I have been following Microsoft open source strategy from 3 years or so now, and they are not an exception: adaptation is a gradual process at Microsoft too.
Hank Janssen, Director of Program Management at the Microsoft Open Source Technology Center, over these days is traveling around Europe, and yesterday we had an interesting conversation about how open source things are going at Microsoft these days.
A suggestion for some future questions about Microsoft’s open source strategy might include specific questions around its strategy of selling Linux-related patents to patent trolls.
Only trouble for Microsoft was that it got caught out in its latest attempt.
Microsoft’s hall of shame detailed for example in these two links >
http://www.groklaw.net/article.php?story=20090908164954318
http://press.redhat.com/2009/09/09/microsoft-and-patent-trolls/
So please explain to me again how Microsoft is now a reformed anti-competitive bully, because its double-dealing clandestine actions sure look like anti-competitive behavior to me.
Microsoft actions as you have outlined them are all simply self-serving attempts to lock in open source PHP projects to run on top of Microsoft IIS, SQL Server, and Azure platforms, that are more expensive than open source alternatives. This benefits nobody but Microsoft, and is therefore hardly something that justifies bouquets of flowers.
This strategy is definitely not “choice beyond marketing” as the writer’s banner suggests. Having ownership of the name Open Source Foundation is a marketing step. Googling “open source” will now discover Microsoft’s foundation at or near the top of the list. Using the word “Foundation” suggests to the public that the organization is the founder of open source, another marketing step.
Adding code to Linux and PHP so they work better with Microsoft products is a marketing step for their own programs.
When the reverse is true, where Microsoft engineers its products to work better with open source programs from other contributers, that can be called “beyond marketing”.
It amazes me that people want to be so forgiving of Microsoft given their history and the fact that they can’t speak without telling half truths and outright lies.
Microsoft has been saying on the one hand that they want to promote interoperability, but except when forced to do so, that interoperability is all one way, and that way is a way that leads to lock in to the Microsoft platform and file formats.
In addition, Microsoft’s behaviour with regard to standards is appalling. Their gaming of the ISO standards system to ram through the OOXML standard is disgraceful and if there were any justice, they would be sanctioned and have their unimplementable standard revoked.
I would love to see Microsoft actually turn over a new leaf and be a good citizen that the open source community could trust and work with, but as long as they continue to say how they want to play nice with the open source community, but then turn around and actively work to undermine it, as most recently demonstrated by their attempted sale of patents to patent trolls for the purpose of attacking Linux and open source, then I would not only not trust them, but would actively discourage others from doing so either.
I lay the blame for Microsoft’s bad behaviour with regard to open source squarely at the feet of the current leadership of the company, specifically Ballmer. He is a plague on the software industry and the sooner he retires the better.
You people think you have to own everything. I’m sick of being compelled to use your lowest common denominator crap software. Don’t crap in Linux’s punchbowl, parasite. Don’t infect Linux with your mediocrity. Don’t act like you’re the friend of anyone. Linux has come as far as it has in spite of your best efforts to kill it. This “un-American cancer” is only toxic to you, and it is going to bury you. Welcome to the dustbin of technology. Its too late for you to posture as if you care about your customers any more than a heroin dealer does. Live by the sword, die by the sword.
@techdog I think we are not our past, we just got to learn from it. Look at ODF Plugfests. They are a reality by now, and I am helping to organize the next one, and Microsoft will be actively taking part to be interoperable with other ODF implementors.
@Frank Daley I have been mentioning the IP issue in past blog posts is a sensitive matter, but it is not easy to get general answers from opensourcers at Microsoft on this, being a transversal issue.
Talking about Microsoft’s adaptation to the open source world, I believe that enabling also Microsoft customers to get advantage of some open source platforms is a win-win. All in all more people will learn about open source software, perception is always the first step towards knowledge.
@Stomfi @333242 I believe that there are other reasons behind the idea to create a foundation than suggesting to the public that the organization is the founder of open source. I don’t know yet if Sam Ramji and his team will be doing something interesting or not, I will probably cover this issue at a later stage, though.
Adding code to Linux and PHP is not a marketing choice, but actually offering Microsoft customers the opportunity to work with both worlds, as they want to. Adaptation in this case came out of necessity, I would say.
@Roberto, I hope your motive is not to sanitize Microsoft. They are beyond redemption, their record say’s that well and truly. They wish to have the FLOSS community working with and for them. I hope you’re not Astroturfing for them. I say I hope because neither I nor anyone else can read what’s inside your head. I just hope it’s not a Richard.
Anyway, good luck with trying to clean up their image among real Programmers.
As I wrote almost one year ago, adaptation is a gradual process. Rereading this blog entry almost one year after is easy to figure out how many things are changed (e.g. initiatives like interoperability bridge, or the CodePlex foundation are out there).
The European Union took the decision to opens in-depth investigation for fear of prices hikes, and IT veterans, open source experts and economists negatively commented the news.
Before expressing any opinion let’s see what the Competition Commissioner Neelie Kroes said:
As I recall (happy to be corrected), naming specific products in EU tenders is in violation of tender law. To wit, a tender may reference a RDBMS as requirement but not SQL Server 2008. This is why for example the Hungarians got into hot water over the Microsoft-heavy public tender a while back.
It’s probably a bit unrealistic in this day and age to think that a tender can be specific enough without referencing specific technologies and products but that’s the law today and if we’re going to advise against naming Microsoft in tenders then MySQL shouldn’t be targeted with this form of financing either.
Hi Josef,
I was thinking of research calls, sorry. We can learn a lot from the past in this respect, see the PyPy Story!
Concentration in IT markets, especially in Europe, is basically induced by anticompetitive characteristics and legally questionable activities of three IT companies since long: IBM, Microsoft, HP.
Non-approval of upper merger will not lead to further competition. The opposite will be the case. Moreover the Open Source market,
actively promoted by Sun Microsystems, will suffer seriously.
Now this anticompetitiveness is actively supported by the EU commission’s antitrust division, headed by Mrs. Kroes. This fact is casting serious doubts in the work and competency of Mrs. Kroes’ team world-wide.
The commercial branch of MySQL has a market share of 0.4% officially and is thus far from being able to cause a concentration in the database market.
Having said this, I notify that EU commission’s decisions itself will have to be regarded as cause of concentration in case of
disapproval of above merger.
Hi Peter,
I suspect that IT concentration has different roots. Europe missed to take advantage of the “packaged” software era in the early 90’s, but few players (SAP). IT market worked and works by reselling US software plus selling system integration services.
So said, I’m with you when you state that the commission anti-trust division seems to miss the real point, and as I wrote I’d like EU to put its (our) money where its money is.
RiverMuse – a company established in 2008 by the original founders of Micromuse  and RiverSoft – at the end of July announced the availability of RiverMuse Open Source Fault Management, a fault management platform designed to be extensible via pluggable modules.
Phil Blades -Â VP Products & Community at RiverMuse – told me more about their open source vision.
Eric Barroca after reading Dirk Riehle‘s slides about “The Commercial Open Source Business Model†wrote an inspiring blog post, receiving a number of interesting feedback from the business open source folk.
Let me start by recommending Dirk’s presentation, it really worths reading, but beware of his definition of “commercial open source”:
Commercial open source software projects are open source software projects that are owned by a single firm that derives a direct and significant revenue stream from the software.
Thanks for continuing the discussion! Just a short note on the term “commercial open source”. As far as I understand, it was coined by SugarCRM to distinguish Sugar from say GIMP or other open source software that had no primary profit motive in mind.
I’m actually not saying that the only commercial open source out there follows the single-vendor open source model. Acquia is a good example of a commercial company that is based on community software, so is TWiki. RedHat is commercial for sure too.
Because of this possible confusion that you are also pointing out, I have been moving away from “commercial open source” to “single-vendor open source”. From today’s perspective, SugarCRM overreached when coining this term.
Including multiply-sponsored projects in “commercial open source” is a good thing, I won’t argue with you there. But I’m still not convinced that “all” open-source work is “commercial.” There are loads of projects on Tigris.Org, SourceForge.Net, github, and all the other community sites that have no sponsorship at all.
@Dirk thank you to rejoin this conversation!
I believe you’re right, SugarCRM was probably at the forefront with naming it commercial open source, but I am not sure they want to exclude open source vendors like Acquia or Sonatype.
I appreciate your decision to move away from “commercial open source†to “single-vendor open sourceâ€, really.
@jrep I am following the definition of commercial reported by David Wheeler in his paper:
Commercial means either (a) “oriented to profit-makingâ€, or more generally (b) “of, pertaining to, or suitable for commerceâ€, where commerce means “intercourse, dealings, the buying and selling of commodities, or trade†So we’re talking about something (a) oriented toward profit, or at least (b) something pertaining to public trade or dealings.
I must agree with David saying that “when we include the second meaning (which some people forget), nearly all FLOSS programs are commercial”.
Roberto,
At least the open source supporters are doing their coming out (thanks to Eric!)
Your analysis is perfectly correct (as well as Dirk’s one), but I’d like to moderate it on one single point :
I think that there is some open source initiatives that are not commercials!
Some open source initiatives, driven by (non profit) foundations (FSF, Mozilla, Apache…), are mainly motivated by altruism, openness and sharing (as well as by the ego of some of the contributors). Indeed, within thoose foundations, they are not equal : some are using licenses (GPL to name it) with very strong constraints about commercial use : the code developed from a GPL-licensed source code must be given back to the community with the same license!!
This is really the original (and in some way utopian) vision of Richard Stallman.
This is why I mostly agree with you. I even think that everything else is commercial (and marketing tactic)….
By the way, I’ve just read an awesome post from Vishal Vasu (http://www.vishalvasu.com/general/open-source-versus-open-standards/) that reminds us (from a user perspective) that, what is important, is that your software needs to support (useful) open standards!
Regards
Hi Alain,
I know you are right saying that some – maybe even many – open source initiatives are mainly motivated by altruism, openness and sharing. Those motivations do not prevent commercial activities around those projects.
Via twitter I was pointing you to Mitchell’s blog post about Mozilla’s sustainability (courtesy of the WayBack machine) because it is a great example of the so-called second meaning of “commercial” (see my previous comment).
About GPL strictness I’m not so sure, not in a web world at least, but I didn’t cover (yet) licensing and open source commerce.
Last but not least, I totally agree with you and Vishal, I am struggling to make open standards compliance more relevant here in Europe, the next ODF Plugfest will be a step in this direction.
I found an interesting appliance factory that makes an open source project as simple as an iphone application and automatically packages it as a business ready appliance.
Eric as anticipated I wrote an entry about UShareSoft.
Among open source research project funded by the EC the EDOS project aimed to study and solve problems associated with the production, management and distribution of open source software packages.
EDOS (Environment for the Development and Distribution of Open Source software) obtained interesting results, either from an academic point of view or from an industrial perspective.
The lines between open source and proprietary vendors’ software strategies continue to blur. Intuit announced the launch of a community site for developers interested in creating connected on line applications for small businesses, providing them with a number of open source tools.
About three months ago GroundWork announced the availability of GroundWork Monitor Starter Edition, a cheaper edition designed to establish a position at the lower end of the market and yet educating users to trade money to save time (as MÃ¥rten Mickos docet).
I asked David Dennis, senior director of product marketing at Groundwork, to keep me updated about the initiative, below some answers on the topic of GroundWork Monitor Starter Edition.
Justin Erenkrantz – Apache Software Foundation board member as well as President of the foundation – today at OSCON 2009 will talk about “Putting It All Together: Contributing to Open Source Projects“, or how an individual developer can contribute constructively to an (Apache) open source project.
Yesterday I had an skype conversation with Justin and Sander Striker, an Apache contributor, and I asked them more about Apache and the Apache Incubator, the entry path into the Apache software foundation for projects wishing to get under the Apache umbrella.
The MySQL Librarian is an initiative aimed to collect links to the best MySQL-related material on the web. I asked Giuseppe Maxia, MySQL Community Team Lead, more about the initiative.
The European open source observatory opened up about one year ago, last February went into the wild 2.0 and now offers a free Virtual Forge service, aimed at giving a better understanding of hosted projects.
Europe keeps investing money to fund OSOR development, now trying to mimic Ohloh metrics and data, instead of spending energies to create synergies with others.
In the OSOR news  Marco Battistoni, Unisys OSOR Technical Manager, says (emphasis is mine):
However setting up and operating such a repository can be very costly and time consuming (believe us, we know!):Â one has to buy servers, internet connection, install the necessary applications, hire experts to operate the site 24/7… This needs a lot of commitment both in human and in financial resources.
I’d prefer to see our money spent to create something new, or simply to share knowledge about interesting open source projects and tools. There are definitely more forges than necessary.
I agree with you, there are so many places where a free software developer can host his/her project that it’s difficult to decide but no one help in sharing ideas, this could be of some help in cutting down the number of project doing the same thing and help developer to team up.
Stefano don’t get me wrong, I am not saying that Europe is wrong having its own repository/forge. European public adminstrations have to deploy a long term sustainability plan when it comes to hosting projects. Today moving projects from a forge to another is not trivial, since data federation is still to come (and maybe Europe might well help towards this goal).
OSOR EC-funded project is spending big money, and I’d like to see most of these resources spent to better disseminate projects information.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Crabby, 
Peter Parker, 
Juju, 
This strategy is definitely not “choice beyond marketing” as the writer’s banner suggests. Having ownership of the name Open Source Foundation is a marketing step. Googling “open source” will now discover Microsoft’s foundation at or near the top of the list. Using the word “Foundation” suggests to the public that the organization is the founder of open source, another marketing step.
Adding code to Linux and PHP so they work better with Microsoft products is a marketing step for their own programs.
When the reverse is true where Microsoft engineers its products to work better with open source programs from other contributers, that can be called “beyond marketing”.