Linux Foundation Comments On Microsoft's Increasing Love of Linux

LibbyMC writes Executive Director Jim Zemlin writes, "We do not agree with everything Microsoft does and certainly many open source projects compete directly with Microsoft products. However, the new Microsoft we are seeing today is certainly a different organization when it comes to open source. The company's participation in these efforts underscores the fact that nothing has changed more in the last couple of decades than how software is fundamentally built."

Comments

Re:Microsoft's 1990's business plan.

[swillden]

I would like to believe you. I really really want to but what's the guarantee?

There are no guarantees.

How do you know that it won't 'extinguish' cross platform support when it defeats the competitive options.

Because Microsoft has failed in the mobile space, and mobile computing is becoming the dominant form of individual computing. Desktops and laptops aren't going away, but they're being relegated to smaller niches, and even in those niches people increasingly expect to be able to work cross-device. I don't expect my tablet or phone to be as convenient for, say, editing a spreadsheet or writing code, as my laptop or desktop, but I increasingly demand that I be able to work on the same stuff on all sorts of devices and to be able to move seamlessly between them.

This inherently means that big chunks of any solution must be cross-platform, because there is no single platform that runs on all devices. Microsoft would like to change this by unifying desktop and mobile Windows, but to be successful at that they'd have to get a dominant position in mobile computing, and they've failed at that. The webification of everything is also making it increasingly impossible to bind users to one operating system.

So, Microsoft is simply not going to have the ability to extinguish cross-platformness, because to do that they'd have to own all the platforms, and they don't, and won't.

This is like we had a bad tyrant and we suffered tremendously under this tyrant and it took a DoJ anti-trust lawsuit and a very long amount of time to see meaningful competition in this space again.

The DoJ suit had nothing to do with it. Microsoft was never meaningfully limited by that suit.

Re:Microsoft's 1990's business plan.

[jedidiah]

None of the things you are ranting about are relevant. The issue is whether or not Microsoft is the same company. Is it the same corporate culture?

Chances are that it is.

The fact that the rest of the world has changed really isn't relevant. It's not the rest of the world we're talking about. The world may have changed and it seems at first glance that it's the same old Microsoft being a leech off of Android with it's patent trolling.

Forget about childish insults directed at Unix users. Microsoft has continually botched it's attempts to adapt to the new reality. That's why it makes more money in the mobile space off of patent trolling than it does it's own product.

Even this "gift" is a manifestation of how they couldn't cope with Java.