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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?
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.
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.
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?