Slashdot Mirror
What Will Microsoft's "Embrace" of Open Source Actually Achieve?
Nerval's Lobster writes Back in the day, Microsoft viewed open source and Linux as a threat and did its best to retaliate with FUD and patent threats. And then a funny thing happened: Whether in the name of pragmatism or simply marketing, Microsoft began a very public transition from a company of open-source haters (at least in top management) to one that's embraced some aspects of open-source computing. Last month, the company blogged that .NET Core will become open-source, adding to its previously open-sourced ASP.NET MVC, Web API, and Web Pages (Razor). There's no doubt that, at least in some respects, Microsoft wants to make a big show of being more open and supportive of interoperability. The company's even gotten involved with the .NET Foundation, an independent organization designed to assist developers with the growing collection of open-source technologies for .NET. But there's only so far Microsoft will go into the realm of open source—whereas once upon a time, the company tried to wreck the movement, now it faces the very real danger of its whole revenue model being undermined by free software. But what's Microsoft's end-goal with open source? What can the company possibly hope to accomplish, given a widespread perception that such a move on its part is the product of either fear, cynicism, or both?
Give them a taste for free, then when they're hooked, gouge them.... Visual Studio and .Net do tend to be well received by everyone. The consensus is that it's a good product and a pleasure to use. The only problem with it is that you have to run it on Windows. So, perhaps the plan is to support .Net on Linux for a while, then yank the support for Linux away and force everyone back to Windows and SQL Server or rewrite their application for another platform.
What has changed is that open-source is no longer a threat to Microsoft. It was a threat when Windows competed against Linux for the desktop and for the server. But today, Microsoft doesn't care about Windows and has re-invented itself: Microsoft lays its hopes on Azure.
All this open-sourcing of .NET is to entice people to use .NET and thus use Windows Azure. By eliminating the stigma of being closed and proprietary, they eliminate the #1 objection to using .NET. This openness goes both ways: not only is .NET opening, but Azure is supporting other stacks: node and LAMP for example. They don't care what tools you use anymore, they just want your hosting business.
Microsoft's new competitors are OpenStack, Amazon, and other cloud service providers. They will compete with those providers by trying to have the cloud platform that supports the most tools and the easiest process to get stuff into the cloud.
I don't know; the market looks very different than it did back in the Halloween Email days. There are two things going on here: 1) Ballmer and Gates are out at MS, and 2) server OS market share is not as important as sales of cloud services. It isn't what you're running on your box that they're interested in, anymore, it's what you're connecting to for your business layer. If they can get *nix customers connecting to Azure on .NET, I think they'd call that a win.
Historically, being embraced by Microsoft has often been deadly...
True in the 80s and early 90s, but today Microsoft is pretty responsive to their partners and that role has more been taken on by Amazon. I hear Amazon basically data mines business partners who sell on their site to undercut prices on everything except for certain narrowly agreed products.
It's a good business model for Amazon's move to gather more market power, which will give them a near-monopoly in the end. They're definitely playing the long game. But it's not a good move for their partners.
Back in the day, Microsoft viewed open source and Linux as a threat and did its best to retaliate with FUD and patent threats.
then in 2013 Microsoft suffered a loss of more than US$32 billion and in 2014 it fired, er "layed off" almost 20,000 employees. faced with life support options of XBox earnings and corporate licenses, it excreted another phone no one wanted and held its breath. then it lost another 300 million on its nook investment and 676 million on the surface tablet in 2014. Then it remembered how well litigation as a business model worked for SCO.
microsoft is embracing Open Source in much the same way you embrace that creepy uncle that touched you as a kid during thanksgiving. Its a truce, because a patent war against amorphous things like windowing, clicking, or startup noises would haul big guns like apple and google into court, not just samsung and tomtom, and they would face the very real possibility of losing unchallenged but indefensible patents so its best to keep that paper tiger in the desk drawer. Their best bet is to hope people think Microsoft non OSI "open source" licenses can make some headway, and that people stop talking about BSD and GPL. Gobbling up more video games would do it well, but the innovation ship has sailed at redmond and there arent many options left for real growth. Watch for it to become a clearing house of small game studios and dessicated open source projects long since forked by dedicated dev groups that have very sour memories of Redmond. Microsoft knows it can expect businesses to pony up protection money but once Google or Ubuntu unveil an office desktop killer, thats the end of the show.
Good people go to bed earlier.
And there's still nothing preventing them from changing their attitude and discontinuing support, especially when by getting their software in-use, it's easier to migrate to their platform with the existing type of software than it is to change types of software while remaining on the existing platform.
Do not look into laser with remaining eye.
I may be wrong but I thought the only major patent things they've been involved in lately they were pretty up front about - in fact, many Slashdotters complained at the time they were just engaging in FUD by announcing they had any patents.
The things I know of are:
- The FAT LFN patent. Not a great idea, but they never picked FAT to be a SD card file system in the first place. Can't blame them for cashing in beyond general opposition to patents.
- The package of patents covering technologies in Android - this is the one I think Slashdot's commentator consensus complained was FUD until Microsoft started approaching mobile device makers.
- VC-1, which they were upfront about during the standardization process, and coordinated with the group licensing the MPEG LA was organizing.
Where have they tried to push something as an open standard and then turned around and said "Ha ha! Gotcha! Here are these hidden patents we never told you about"?
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
Open source is a success. It's taken over most of the server market. The fact it's open is why it's a success - do you think PHP would ever be popular if it were closed?
The question Microsoft is asking themselves is not "How do we kill this", but "How do we monetize this?" (followed by "How far should we jump right now, and to what extent should we hold back?")
You are not alone. This is not normal. None of this is normal.
The SDK and libraries have never been a revenue source. The development tools and software platform are the revenue sources.
Given a continued level of investment, it is unlikely that another party would overtake Microsoft as the definitive source for commercial .Net needs. On the filp side, Microsoft needs a bigger ecosystem. First party only takes them so far, and most third party efforts focus around more linux-oriented or platform-neutral stacks, with an emphasis on open source. Going more cross platform and open source is their way of trying to get the platform more relevant. If this plan succeeds, then some parties will be 'getting it for free', but those parties would have otherwise gone with a free solution.
In short, they are trying to open source just enough to provide equivalent support to free frameworks that are realistically good enough, while holding back components where there is a shred of belief that MS might possible continue to hold differentiated value.
They're not really open sourcing them. The Linux version's going to be some kind of collaboration with Ximian to extend their Mono implementation. Eventually they'll be marketing along the lines of "Now that you've chosen Azure, don't you want the real thing for your .NET platform - you can't trust those hippies to have implemented it right".
Posted from my Android phone. Oh, I can change this? There, that's better...
Yeah... My guess is that, after this announcement, developers are going to say to themselves, "Great, now we don't have to learn how to use new tools to create software for Linux", and do all their work on Windows.
Since this is about open sourcing .Net how is it any different from Java? Do people not learn Linux-based tools to create Java programs because they can do it on Windows?
Then, in five or ten years, when everyone's using Microsoft's tools, they'll claim no one's using them to port to Linux, anyway, and drop support.
But it is open source, what would "dropping support" achieve when the source is out there?
Embrace, extend, destroy. Sun Tsu's book isn't off their shelves just yet.
That said, Microsoft needs revenue, and moneyspenders tired of the BS, the poor quality, the BS, the proprietary nature, the lock-in, and more. The veneer of openness still means that Microsoft is looking for revenue, and their seeming love for open source is designed to follow the market, not some sort of philosophical shift. They're still in it for the revenue.
The trends in software and administrative support still favor strong static infrastructure, and Microsoft's IT management has a generation of schooled people that know dot-net, SQL Server, and desktop products. They learned AD, and how to make stuff the Microsoft Way.
Licensing models can't be easily ignored, and embracing them doesn't stop their principal need: more and lots of revenue, and at least some harmony. Their QA still is hideous, but it's improving, which is damning with faint praise. If they want to competitively and actively support open source/FOSS, fine. They could change that battleship of theirs tomorrow. Licensing wouldn't matter as there are armies of closed source coders dying for revenue, too. It's just that community-sourced armies of passionate coders can be not only faster, but equally as effective-- or more. It's the revenue. Follow the revenue. It's all about the revenue.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
i3 processors start at a TDP of 11.5W and are almost as fast as those 25w amd chips despite using less than half as much power. AMD chips have not been able to come remotely close to the performance per watt of Intel's chips since Conroe launched in 2006. They compete on performance per dollar, not power efficiency.