which has become successful in its own right, though far from dominant. SQL Server is successful within its segment, though I don't know if its profitable. Visual Studio is the best IDE for developing on Windows, but they have no real competition there, and now they're giving it away.

Re:Is Anyone Still Scared of Microsoft?

[h4rr4r]

How is the Xbox a success? Even if the 360 becomes the #1 console it will never pay off the bill from the first one.

Re:Is Anyone Still Scared of Microsoft?

[shutdown -p now]

Visual Studio is the best IDE for developing on Windows, but they have no real competition there, and now they're giving it away.

Oh, there's plenty of competition. Qt Creator, for one. And Java apps still run on Windows, so you have to count both Eclipse and NetBeans, as well.

It's not exactly "giving away", either. Express editions are free, yes, but they're quite feature-limited compared to full versions - and have you seen the price tags on those, especially with MSDN subscription? And yet most MS shops buy it.

How about OOXML?

[VGR]

How nice of them. They apologized for calling Linux a cancer.

Still waiting for an apology for the OOXML atrocity. In fact, it's going to take a lot more than a few contributions and nice words to make me put OOXML and its enormously dirty dealings in the past.

Translation ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Translate the phrase: "We Love Open Source"
"Please Develop for our platform, we need more applications."

Sure they do !

[alexhs]

Microsoft Claims 'We Love Open Source'

... with salt and well cooked.

(Tribute to MC Solaar : translation of the song "Bouge de là")

Embrace, ...

[PinkyGigglebrain]

If MS tries to go for the "We're all friends here" hug watch out for the dagger up their sleeve.

.

Error in translation

[gmuslera]

"F*** you" is about sex, not love

Ballmer loves Linux ...

[PPH]

... like a Slashdotter loves a supermodel. Trouble is, they'll never love you back.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[h4rr4r]

The desktop market is tiny. OSX is a joke in the server realm and the embedded one. Most kids are not taking Macs to school.

Linux is winning by taking the topend, servers and the bottom, the tablets and phones. Android sales already outnumber iPhones. Growth will continue.

Endless love...

[WoollyMittens]

They love it so much, they just about love it to death.

directx

[Anonymous Coward]

the only thing the open source community wants from you microsoft, is a fair playing feild. OPEN SOURCE directx all versions. OR GET THE F OUT OF THE INDUSTRY. we ask nothing else of you. then again u can take that patent list and shove it up ur as$.

for those that dont know... direct x, actually has influence on how the video cards are made. so therefore. insider trading on the biggest monopoletic scam of the last decade or longer.

heres some more dirt. windows 2000 pro couldnt use dx9?
windows xp cant use dx10?
windows vista.....
windows 7.....

see the trend they forced on everyone?... hmmmmmm dirty dirty trickery.

to lazy to login to my acount. im CcSsNET been paying attention since dos there M$. you think this is the only dirt i got on you? haha. step up!

Define "love"

[smellsofbikes]

Because I can't help but think Microsoft loves Open Source like Roman Polanski loves 14-year-old girls.

Slonik

[tepples]

When people stop using databases, what does Oracle really have?

People won't stop using databases, but when people stop using its flagship database software, Oracle will have what PostgreSQL fans like to call an elephant in the room.

Re:Slonik

[HermMunster]

MySQL played a big part in why Oracle grabbed Sun. Having control of the product (even if they don't discontinue it) will certainly slow down the time-frame where it might gain feature and performance parity (if it's not just left to rot in the sun) with Oracle's flagship product. I think Ellison understands that given enough time it would hurt their bottom line. At least now they control it.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[Rob Y.]

I think KDE4 and Gnome have ruined Linux on the desktop for a very long time.

While I agree that the Linux desktop divide is a real issue, you've got to remember that KDE4 and Gnome have never even been seen by most mainstream users. In fact, it's only over the last few years that Linux desktops have become 100% ready for the mainstream (i.e. provide a comparable, better in some ways, newbie experience than Windows). Of course, the lack of popular software titles is still a chicken and egg problem that may never be resolved. But don't confuse the internal squabbles of longtime Linux enthusiasts with the real roadblocks. Inertia being the biggest.

Businesses willing to go with OpenOffice could switch to Linux at any time. That wasn't quite true a few years ago. But now Google's doing it. IBM is kinda doing it (though their dogfooding of Lotus isn't an approach likely to catch on). Munich's finally got their act together.

And the reason kids can take Macs to college is exactly the reason Linux can work for most people. Nobody uses desktop apps any more. Sure, they use iTunes and probably MSOffice. Maybe a game or two. Nobody's forced to use IE any more except inside lazy corporations with old IE-specific apps. Linux will be ready for the desktop as soon as the genericification of the desktop is complete. Google's Chrome is gonna help drive that point home for corps for whom Google's size legitimizes the concept. It may be too soon, but it's where things are heading. You won't have to use the cloud for everything, but corporations will use internal clouds for as much as they can.

Linux runs on Windows

[tepples]

As long as it runs on Windows they don't care.

I don't follow your logic given that Linux runs on Windows. Oracle has this container called VirtualBox into which one can install any x86 PC operating system, not just its own Solaris, and VirtualBox runs on Windows.

Re:Linux runs on Windows

[Eskarel]

And if that's how you ran Linux, Microsoft wouldn't care.

Re:Linux runs on Windows

[shutdown -p now]

I don't follow your logic given that Linux runs on Windows.

His logic is sound - it's precisely why Hyper-V officially supports Linux as a guest OS.

Port Office to Linux

[future assassin]

and I'll believe it as a start. Even though I use and try to get others to use OpenOffice MS office is still so much more polished for the end user. Same goes with GIMP, as much as I want to switch to GIMP full time its still no replacement for PS7 for me.

Re:Port Office to Linux

[Americano]

How many Office for Linux licenses are you proposing to buy?

Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

I downloaded that Microsofts Linnucks program and installed it on my PC. It worked good.

Fear of Google

[Ken Broadfoot]

Is driving this change of heart for Microsoft.

..they love Open Source...but check their strategy

[martiniturbide]

Some months ago I made an analysis of a local Microsoft event where they said they love open source. But their strategy is Upside down. Check my article. http://martin.iturbide.com/?page_id=114

Ms, dont sweat it.

[unity100]

This still feels like a part of 'embrace extend extinguish', or, head being unaware of what the tail is doing. A fortnight later probably some irrelevant exec will come up and attack open source somewhere else.

......

But you saw what happened since last 20 years. you saw the rate it went from null to full. you see the rate it is going.

dont sweat it really. we are 'the people'. you either join us ..... well, really, there is no 'or'. you eventually join us. so, dont sweat it. really.

Re:Windows wouldn't have a network stack without B

[Bill, Shooter of Bul]

Windows wouldn't have had a network stack for win 3.0. They've re written it a few times since then. They've also said publicly that they much prefer BSD style licences to GPL for fundamental technologies (like a network stack ) which companies can then customize and integrate into their own software without having to release the end result.

On a side note, that's not the best article on the subject. The author doesn't really know what he's taking about, IMHO.

Good Question!

[Narcocide]

Well, they could just try to make a product so superior that nobody in their right mind would consider an alternative.

*derisive snort*

Re:Meet the 6 stages

[stephanruby]

1. First they ignore you
2. then they laugh at you,
3. then they fight you,
4. then you quote Gandhi
5. ???
6. Karma!

As a wise man once said

[Minwee]

"It is necessary to get behind someone before you can stab them in the back."
-- Sir Humphrey Appleby, December 1987

Microsoft's Open Source;

[Lost Penguin]

It's excellent with Fava beans and a nice chianti.

Reminds me of...

[ebystander]

Frylock: ...You love people!
MC Pee Pants: No, I love the liquid INSIDE people...

Balmer is a fossil waiting to die

[TiggertheMad]

Your problem is that you seem to view each of Microsoft and open source as monolithic united entities with a single mind and vision.

Well put. Moreover, with time, more and more of these fresh out of college kids that have had some exposure to *nix will get hired by MS, and more hysterical old school twits like Balmer will retire. Over time, MS will cozy up to *nix as more people that work there understand what open source is all about.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[Anonymous Coward]

The competition with linux isn't in the consumer pc market. They see linux competition in the server market and also in the mobile/embedded market.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[Anonymous Coward]

OSX on Mac is the perfect triple threat:

Run MacOS X for the user experience
Download and run your favorite X11 applications from Unix/Linux
Run Windows in a VM (quite well) for all those apps that haven't been created on the Mac or will never be Mac native (can you say MS Project)

1 machine, 3 ways.

Can't get better than that.

WHOA!

[Anonymous Coward]

Does this imply that they fired Ballmer already?? I thought that wasn't supposed to happen until the end of FY2011 at the earliest!!

MS loves Open Source, still hates Free Software

[wowbagger]

MS Loves Open Source, which knows its place.

MS Hates that uppity Free Software.

Re:MS loves Open Source, still hates Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

To put it another way, Microsoft is prepared to grudgingly co-operate with pragmatists, but still doesn't see much common ground with idealists who think all proprietary software is wrong.

Just sayin'.

Re:MS loves Open Source, still hates Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

MS isn't a living being. No company is.

There are individual persons behind these "MS says this" and "MS thinks that". Identify those persons and stop talking/writing like a company could feel or talk anything by itself.

Those persons usually want to stay hidden behind this; "look ma, we've a talking lifeless entity", like puppeteers. But that's all "the company" is to us outsiders: a puppet.

Re:MS loves Open Source, still hates Free Software

[Anonymous Coward]

s/pragmatists/shorttermists/

Microsoft Must Wear a Condom

[b4upoo]

We need to make certain that Microsoft wears a condom because when they are spreading this new found love for Linux we must keep in mind that Microsoft is diseased to the bone!

The way I love Angelina

[Anonymous Coward]

Ill love to fuck Ms Jolie

Uncle fester'll love to fuck OS

Period

immature P

In other words, Microsoft loves cancer?

[Anonymous Coward]

What a sick company

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[Seven_Six_Two]

Most kids are not taking Macs to school.

I'm a 2nd year student at a large Canadian university (large for Canada, that is) and I'm doing a double major in Comp Sci and Biology. I just completed a first year intro to bio course, with a class of about 60. I estimate that about half of my classmates brought laptops on a daily basis. Out of those, somewhere around 1/3 to 1/2 were mac. 3 of us (that I noticed) use Linux (2xUbuntu,1 unknown) and the rest were assorted netbooks and fullsize windows machines. As for the university itself, nearly 100% of the public machines in the libraries are Solaris, and the upper year CS labs are a mix of Solaris and Linux/Unix boxes. The distributed computing lab and our bit of Sharcnet is a blend of Linux and, um, as far as I know, Linux. I don't know if that's a good enough sample size, but I see adoption continuing at a slow but steady pace. I don't care if Windows dies, because it's dead to me.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[ducomputergeek]

No they won't. Corporations tried that "Cloud" thing back in the 1970's and early 80's. It was called time share. There is a reason why so many companies went to microcomputers (PC's) back then. Sure they may try. I have friends that work at a Fortune 500 here in town. They went to the centralized servers "cloud" method with thin clients at one of their two HQ buildings in 2008. They're back to buying laptops or desktop PC's for employees. Why? They quickly found that is something like a network switch failed, an entire floor would be down until it was fixed. That could be 100 or more employees with out the ability to do much "work". Take an average persons salary of $25/hour and for every hour that switch is down is $2500 minimum in lost productivity. And if it's not the switch and some other problem with the network that takes a day to fix. Apparently they were averaging about 10 hours of downtime a month due to one reason or another.

With a laptop or desktop, if one goes down, one employee is not productive until fixed. If the network switch goes down, work can still be done, although maybe not as much. But some work getting done is better than 0.

I still use desktop apps every day. I find reading my email with Mail is far easier than logging into 3 separate websites for web mail.

Microsoft is Grandpa Simpson

[yelvington]

I know I'm supposed to hate Microsoft, and generally I do, but at the moment I'm feeling sort of charitable toward the doddering old fool. Microsoft has become ineffective, marginalized. Yeah, I know it still controls the non-Apple OS marketplace, but it's become a joke in the areas that represent the future: mobile and tablets. Microsoft tries awfully hard to be C. Montgomery Burns, but lately it's looking a lot more like Abe Simpson.

Over the years Microsoft has benefited quite a bit from open-source software, and by positioning DOS and Windows as an open platforms (anybody could develop for it, without asking permission), it won the first war between open and closed views of the world. If you're under 50 you're probably not old enough to remember how some of the early players in personal computing wanted total platform control to a degree that would make the current Steve Jobs blush.

Today, the real threat isn't Microsoft -- at least not if you discount the 18 bazillion virus-infected botnet computers that attack the average website every hour. The real threat is the total-control view of computing represented by Steve Jobs and the telecom companies that have persuaded Google to sell its soul. Jobs and Verizon are on opposite sides only in that they disagree about who should be in charge. Either way, it's not you.

Re:Microsoft is Grandpa Simpson

[TheGratefulNet]

"Your dad used to be as smart as a monkey. But then his mind started gettin' lazy, and now he's dumb as a chimp."

yeah, I think that applies here, too.

Re:Microsoft is Grandpa Simpson

[EEPROMS]

If you're under 50 you're probably not old enough to remember how some of the early players in personal computing wanted total platform control to a degree that would make the current Steve Jobs blush.

BLUSHING!!, lol.. try Steve is copying what IBM did way back in the bad old days when IBM used to only allow IBM connectors and IBM power supplied and cords or "you will be banned from the light that is IBM support". Apple is doing exactly the same right now. My take on this whole thing is Microsoft has seen a weakness in the new bastard on the block with the fruit logo on his chest. So now Microsoft has realised that Apple is more closed as a computer environment than a PC with windows on it. So first step is make peace with the FOSS community then start attacking the Apple cage of none reality.

Re:Microsoft is Grandpa Simpson

[Nyder]

You miss the point. You aren't supposed to hate MS, you are supposed to make up your own mind about how you feel about MS.

You need to have your own thoughts, make your own decisions, and live on that, not on what your supposed to do.

Re:Microsoft is Grandpa Simpson

[Drakkenmensch]

In some ways, Microsoft does look like Mister Burns. Remember the episode with the return of Homer's mother where he's berating that postal employee because he can't find the postal rates for sending mail over to Prussia or Siam?

And what about Mono?

[caywen]

I'd be interested to see if Microsoft practices what it preaches with respect to Mono. Honestly, I can't say they have made many moves to kill it, but they still loom large over that (IMO) very cool project. If they love it so much, I'd like to see them come out and bless at least parts of the project.

Hahahaha! Ahahaha..haha..hoo...heee..

[adamofgreyskull]

...hahahahahahaha. Haha..hahahahahahahahahaha. Oh, wo...hahahahahahahahaha. Oh WOW!
OK, so they love Open Source? Like they love Open Standards? I.e. They "LOVE" them, as long as they have absolute control over them and are able to define them arbitrarily in terms of the output of their closed source applications. Perhaps Microsoft has recently filed a patent on the concept of love, thereby redefining it? In other news, child molesters "love" children and rapists "love" women.

Utter bullshit. They may "love" Open Source because they can plunder all the BSD code they want or because, IIRC (from an interview on LugRadio), they use gcc and linux build clusters behind the scenes to make their lives easier. But the main reason they "love" Open Source? Because right now it suits them to say that they do and because they want to be framed as The Good guy next to Oracle's The Bad guy. I trust Microsoft's commitment to Open Source about as far as I could throw Steve Ballmer into a headwind (and I'm not a strong guy).

MS Love?

[sharkey]

Probably involves a ski mask and a pillow case loaded with full soda cans.

Microsoft's new attack on Open Source ...

[SickLittleMonkey]

... has really been to "embrace" it. (As usual!)

Think about it like this:
- Ms-PL (and 4 or so other licenses)
- CodePlex
- Free versions of Visual Studio

Now developers can write open source for Windows & .NET with MS versions of everything the traditional open source world used to provide.
Instead of developing with Java or gcc for other VMs or Linux!

Re:Microsoft's new attack on Open Source ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Ms-PL is basically BSD with an explicit patent grant. That's a pretty cool license.
At least MS promises not to sue you for implementing their VM. No such luck with Java...

Re:Microsoft's new attack on Open Source ...

[Anonymous Coward]

Who mods this crap insightful?
Your ignorance is really astounding. Nobody is stopping them to develop with Java or gcc for Linux. If people chose to develop using the tools that Microsoft provides for free over other free tools, then maybe it's the fault of the tools.
But, sure, if I was a Java developer who works with Linux, I would totally jump over to .Net development because Microsoft has baited me away with CodePlex and Visual Studio Express. And they even made J# so I would feel right at home, just to pull me away from my precious Eclipse. Those bastards!

Re:Microsoft's new attack on Open Source ...

[SickLittleMonkey]

Show your face coward!
(Honestly, I don't know why I'm bothering ...)

My point is that MS finally gets it now.
They have found ways to _harness_ open source developers rather than fighting them.

You make a valid point despite your sarcasm.
J++ (and so J#) was a failed attempt to do the above.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[domatic]

Even fat desktops have to interact with some sort of network datastore to be productive with many things. Except for editing local documents that switch going down is going make near bricks of them anyway.

Microsoft loves open source...

[Livius]

the way bank robbers love banks.

What, was that some kind of secret?

A trap without a condom...

[Anonymous Coward]

What hooker was that? I might've given her a virus just before she spent the night with you.
Do you feel a little allergic to attornies and lawyers yet?

Re:Meet the 6 stages

[Anonymous Coward]

That some funny karma you got there..

IronRuby? HAH

[Anonymous Coward]

"Microsoft has released some technology under its own open source license (the "Microsoft Public License"), such as IronRuby, which integrates .Net code with the Ruby programming language. "

Is that the same IronRuby that has basically stalled due to them firing / re-assigning most of the team. Last I heard there is one person left on it, the other lead dev quit to work at a financial company

From TFA - food for thought (and paranoia)

[c0lo]

Page 3:

Microsoft is only "dabbling" in open source at this point, argues Matt Asay, [...]Microsoft "needs to go deep on Linux," not by replacing Windows with Linux but by "acquiring Novell's SUSE Linux business and focusing it completely on mobile," Asay argue (though perhaps he simply wants Microsoft to take out one of his competitors).

Hmmmm... what? Another Zune/Kin, this time using Linux? If they didn't make it with their own OS, what are the chances they'll succeeds with something else?

Whether Microsoft dives deeper into open source is an open question, but one prominent voice in software says the war between Microsoft and open source is a thing of the past, in part because Microsoft could not destroy open source even if it wanted to.

That rings quite true. So buying SUSE wouldn't do a thing on the destruction line.

Microsoft has an opportunity to boost its reputation among open source proponents in part because of public relations mistakes by Oracle, which as noted earlier is ending the OpenSolaris project and suing Google over use of Java.[...]The Oracle moves do make Microsoft look good by comparison, Lyman says.

Yes, now I see: it is just a very good moment for MS to declare love, now that the girl got black-eyed by another contender - it is only compassionate to do so.

Microsoft's problem

[microbee]

is that it always fights the wrong enemy, and along that battle new enemies pop up at its backyard.

Microsoft thought it had the world domination in 2000 already, and maybe it had. Then it stopped whatever innovation it had and just started to kill anyone who it thought could threaten the status quo. And it thought that would be open source / Linux.

Many years later, Apple crawled out of its coffin and surpassed Microsoft in market cap. Linux on the other hand never threatened Microsoft on desktop. In fact, with Android, Microsoft even needed Linux to fight Apple (enemy's enemy is always friend).

Just like the US government.

Equo ne credite, Teucri;

[L. J. Beauregard]

quidquid id est, timeo Danaos et dona ferentes. (Vergil)

Microsoft+Love error?????

[hardware1949]

Hold your friends close to your heart and your enemies even closer.

Linux is not the same as open source

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the comments here seem to completely miss the fact that Linux does not equal open source. It's entirely possible to hate Linux and still love open source. Linux is a big part of the open source community, but there are many many other aspects. I can certainly understand Microsoft embracing open source Windows applications while, at the same time, trying to fight Linux adoption.

Frankly though, I think MS has realized Linux isn't about to take over the desktop, or various other markets, and there is enough pie to go around.

Agreed 110%, why & how (with time data)

[Anonymous Coward]

"The reality is that there's room for both open and closed source software in the world." - by Mongoose Disciple (722373) on Monday August 23, @05:19PM (#33347306)

I'm inclined to utter agreement, 110%, and here's why:

2 grounds, & 1 being simply that time's showed us all this as you seem to allude to, with your decade long reference (been around computers since 1983 here actively, and as a multiply degreed pro in computing since 1994 in both networking/techie work and programmer/analyst roles, where in the latter I have been published numerous times since 1995 in respected publications like Windows NT Magazine, today's Windows IT Pro & many more, mostly for software I wrote, some being freeware or shareware, some being commercially sold to this very day that did well 2 yrs. in a row @ MS TechEd 2000-2002 in its hardest category, SQL Server Performance Enhancement (currently holding "software engineer" title) and I hold dual degrees in the sciences of computing (A.A.S. in CSC on the way to B.S. in it (100 of 120 credits in fact) & MIS minor from a B.S. in Business)).

The "stats" there are to show I have some "street cred" & experience in this art & science is all, probably as long as your own experiences I would guess.

The 2nd/other?

Well, a lot of folks here, including one that's MS Senior VP level mgt. here (Foredecker) KNOW I am a HUGE "Windows Fanboy", but even in emails to he while he & I have corresponded both here in regards to some issues on HOSTS files and DNS client services and more where I pointed out things that need a bit of improvement in those areas (he conceded my points have merit on those areas in fact), I told him "It's inevitable that Linux will 'catch up'"... & lately, imo @ least? It surely has.

See, for the last 6 months now (and I have not used Linux or BSD variants at home since 2003-2004 or so, Redhat 6.x iirc, & before that it was Slackware 1.2 iirc in 1994 which utterly needed work/stank, but it was new so it was understandable), I have been testing both BSD (PC-BSD) and Linux variants while I am on vacation in Europe for the past 2++ months now (1/2 of which was on PC-BSD, while I was in London, Berlin/Templehof, Madrid.... this needs work imo, & the other half NOW, which was in Warsaw, St. Petersburg, & Prague was on Linux (KUbuntu, & Linux MINT)?

I have to admit (and I have in other posts her also the past 2 months as well) that Linux has come a HUGELY long ways in both the 2.6x series kernel, and especially imo, the KDE desktop shell + distros that use it!

So much so, I intend to keep on using it and even keeping up with beta distros (the Maverick Meerkat KDE based KUbuntu 10.10 has my interest now here) at home when I get back from now on... as I said in other posts this month in fact, in regards to Linux?

IT'S FINALLY REACHED A POINT OF BOTH EASE OF USE AND DECENT APPS + COMMUNITY SUPPORT TO USE IT DAILY AND FOR ANYONE TO USE IT!

APK

P.S.-> Heh, "imagine that": Me, the original "Windows fanboy/zealot of /.", making THAT type of statement! apk

XNA

[emkyooess]

Now maybe they'll revise the XNA license agreement such that XNA projects can be released under copyleft licenses? I'll believe that -- never.

outrage

[Anonymous Coward]

[insert appropriate level of microsoft aimed outrage here]

MS code all under GPLv3? Why didn't you say so!

[gnarlin]

Microsoft loves open source (MS jury still out on Free software?)? Well then. Just point me to where I can download all the windows and office source code under a Free software license. Until the proof comes in the pudding then there is nothing to talk about. Actions speak louder then propaganda and lies.

Microsoft Claims 'We Love Open Source'

[emaname]

This strikes me like something someone would say about a perfectly prepared cheeseburger just before they consume it.

A Cancer, Are you kidding?

[Murdoch5]

If Linux is a cancer then Windows is AIDS in full blown assault.

Diplomacy.....

[Anonymous Coward]

Diplomacy is the art of saying "Nice doggie" until you can find a rock.

Will Rogers

I think Microsoft is just being diplomatic in this case.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[Murdoch5]

Linux can never be mainstream until the uneducated professors and teaches that plague our schools learn about computers. I just graduated a full computer engineering program and I found it almost insulting how little we were allowed to use Linux. All of the C code we wrote had to be Windows based, all the other code, Windows based and all the applications we used were Windows based. In OS class we had to learn about Windows and the school didn't even offer us Linux based PC's to do work on.

We weren't allowed to hand in documents in Open Office format and we had to make sure that everything we did worked in Windows. The only Linuxish class we got in OS was so badly taught I actually fought the prof the entire time about it.

The main thing stopping Linux from penetrating deeper and deeper into the mainstream computing circuit is the lack of knowledge teachers have about it. Linux can do almost everything Windows can and alot of things better and more stable. As a hard core Linux fan / user I don't see the point on running Windows on any of my computers. My view point is, if my new profs can use my work they can figure out how to use it on Linux. I just started a telecommunications degree and my new stand point is I'm going to use Linux and any prof who doesn't want deal with can screw themselves. I also only use Open Office. I really don't care if I'm in an elective English class or a computer programming class, it's time Linux made headway and I'm only going to see it gets the respect it needs.

Microsoft and Open Source

[hackus]

I will be happy when every last penny is drained from Microsoft's criminal activities it had to pursue to obtain the market share it has and the billions in its bank accounts.

Once the fangs have been removed from the beast (Bank account reads 10 Million balance), and it is as helpless as a wet dish towel, the open source community will be more inclined to listen to what it says from the point of expressing "love" for open source.

-Hack

Observation?

[Anonymous Coward]

Do all people on Slashdot share a single brain or something? Nobody has a unique thought that isn't also posted by 10 other people... browse @ 0 or -1 if you don't believe me... also I love Microsoft and I love open source. I pirate Microsoft software and I never have and never will contribute to the open source community (while using tons of it's software and sources). Do you have a problem with that? Then fuck yourself in the ass with a penguin dildo covered in ballmer lube.

Go, Microsoft

[Anonymous Coward]

talk the double talk while double-dipping your customers.

We all know that while you say you love humankind you just love their wallets.

Yeah, right.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[Americano]

The main thing stopping Linux from penetrating deeper and deeper into the mainstream computing circuit is the lack of knowledge teachers have about it.

Linux is already plenty mainstream, I don't think you'll find too many enterprises that don't have some significant Linux instalation. Over the last 10 years, it's replaced probably 10-20% of the Windows servers my company runs (perhaps more), probably about 30-40% of the AIX servers, and another 25-30% of the Solaris servers we run. Key word there: *servers*.

Linux on the desktop has been evaluated ("officially sanctioned evaluations") 3 times at my company that I'm aware of in the last 10 years - it's come back 'close, closer, closer,' but missing significant chunks of functionality that are deemed "required" for the purposes of the evaluations. Until it can close the gaps that are causing it to get shot down during these evaluations, it won't achieve much mainstream success *on the desktop*, regardless of how much teachers flog it at universities. If you learn C, C++, Java, or whatever, you should be able to apply those skills to new platforms without inordinate difficulty.

They loved bees, too

[SgtChaireBourne]

"Embrace, extend, extinguish.

Never forget. Microsoft has never helped open source. They have only contributed to their own version of it, which is very much unlike open source as it was defined 10+ years ago."

M$ loved bees, too. See where their satanic majesties' affection subsequently took the bees within a few years.

In other news..

[sparetiredesire]

In other news: Microsoft says they really like Netscape Navigator and want their Java implementation to be compatible with others. Oh and they think Microsoft Word files should be backwards compatible as well.

Microsoft...... LOL - Non Player = Non User

[dogzdik]

Shit you know - Microsoft now has sooooooo many enemies within it's consumer base, as well as the EX user base, it's just so kind of hard to see why anyone at MS would be flashing their fanny at us over this one.

.

All I can say is that I am glad that I do not suffer from MS's anal retentitive "product lock-in" and scamming.

.

Perhaps this is why I was planning my escape route from them, their attitudes and their crapware for a long long time - until Linux became easy enough for the mentally deficient (like me) to be able to use it (without excess straining).

.

LOL - Love Linux? Who are they going to try and scam? and how are they going to try and scam them? with this bullshit trip?

.

Re:We Love Open Source -- obligatory

[Anonymous Coward]

What's wrong with being drunk?

The fact that when your post is so difficult to read that you probably had to be drunk while writing it!

It took me no less than 5 re-reads of your post to understand what you were getting at, and that what you were getting at was nothing more than a rephrasing of the post it was replying to...

The first few reads made it sound like the ramblings of an old, senile man.

We Love Open Source...

[Z80a]

when we can profit on it, of course.

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

beware

[yyxx]

Microsoft "loves" open source in the same way that Oracle, Sun, and Apple "love" open source: as something to exploit, score PR points with, and sue people into oblivion over. Oh, and as a source of ideas for new bogus patents, too.

Re:beware

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm not aware what the problem with Sun and open source was...?

Re:beware

[Anonymous Coward]

Sun created the patents and the contractual framework that form the basis of the Oracle lawsuit.

Sun also took BSD UNIX and made it proprietary.

Re:beware

[Anonymous Coward]

and that about says it all.

When I bought my Macbook Pro the salesman did everything he possibly could to 'give' me a copy of MS Office. I declined the offer, three times. Here's my view on 'interoperability';

my firewall/dhcp server = Linux
2 webservers = Linux
Macbook Pro
Mac Mini
1 netbook = Linux
1 Laptop = Linux
2 desktop PC's = Linux
Network attached storage = BSD
Network printers = HP & Epson.

Microsoft who??

Seriously, I love MS. If they didn't exist, who would we throw darts at?

not the original evil

[yyxx]

Microsoft wasn't the original evil that drove open source; Symbolics, IBM, AT&T, and a whole bunch of other companies were. Microsoft essentially just took over from IBM.

Microsoft reps' opinion in 2007 of open source

[daboochmeister]

Not karma-whoring, true story. In 2007, we had a couple of Microsoft reps in to talk to our team on our multi-billion dollar defense project, which uses an eclectic mix of MS and open source technologies. I asked him about any initiatives to enable better integration, whether it be open source file systems, office file formats, or whatever.

He and his partner's response, in front of an audience of 150 or so developers/integrators ... "Open source? I can't understand why anyone in his right mind would want to use any product hacked by a couple of kids in the Phillipines, when they could be using our technology." I asked him if he was kidding, or if he really felt that products like Apache, Linux, PHP, MySQL, Firefox, etc. were hack jobs by kids -- he said he absolutely meant it, and we'd be crazy to move off the MS reservation. This was before he knew we had made heavy use of lots of FOSS.

Now, it's just two guys' opinion, you'll say ... but in 2007, for MS reps, whose job it is to reach out to companies about MS technology, in front of a large audience, to assert such? I was stunned.

Oblig. Ash-quote

[isecore]

"It's a trick. Get an axe."

so let's see the official MS apps for Linux

[darkeye]

from their office suite down to their games and the newly relaunched MS Flight Simulator, let's see the native Linux apps that they will deliver from now on.

they I'll believe them :)

MS FUD Factory

[QuestorTapes]

> The mistake of equating all open source technology with Linux was "really very early on,"
> Paoli says. "That was really a long time ago," he says. "We understand our mistake."

So... Microsoft's new tune is "We Love Open Source...Except GPL Licensed Open Source"

> Microsoft hasn't ... rescinded its declaration that Linux violates its patents...
> [Microsoft's] earlier battle stance was a mistake. Microsoft wants the world to
> understand, whatever its issues with Linux, it no longer has any gripe toward open source.

Except GPL Licensed Open Source

> Microsoft has released some technology under its own open source license (the
> "Microsoft Public License"), such as IronRuby, which integrates .Net code with
> the Ruby programming language.

"Signs are pointing to Microsoft backing away from IronRuby..."

ZDNet, "What's next for Microsoft's IronRuby?" by Mary Jo Foley

http://www.zdnet.com/blog/microsoft/whats-next-for-microsofts-ironruby/7034

From the article:
'According to a now former IronRuby developer, Jimmy Schementi, Microsoft
has just one developer left on that project (who is committed to it half-time).
Schementi recently quit Microsoft when his manager asked him "what else would
you want to work on other than Ruby," he blogged.'

Summary: Microsoft says "We Love Open Source..."

  - except Linux...well, any GPL Licensing, really
  - and we still maintain they violate MS patents...a bunch of em.
      Really, you can take our word for it
  - and we'll still extort license fees under threat of enforcing these
      patents we refuse to enumerate
  - and we love open standards and open technologies, and want to
      work with them...as long as we can make a proprietary DotNet version...

And Microsoft will stand by its commitment to open source, unless its
absolutely convenient.

Hurray for Microsoft! Hip, Hip, Phhhffffttt!

Translation

[brunes69]

"We now realize that the desktop operating system is a commodity, that online advertising and mobile markets are the future, that Apple and Google are eating our lunch in those areas, and we need all the help we can get".

Love?

[Anonymous Coward]

So, can I play Oggs on an Xbox 360 now?

Pretty sure

[ThatsNotPudding]

one of these stages should be:

x) de Icaza

Almost Believe You Steve

[Rabbidous]

Too little too late if you ask me. Where else would Microsoft get all their "new" ideas for Windows 7 if it weren't for Apple and other Unix-like OSes. First thing I thought after installing Win7 on my boss's computer was that a number of the new features here are very similar to gnome laid over the top of OS X.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[Murdoch5]

Linux is already plenty mainstream

Sorry your right, on the server end it's been taking up and in good numbers. What I'm more so talking about is the lack of Linux in the desktop.

missing significant chunks of functionality that are deemed "required" for the purposes of the evaluations.

From the eyes of executives and for lack of a better term noob computer user Linux doesn't work. At my work we have 2 computers running Ubuntu, one is for a Coop who's computer crashes when ever we install Windows on it and the other is a manufacturing computer used for email. After the coop student used his Ubuntu install for about 1 month he hasn't noticed a difference. We see the same with the manufacturing end also.

Linux has been desktop ready for years, it's just getting better and better, I will say that I actually feel if it went toe to toe against Windows it would take it under the table given enough time. Linux has better application for office work, on the gnome end featuring Evolution and Open Office as the primary Office Suite. The truth is I've never actually seen many executives do alot more then emails and document work.

When I said the main thing stopping it is the lack of knowledge teachers have about it, I was speaking the truth. What if teachers started preaching about Linux being the better platform compared to Windows, what if in class demo's on how to do something on a computer were done on Linux and not Windows and the real shock, what is college / university services worked on Linux (strictly speaking about my University / college).

The academic community has really stopped students from getting to know other platforms, in there mind a student should only know MS Office and a fleet of closed source, over priced software that for the most part can't do anything the open source stuff can. It's really funny to see there face when they try to open an open office file in MS Office and all they see is boxes, Or they attempt to open an octave file in Matlab.

With all the cost to the school in maintaining all there Windows installs and MS fee's for software they could honestly just starting lowering the price on textbooks, school services, oh and maybe tuition. Linux is a free, more capable alternative with enough software to really just take the place of Windows.

Of course for the few Autocad / Solidworks installs you need just setup a remote desktop / VNC system or get crossover. If the schools made the effort to switch and the students were now faced with Linux instead of Windows I think that would go a long way to students seeing that they've really just been enslaved on a platform that as it stands is just as good if not worse then what else is out there.

I'm saying all of this from the perspective of a Linux fan / developer, but I feel that everything I believe is true. I welcome constructive criticism and will consider it.

Microsoft is damn right about Linux being a cancer

[Anonymous Coward]

I totally agree with Ballmer.

If you want to live by your ideals and propagate them, chose the BSD license over the cancerous GPL.

And...

[FithisUX]

we claim we love Microsoft.

Love Microsoft right back!

[Anonymous Coward]

Love Microsoft right back!

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[Americano]

From the eyes of executives and for lack of a better term noob computer user Linux doesn't work.

It's more than that, though - it's not enough to just be "good enough" for the individual users. Enterprise markets want cookie cutter builds, the ability to manage security & usage policies across thousands of systems, and Windows is still beating Linux in that area with Active Directory.

The problem is, Linux offers a "more or less equivalent" system to replace Windows for people... but that comes with the expense of retraining users, retraining or hiring new sysadmins, deploying all new replacement tools, converting (or losing) legacy documentation and other stuff that's locked in Windows-only binary formats, reworking a huge chunk of support infrastructure... and all of that expense will put you back at... "just about where we started."

This is the problem Linux has to overcome if it's going to make serious inroads on the desktop in the enterprise. For an enterprise of tens of thousands of people, there's a significant cost to convert, and a slow return on that investment for desktop systems.

Re:Of course for MS, Linux isn't the threat.,..

[Murdoch5]

Fair enough, we can only hope that one day Linux can be the desktop OS of choice.

Yea, sure

[Anonymous Coward]

So now they love open-source? Really?

How about starting with an official excuse to this guy: http://developers.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/01/164254