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.
/. submmissions have always had a bit of an issue with spelling. In this case, the original story was probably about Open Sores.
Sent from my ASR33 using ASCII
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 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.)
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
'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.
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
Not only is Microsoft Corporation a person, now you want it to become a protected minority as well.
Have gnu, will travel.
...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.
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.
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.