Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft's Olivier Bloch Explains Microsoft Open Source (Video)
Most of us don't think of Microsoft when our thoughts turn to open source. This is probably because the company's main products, Windows and Office, are so far from open that just thinking about them probably violates their user agreement.. But wait! says Olivier Bloch, Senior Technical Evangelist at Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., we have lots and lots of open source around here. Look at this. And this and this and even this. Lots of open source. Better yet, Olivier works for Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc., not directly for the big bad parent company. Watch the video or read the transcript, and maybe you'll figure out where Microsoft is going with their happy talk about open source. (Alternate Video Link)
Slashdot articles are now pushing Microsoft products. Everything is backwards from 1997.
"not directly for the big bad parent company" - what exactly is the distinction made by that 1 level of parent company separation?
You don't want it, and if it touches you, you are DEAD.
Let's not forget one of the main sponsors behind H1B visas. They hate American workers and don't deserve to be part of our country.
It's a translation problem. Olivier thinks FOSS stands for Free of Open Source Software. He only came here to get away from socialism and the burden of free health care.
...and yet, all of Microsoft's flagship products, AFAIK, are the polar opposite of open source. If Microsoft truly thought anything of open source, this should not be the case.
While MS is the company that everybody who ever liked MacOS or Linux loves to hate, it's been a long time since they've been actively hostile to open source, and they contribute quite a bit to it. Frankly it's been a long time since I've seen a good reason to dislike them any more than any other corporation in an adversarial relationship with a product I like.
the 90's called and wants its flannel back.
The reason we don't think of MS when it comes to open source is because it is like being reminded of one's evil mother-in-law. You know she's out there, scheming, plotting. You know will have to deal with her one way or another. You know she'd like to steal your soul and sell it straight to Satan.
If it's Microsoft, it's a trap.
(Apologies to any fish-headed gents in the crowd.)
Why does it even have a flannel back?
If you look at it they will claim you are in violation if you use any of the same language features! What's MS's history with hobbyists again?
... zero.
They can keep their source.
Who knows, maybe the tables will continue turning and Microsoft will become a sane, viable choice in the future.
Posted AC because of trolls, fanboys and acesulfame potassium.
Roslyn should be considered a flagship product (you know, once it's released). It's open source. http://roslyn.codeplex.com/
Look at this. And this and this and even this.
Raaawrgh. Not the "this, this and this" dance again. ;) Let me FTFY...
"Look at Microsoft Open Technologies. And .NET Foundation and a Computerworld article about Internet of Things and even Codeplex."
A good rule of thumb is that the sentence should be readable even without seeing which URLs the hyperlinks point to.
A youtube video from Iran's Culture Minister explaining Tehran Catholicism.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Little bit of Microsoft history for you crazy kids
The level of racism against Microsoft here, is appalling.
'In a CSI job posting in December, Microsoft said candidates would need to be able to
“Win share against Open Source Software (OSS) in the cloud, on devices, and in traditional workloads by changing perceptions of Microsoft and winning the socket.”'
“The core of this role is to win mind-share so that Microsoft can win market-share.” ref
Correct.... and ultimately... the reason for all their Open Source efforts is to promote the flagship closed source software such as Windows and IIS and help keep developers on their platform; they don't want popular "The Open Source Momvement" to mean that people who are onboard have to leave their closed expensive platforms.
The parent company says open source is "a cancer".
The subsidiary he works for says open source is what MS does, sign a NDA and you can see the documentation.
Also, the subsidiary says, open source is when MS buys a trade group to have their patented format voted as a standard.
That's the difference.
Look at this. And this and this and even this
This is nothing more than Get The Facts (version 3.0)
A followup to their anti-Linux campaign and anti-Firefox campaign and then their anti-Google ("Scroogled") campaign saying "We're all open source and stuff".
Yes, but the same can be said of Google and others.
So much hot air. So many words, yet nothing with any meaning was said.
Never forget: embracing open source is just the first step in "embrace, extend, extinguish."
Amazing, their open source is .NET stuff; is .NET stuff open source?
At least once a year, Redmond sends one of its shills out to declare Microsoft's dedication to open source, and it's always a variation on the same theme.
It happens more often these days. Last time they talked about OSS a month ago.
...any time Microsoft has tried to pass itself off as reasonable and interoperational, it was a springboard attempt to find out who in the industry wants that from them, and then apply thumbscrews, handcuffs, hookers and blow as required to get those companies to see the world its way. That is, the Microsoft-centric, homogenous and locked-in up to their eyeballs, way.
Never. Ever. Ever. Ever.
EVER.
NEVER EVER trust Microsoft. They are the most self-interested company in the history of companies. Even Oracle looks shiny compared to Microsoft.
...Steve
Last year they also had a Google Docs Isn't Worth the Gamble campaign accompanied with a video.
What do you call a "flagship product"? Entity Framework? ASP.Net MVC? SignalR? Kudu? ASP.Net vNext? Roslyn? Katana?
On the developer side, we are very well catered for in the open source arena by Microsoft.
Really? I can run Roslyn or Asp.Net MVC or ASP.Net vNext or Katana on Mono, no Microsoft OS in sight.
Or it might be because of statements like "Linux is a cancer" being made by the company's Chief Executive Monkey. Or the way they bulldozed their substantially-less-than-open MOOXML through when an actual open document format looked like it stood a chance of becoming a standard. Or the company's decades of monopolistic, crush-anything-that-looks-remotely-competitive behaviour. Or the way they spent a couple of decades ripping off products and technologies, crushing the original developers in the process. Or the way they've cowed so many people into accepting mediocrity as being acceptable.
I could go on and on with their disgusting actions and behaviours, but I'm pretty sure that "because Windows and Office are far from open" is the least of the reasons why I wouldn't be quick to associated Microsoft with open source.
"we have lots and lots of open source around here" that is a complete LIE.
In the list of references provided as proof of Microsoft contributing to open source, none of them are independently useful Microsoft developed projects. They all live on entirely proprietary systems fully owned by Microsoft, thus not really opensource in any way, and only truly promote usage of their proprietary tools with independently developed open source software. Sure they are happy to provide ways for you to develop open source software, but it is a lie to say that the references there provide proof that Microsoft develops open software.
Made we'll try again next decade.
Don't you talk about open source, Microsoft! We dont actually want change so you just keep doing evil things so we can stay mad at you, thats all we really want!
All I can say is "fuck off you treacherous dog, Olivier Bloch."
so you saw "Microsoft" and you saw "open source" and you had an emotional crisis and tourette-like outburst. people like you are everything that is wrong with tech communities, no impartiality no ability to see beyond your own preconceptions. sorry but the world changed around you and you missed it because you were so busy being angry.
what they are doing here is a *good* thing. does that change my perception of their corporate culture? no, not really. do i think this will lead to some revolution? no. but unlike you i also do not immediately hate whatever they do and everybody they employ just because i disagree with some things they do, you lack objectivity.
Last time I tested several software packages from CodePlex, it required Microsoft Windows and OS locked .NET framework to run. This breaks elegantly with freedom 0 in free software: The freedom to run the program for any purpose. My purpose was to run this software cross platform. Not only using Windows, but also see how it worked on Debian GNU/Linux ... It didn't stop there.
The CodePlex applications I installed also added Adware to my different browser on Windows, me having no choice to reject if I would test the software. The Adware made serveral new menu items and input boxes appear. It was a great hassle to remove it. Uninstalling the CodePlex applications was not enough. I had to find a "wipe clean" Adware app for Windows. It didn't do it's job properly. Also it suggested I should pay for removing the Adware. I ended up taking backup of the bookmarks on Firefox, reinstalling Windows and the browser. Then reloading the bookmarks into Firefox.
Why did I test the CodePlex applications in the first place? I was curious on the code quality, and If the alleged quality of community made software shared on CodePlex. I downloaded some of the more popular apps, wanting to experience first hand if the products did what Microsoft has evangelised so forcefully. My experience thou, being using free software since 1996, was that the apps I tried was quite inferior to free software I've been using the last decade on GNU/Linux, Mac or even Windows. The Adware problems came in addition to the inferiority of the applications.
You can of course say that Microsoft hasn't done something like "open source" for long, and you got to give the community time to produce quality software. Well, Microsoft started with so called shared source in 2001, thirteen years ago. They launched CodePlex five years later, now eight years ago. The community got sufficient time to produce quality software in three to five years. Especially the popular community projects should be able to do quality software by now. My experience is that it's just to little to late.
I suggest that developers restricting them self only to Windows, to broaden their perspective. According to Microsoft, Windows only got 14 percent market share on computer devices. That implies that 86 percent are buying and Linux-based Android system, iOS, OS X or something else which are not made by Microsoft. Windows usage share at Wikipedia is below 40 percent. If you interested to make your "open source" code being relevant for as many as possible, don't restrict your self to a fraction of the computer users by limiting yourself to Windows. Include the +60 percent using something else than Windows, including the future generations where +85 percent are using something else. Freedom 0 in free software is the future, running the software for any purpose, including the operating system that most users are buying which today is the Linux-based Android system.
Look kids! All those hand movements, the expression in the face, the tone of a salesman in action!
Open Source Microsoft?
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
...and yet, all of Microsoft's flagship products, AFAIK, are the polar opposite of open source. If Microsoft truly thought anything of open source, this should not be the case.
That's a very absolutist viewpoint, by that logic if you though anything of open source the core components of your computer(s) would be open source hardware and you would run nothing but open source software. Some people fail to understand that you can be a supporter of an ideology without being an absolutist.
It could really happen in part at least. If MSN were to be split out of M$ then MSN could pursue the coolness of FOSS as part of a marketing drive to more effectively and directly challenge Google. There is no reason a separate and independent MSN should stick with windows and office product and instead pursue service and support of FOSS products and of course us it internally in order to promote it's skills and coolness eternally.
Chaos - everything, everywhere, everywhen
In the Hadoop space, Microsoft has also worked with Hortonworks to expand the Apache Stinger, Tez, and ORC projects - among others.
Granted, they certainly want to make sure Hadoop runs on Windows servers and Azure; but nobody says that open source has to be an entirely altruistic affair.
> wasn't talking about open source in general
Quoting Ballmer:
If you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source
He went on to claim software written for or by the government shouldn't be open source because commercial companies are not allowed to use open source software.
PS, you are correct that he's a major shareholder. He controls more shares than Bill Gates, enough to swing any shareholder vote, thereby giving him de facto control of the board of directors and the company.
And who created Mono? Not Microsoft...
They managed to squander any and all trust they might have had
Anyone who "trusts" any large corporation is foolish at best, if you're describing the moral sense of the word. The only thing you can "trust" is for a corporation to do what's best for its own survival and bottom line. For the most part, especially in today's information-rich world, most companies - at least those who don't have government-sanctioned monopolies like many ISPs and cable providers - understand that pissing off large numbers of customers is pretty bad for business.
You can generally trust a company to do what's in its own best interest. In well run companies, that typically aligns reasonably well with customer interests, but only because unsatisfied customers tend to look for alternative products or vendors. I trust Amazon to keep my data secure in its datacenters, both at a technical level (they have lots of experience) and at a business level (a breach or massive data loss would harm their reputation). I also use Microsoft products on a daily basis, both because they're good products and because their operating systems are a huge percentage of my target market. I trust that they have very strong incentives to produce stable and secure products, which again aligns with my needs. They have no desire to become any less relevant in a fast-moving world that they're already struggling to keep pace with.
When most people talk about trust and corporations, I think it's generally a different sort of trust than, for example, how you'd trust your wife, family, or friends. At least, it certainly is for me. For businesses, trusting Microsoft might simply be the belief that Microsoft will continue to act in a relatively predictable manner, and so they can be relied on to provide the same sort of services and level of quality, whatever you perceive that to be, as they had in the past. You're simply trusting in its inherent nature. So, if you *understand* its nature, you can then better understand what you should and shouldn't allow that company to do for you - or to you.
That may sound overly cynical or somehow like an anti-corporate or anti-capitalist rant, but that's not where I'm coming from. Let's face it, without large corporations, we wouldn't have access to a lot of our most impressive products and technology. I just think it's important to understand and accept something's true nature in order to effectively make use of it, and to protect ourselves when our interests *don't* align with it.
Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
> wasn't talking about open source in general
Quoting Ballmer: If you use any open-source software, you have to make the rest of your software open source
and as the more educated among us know that is not true and when he was using the term "open source" what he actually meant was the usage of GNU GPL'd code in a project. Are you just being intentionally obtuse or could you genuinely not parse what he meant? Im not saying I agree with anything he said or meant but Im not going to pretend Im too stupid to understand it.
and no, a single digit percentage share in a company is *not* enough to swing any shareholder vote.
" but nobody says that open source has to be an entirely altruistic affair." Heresy. Around here we seldom use OSS unless we are talking about World War II, we always use FOSS and nobody pays for anything because Star Trek.
Did you not even bother to look at the link? It's pretty clear:
3. Grant of Patent License.
Subject to the terms and conditions of this License, each Contributor hereby grants to You a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, no-charge, royalty-free, irrevocable (except as stated in this section) patent license to make, have made, use, offer to sell, sell, import, and otherwise transfer the Work, where such license applies only to those patent claims licensable by such Contributor that are necessarily infringed by their Contribution(s) alone or by combination of their Contribution(s) with the Work to which such Contribution(s) was submitted. If You institute patent litigation against any entity (including a cross-claim or counterclaim in a lawsuit) alleging that the Work or a Contribution incorporated within the Work constitutes direct or contributory patent infringement, then any patent licenses granted to You under this License for that Work shall terminate as of the date such litigation is filed.
What makes me laugh is this claim of open-source. And yet the company is still doing things to attack and harm free software/open-source.
I have a feeling that MS is doing nothing more then monopolize open-source/free-software. They'll probably use the patent system and other copyright loopholes to eliminate or cripple whatever code they want for themselves. Android really isn't open-source you had a company abuse Linux so they didn't have to spend money to build an OS, and it is so fragmented along with the security holes in it, Google has really setback Linux by years.
"First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." [Gandhi @ RedHat]
It doesn't. That's why it wants one.
he was using the term "open source" what he actually meant
Neither Ballmer nor Jesus need you to interpret what they meant when they spoke plainly.
There is no reason a separate and independent MSN should stick with windows and office product
Depends on who owns the majority of the stock in that 'independent' company, don't it?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
you forget... it'll never be released. Its job is to garner support, "hearts and minds" and then get all the best bits subsumed into the core of Microsoft closed-source products where you'll never see it again.
then Roslyn will not be needed, can be left to die while they produce another open source project.
He went on about it for a while, so it's not a case of mispeaking, of saying the wrong word. When he said commercial companies aren't allowed to use open source software, I think he meant exactly what he said. That's a lie, of course, but it certainly seems he knew what he was saying.
A vote might well go 48% - 52% or something like that. BallmeBallmeer can swing it from 48/52 to 51/49. Ballmer's 3% share is enough to swing many, if not most, votes.
Yes, it is:
Mono
ASP.NET
Entity Framework
...and yet, all of Microsoft's flagship products, AFAIK, are the polar opposite of open source. If Microsoft truly thought anything of open source, this should not be the case.
Well, WiX is kind of a flagship product - it's embedded in Visual Studios, utilized by most all of their projects, and Open Source (originally GPLv2, I forget what the current license is).
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
The problem for Olivier Bloch, Senior Technical Evangelist and Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. is that they are isolated. The parent company only tells them enough and shows them around enough so that he and others like him can say what they do with a straight face. Meanwhile, the left hand knoweth not what the right hand doth.
I witness this a couple years ago at POSSCON. We had someone that had a similar position at Microsoft give a Keynote. He talked about all the things Microsoft did and everything they showed him and how the teams were open to Open Source. But while he was there saying those things, Microsoft corporate were actively denouncing open source - Balmer and all his lieutenants and even their lieutenants. The speaker truly believed what he was saying - and what he saw. They just sufficiently isolated him such that he was able to believe it and therefore say it. Most of the audience was aware of what Microsoft corporate was saying that directly contracted the speaker they had provided. Sadly, they heckled and booed him instead of showing some professional courtesy, especially since Microsoft was a big sponsor that year.
All that said, it's not that Microsoft can't turn around and become Open Source friendly. It's just that there is such a beaurocratic momentum against it within the company that it will be years before any kind of turn around can effectively happen, unless the have a mass firing of the upper level management, which is not likely.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
He went on about it for a while, so it's not a case of mispeaking, of saying the wrong word.
no he just made the case against the GPL (the case that many BSD-advocates also make), obviously with the incorrect assumption that GPL == Open Source. but irrespective of that it was an uniformed claim made 13 years ago by the CEO who is no longer an employee of the company and holds a low single digit share of the company. im not sure what conclusions you draw from that to apply to the situation today? clearly even if what he did mean "open source" then it is a proven fact that that is no longer the view of the company given that they release some things as open source today. so no matter how you look at it it is irrelevant today anyway unless you are simply looking to cling to the past to fulfill some desperate need to be able to project to them as the enemy of open source.
Ballmer's 3% share is enough to swing if, if any, votes.
FTFY. votes so close that 3% makes the difference are not common.
You "Open SORES" people attempt to crap on MS for years here ala "Linux = Secure, Windows != Secure" (which ANDROID, a linux variant, shows is complete bullshit now that finally, a linux is most used on a computing platform, showing it's NOT secure at all and attacked the same way as Windows has been since it dominates the PC and Server market combined vs all other competitors).
Now, you're doing it even now all through this article's replies. That makes you "better" somehow, than MS is? I know not.