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Microsoft Tries Hard To Play Nice With Open Source, But There's an Elephant In the Room
Esther Schindler writes: They're trying, honest they are. In 2016 alone, writes Steven Vaughan-Nichols, Microsoft announced SQL Server on Linux; integrated Eclipse and Visual Studio, launched an
open-source network stack on Debian Linux; and it's adding Ubuntu Linux to its Azure Stack hybrid-cloud offering. That's all well and good, he says, but it's not enough. There's one thing Microsoft could do to gain real open-source trust: Stop forcing companies to pay for its bogus Android patents. But, there's too much money at stake, writes sjvn, for this to ever happen. For instance, in its last quarter, volume licensing and patents, accounted for approximately 9% of Microsoft's total revenue.
TFA has an interesting but unlikely premise: Microsoft cares about the "trust" of the open source community. Why should they? Isn't the whole idea of open source (with a suitable license) supposed to be that you don't have to trust the originator of the software? For example, open source is often cited as a solution for the problem that the originator goes belly-up. Fine, just maintain it yourself or with the help of the community.
Besides, why should Microsoft care about the "trust" of the people they're giving stuff to? First, it's unlikely they they will ever gain the trust of those who forever view them as The Evil Empire. Second, they've already got the trust (by and large) of their paying customers, much as a male black widow spider trusts the female: trust her, but don't become lunch.
For example, I have a large body of software I've developed over the past 20 years that's written for Microsoft's "MFC." (Seemed like a good idea at the time...) I trust them to keep supporting that (as they have for 20 years), and I also trust that they'll make me buy a new version of Visual Studio every few years when the old one no longer works on modern versions of Windows. (Been there, done that.) That sort of trust is called "business."
Software patents should be outlawed. The US Supreme Court seems to take a dim view on software patents. Code that allows text to render before images is not innovation. Telling you that I own any code you write that enables a specific feature such as that is not innovation its extortion...legalized extortion. Software patents for simple features like that should have never been applied for and should have never been granted. Microsoft abuses patents on software in an effort to stifle open-source in the marketplace. They have even warned that this is the method they will use against Linux and they have been executing that plan for a while now. It's not just Android it's any device that runs Linux. They have been using fat patents against Linux device makers for a while now. Companies like the NAS maker Buffalo which uses Linux on their devices and have nothing to do with Android has to pay up.
It raises cost of FOSS from zero to cost of FAT license. And you can't just drop FAT support because it has a monopoly (as in "dominant") position on the market.
Not to mention the "standard" SDXC that requires the patent encumbered exFAT file system, even though FAT32 would be enough or F2FS would be better. A SDXC compliant device can automatically format your card if it detects a blank card, and if the card is formatted with an unknown file system, including FAT32, can be detected as blank. I'd like to know how much MS, sorry, M$ paid for that standard so convenient to them to be approved.
Microsoft has been threatening Linux with patents for many years. That they are playing hardball with patents against Google is definitely relevant because they could decide to cripple the Linux world by tying it up with patent lawsuits. Even if every one of them were ruled not in Microsoft's favor, they could throw enough money and lawyers at the problem to cripple or destroy any company they wanted to, except other juggernauts like Google, Apple, Samsung, Sony, etc.
So while the Android patents don't directly affect Open Source, they do show that Micosoft could do tremendous amounts of damage to Open Source should it choose.
It's a good sign that MS appears to be trying to play nice with the Open Source world, and to contribute to it as well, but no one can, nor should, forget about the previous 30 years of Microsoft's behavior. They should be earning some good will for these efforts, but there's a long, long way to go before they should earn the trust of the Open Source world, or to even prove that their intention is more than just to put up a screen of "nice" behavior to cover up their more nefarious, ant-competitive practices.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.
Speaking as someone active on Slashdot in the era of the Halloween emails, and Gate's "open source == cancer" speech to Congress, there was a LOT to be angry about. It really was like watching a cartoon villain. I switched to Linux completely for 6 years over it, even. That was legitimate anger.
But you know what? In a few years, we're going to have working professionals posting on Slashdot who weren't even born when this stuff happened. It was perpetuated by people who aren't even in the industry anymore. At some point, we as a collective group are just going to have to accept the fact that we won; we licked MS and their anti-FOSS stance, and it's ok to get over it now.