Submitted by Microsoft has “dramatically” changed because of open-source software, the company’s Chief Software Architect Ray Ozzie said Thursday as part of a wide-ranging discussion during the annual Most Valuable Professional summit in Seattle. He also talked about Microsoft’s mesh concept and the importance of virtualization.
It’s been fairly obvious for some time that the competition, or spectre of competition, from open source has forced Microsoft to change in little ways. Interoperability is mentioned as if Microsoft is thinking hard about it, but with the spectre of some ugly dealings over OOXML fresh in my memory, I won’t be impressed by anything less than major glasnost and perestroika.
As for the stated vision, I see very little that Plan 9 couldn’t do in 1989. Plan 9 still can, it’s still around. In fact, I’m starting to wonder whether every time the word “vision” comes out of certain industries, whether it doesn’t mean a rehash of a far older and proven idea, but one which of course received limited audience. Credit where credit is due… Oh I forgot, Microsoft needs all the positive publicity they can get right now. *sigh*
nice try
Yeah, really nice try.
The sky is green, as green as the grass is pink. And Microsoft did not subvert the ISO standardisation process.
I have seldomly seen someone with worse timing. Daily messages about how Microsoft interfered behind the scenes in almost all countries that voted “yes” hit the ‘net, and Mr Ray Ozzie has nothing better to do than tell us how much Microsoft has changed for the better.
It would be funny, had I not the urge to vomit more than I possibly could eat.
… and I’m the tooth-fairy….
Steve Ballmer still breaks as many chairs as he ever did…
Edited 2008-04-18 22:36 UTC
Well, he did basically admit that Vista sucks, so maybe he’s mellowing in his old age…
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/04/18/ballmer_vista_incomplete/
The Windows Template Library (WTL) is a Microsoft Open Source project that I’ve had the (mis)fortune of working with on a regular basis. If that project is indicative of how Microsoft views open source, I have nothing good to say.
WTL is a project that is literally dumped onto Sourceforge. There is no documentation, not even an API reference and you will find no reference to it on MSDN. This is terrible, especially for an open source project that is run by Microsoft.
This whole debacle suggests to me that Microsoft is not serious about open source, and it views open source as a dumping ground for unsupported projects. They’ll never open source anything of importance to the company.
Check out the MVC framework, there is currently a hell of alot more effort being put into it then ASP.net. Can’t comment on documentation yet as it is still quite a ways from a 1.0 release, but there has been alot of two way communication going on.
There is also the DLR, which is a fantastic dynamic language VM (I don’t know if this is still true, but at least when it came out, IronPython on the DLR was faster then python on its own VM).
Those are the two that really stand out for me. There is also more indirect support; Codeplex houses alot of real life, living projects. MS is also one of the companies that supports SourceForge, and have recently been hiring alot from the .net open source space, and encouraging those people to continue working on their projects, like Rob Conery from Subsonic (which I use on the majority of my projects), Phil Haack from DasBlog, and Scott Hanselman from a whole bunch of stuff on and off of windows.
It takes a lot of effort for MS to shift direction on something, but its definately happening in the developer division. With the latest drop of TFS, we are actually seeing acknowledgment that agile is here to stay (although ms project is still pretty tied to waterfall). The rise of ALT.NET, and the fact that the key players are all MVPs and RDs is also causing alot of noise in the .net world.
I don’t think MS really gets open source yet, but they are moving in that directions. I would say in another 5 years or so we will be seeing substancial, community oriented open source projects coming out of redmond.
Edited 2008-04-19 18:51 UTC
I don’t think so. Microsoft convinced me over the last year, that they will never change their ways. They got fined the largest amount of money that ever someone had to pay because of market distorting behaviour, and it changed absolutely nothing in their behaviour.
I think they will put open source projects on the net, to get gratis development and beta testing for software where they know they will not see a dime for anyway, but they need to be able to offer a full software ecosystem. But I think they will continue to ruin their “technology partners” (not their sales partners), continue to buy themselves into political decisions, in one word – behave on the borderline of the law and far beyond the borderline of moral and ethics.
I judge people by what they do, not what they say. From that standpoint Microsoft has learned nothing from open source software or any open source community.
To me the interesting questions are:
Do they understand concepts of open source software or open source community, and intentionally try to lie their way in through the back door?
Or
Are they honestly trying to build open source communities, but just have no clue?
I used to be strongly anti-microsoft but have really softened as of late. If you look closely at what has been happening within the company you really see some bold changes taking place. Part of this is ScottGu and some just the way the marketplace is changing. We have to keep in mind that MS is a very large company and any change will be fairly slow in coming.
I think we need to start evaluating how “good” a company is by how open they are with their core assets. For example, almost the complete windows codebase is available (mainly to universities). Certainly not open source by any definition, but available. Can anyone let me know where I could find the source code to google search? Actually anything that google actually makes revenue from? Apps? Mail? How about the Oracle DB source? Adobe Flash source? And lets stop being being distracted by things like Google’s SoC and see it for what it really is: brilliant marketing. It costs google very little only hurts it’s competitors. Any projects there to build an open source search? Let’s get a bit smarter in this discussion and stop bashing Microsoft when they seem like one of the few companies that is actually really starting to change and not just doing open source to commoditize their competition.