Microsoft has extended an olive branch to the open-source community, calling for a sit-down to discuss how the software giant can better work with the open-source world.
Microsoft Reaches Out to Open-Source Community
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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On one hand their business tactics have put the software world back at least ten years.
On the other hand their crappy products kept me employed to fix it when things go bad. I don’t think computer technicians would survive very well in a non-microsoft world.
As for their olive branch. They have nothing to offer the free-software world. The free-software world can live perfectly well without them, free-software is transcendant of their petty market grabs.
> Open up the file formats so that we can steal them and put
> them into our open source products…..
This is the argument to open up the formats. People (me too)
already use OO to write and read MS files. I don’t think they should open the formats. They should build their file formats on existing and future open standards.
They can keep the code closed and compete with quality products.
DG
Sooner or later MS will have to learn to live with the fact that OSS is here to stay. But they can put a few Trojan horses
along the way in the meantime.
DG