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Microsoft Dilutes Open Source, Coins 'Open Surface'

Posted by timothy on from the scientology-favors-sanity-don't-you dept.

sfcrazy writes "Now, Microsoft is coining yet another term to further confuse users — 'Open Surface.' Senior Director for Open Source Communities at Microsoft, Gianugo Rabellino, said at Oscon 2011 that customers don't care about the underlying platform as long as the APIs, protocols and standards for the cloud are open. That's when he threw the term 'open surface.'" This seems to have more than a grain of truth to it — after all, programmers have been creating open-source software with closed-source programming languages for many years, and I'm certainly more impressed by Google's willingness to let me export my data than I am turned off by the fact that they use a mix of open and closed source software to run the Google circus.

3 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Strawman attack by enoz · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Published APIs are important, nay, necessary for "cloud" applications and services to be useful to developers to build upon. Open source is necessary for community based development of the underlying applications or services.

    Open source software is completely irrelevant in this instance and this appears to be a simple strawman attack from Microsoft against the open source movement.

  2. Re:What is the point of the linked page? by GumphMaster · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I'm not really sure how this differs from typical APIs where the programmer...

    One is a marketing term that Microsoft can slap a trademark application in for, the other is not? Then Microsoft can claim to be the only vendor with Open Surface(tm) systems, or OSS.

    --
    Patent litigation: A doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction... in which everyone seems willing to push the button
  3. Who does that server really serve? by joeaguy · · Score: 3, Interesting

    All I am going to say to those of you who think "open source" does not matter is read Richard Stallman's paper "Who Does That Server Really Serve?"

    http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/who-does-that-server-really-serve.html

    Having open and honestly published API's and protocols is important and certainly better than nothing, but there are so many other reasons why access to source code is important for trust and freedom in computing.