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).
Almost one year ago my friend and mentor Robin Good told me he was working to launch POP, the first online community and learning program of professional web publishers. Now his program is live, the first course is fully booked and being luckily one of his students I am looking forward to learn more things from him.
Unfortunately the program seems already full booked. Hope to jump in soon!
10 amazing tricks for OpenOffice.org – interesting and funny tricks, included playing with StarWars game.
Nautilus: icons enable OpenOffice documents with real preview – Ubuntu users can enjoy OpenOffice.org document preview in Nautilus (thanks to the “OpenOffice Thumbnailer” package).
Arrows 3D Clipart Gallery Theme – An extension containing 8 arrows in 3D with shadow.
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.
The Open Innovation Summit application deadline has been extended from the 1st of September until the 8th, take your chance to raise capital or meet potential partners to bring your open source solutions to the market.
If you are an open source entrepreneur willing to meet up with VCs take your time now to fill up the application form and be sure to cover the following topics: (More …)
“Hadoop: The Definitive Guide” is the first book covering the now famous java framework supporting data intensive distributed applications.
Doug Cutting, the project’s author now working at Cloudera, wrote that Tom White – author of the book and long time contributor to the Apache top-level project – is the most qualified person to write a book about hadoop.
Toli Kuznets, Marketcetera CTO and co-founder, will tell you about how to implement your trading strategy on the Marketcetera platform.
Reserve your Webinar seat now, the webinar will be held on Thursday 3rd of September at 12:00 PM – 1:00 PM EDT.
The EU now provides a search tool to find applications among the 1751 open source development projects hosted on ten federated forges managed by Austrian, French, Italian and Spanish public administrations.
The new search engine basically relies on an automatic translation service, translating projects’ descriptions in English.
Well, I’m not that sure about your proposal of looking for *code*. In the case of OSOR, the idea seems to be to link with other sites devoted to libre software for public administrations. Working at the package (or poroject) level, seems to me about right. When you’re looking for some piece of code, the domain of the program probably doesn’t matter that much…
In other words, if you’re looking for some package which may be useful for public administrations, looking at OSOR and federated forges seems reasonable. But if you are looking for a specific piece of code (even if it is for a software to be used in PA), the search should be much wider: probably almost any forge could have the piece you want).
WRT FLOSSMetrics, indeed we’re focused on GForge-like forges (including SourceForge), but we can extract data from any public repository in any forge, provided we have its url, and the kind of repository is supported by our tools. Currently that amounts to CVS, Subversion, git and (limited) Bazaar for SCM, Bugzilla and SourceForge for bug reporting systems, and mbox for mailing lists repositories. More are supposed to come.
Yes, I fully agree that the services provided by FLOSSMetrics could be integrated with OSOR, or with any other forge, for that matter. SourceForge is starting that way (not with FLOSSMetrics, but with their own machinery), and OSOR also started it, offering graphs about the evolution of some parameters related to the activity of the projects (in this case, using a part of the FLOSSMetrics toolchain).
Just to finish, thanks a lot for reporting on FLOSSMetrics, and for taking the time to understand it!
[Disclamer: I’m coordinator of the FLOSSMetrics project, and also involved in the OSOR as a member of the consortium maintaining it]
Hi Jesus,
glad to see you joining the conversation.
As I wrote in my blog post most of the times open source projects for public administrations are lead by SMEs thinking and acting locally. Translating projects’ descriptions can hardly help the share and reuse of knowledge in the context of IT, I am afraid.
Krugle code search engine or similar technology might help to search pieces of code that perform more specific tasks, and eventually reuse code made available from other EU public administrations under the EUPL (apparently designed to ease the licensing burden).
Taking advantage only of code hosted on federated forges may result in a lack of opportunity anyway, either if you look for a whole package or a library. In other words, I am assuming that we need of OSOR here, and the EUPL license may well be the reason for that.
I wish to report more about FLOSSMetrics, let’s keep in touch for writing a specific blog post on project’s final findings.
SourceForge.net is wanting to make sure performance of the site from various locations on the globe is fast. As Europe is a major source of traffic to the site, they are seeking testers in Italy.
Daniel Hinojosa, SourceForge.net Support Senior Manager, kindly asked me to spread the word, read below his message.
Roberto Galoppini, 
Crabby, 
Peter Parker, 
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”.