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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.

2 of 191 comments (clear)

  1. Re:"Published API" by Alex+Belits · · Score: 1, Troll

    It doesn't. You can take a published API, and provide your own clean-room implementation of the same -

    I am describing normal use, not reimplementation. Reimplementation of a product made by a large company is usually a massive, rarely successful effort, prompted by the company being negligent or outright malicious with the product development, use or licensing.

    see .NET/Mono.

    Mono is a failed reimplementation of a useless product. The only successful reimplementation of a proprietary API (as opposed to protocols/formats) that I have ever seen is Lesstif, and arguably more good was done by destroying Motif dominance by superior toolkits than by reimplementing it.

    http://www.microsoft.com/openspecifications/en/us/technical-specifications/default.aspx

    And none of that is actually useful for interoperability or reimplementation.

    --
    Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.
  2. Re:"Published API" by Alex+Belits · · Score: 0, Troll

    People like you will always deride anything MS does because

    ...because Microsoft is inherently evil. Everything that defines Microsoft as Microsoft -- its goals, methods, tradition and people are evil.

    if you didn't have MS as your enemy you wouldn't have anyone to hate on.

    I don't see how not having anyone to hate would be a bad thing.

    --
    Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.