Microsoft Open source
- Microsoft open to open source
Microsoft Corp. says it is looking to turn over more of its programs to open-source software developers, playing a greater role in a process that the Redmond company has criticized strongly at times in the past. Money-makers like the company's Windows operating system and Office productivity suite aren't on the table -or anywhere near it. But the company has so far released two software-development tools to the open-source community, and it wants to continue the practice, a Microsoft platform manager told an industry group this week. There's more of that on the way," said Microsoft's Stephen Walli, who oversaw the process of releasing those tools under open-source licenses. "And it's not just about developer tools. There's other things that we can be looking at when you actually look at the breadth of source code that we have, the breadth of software that we have that isn't actually core revenue stream.
- Microsoft's Open-Source Agenda
Analysts and insiders-including Linus Torvalds-say they think that Microsoft's move to start a dialogue with the open-source community shows that the company is recognizing that open source has real, lasting value. After a series of friendly moves towards open-source developers, Microsoft Corp. has talked with Michael Tiemann, president of the Open Source Initiative and vice president of open-source affairs at Linux vendor Red Hat Inc., about meeting with him to "begin a productive conversation" between proponents of open source and Microsoft. Well, for one thing, Microsoft might be trying to cool off the high emotions flying between fans of open source and of Microsoft. "It appears that Microsoft is attempting to change the environment from its currently highly charged, highly emotional state to something more constructive," said Dan Kusnetzky, IDC's system software vice president.
- Microsoft vs. Open Source: Who Will Win
With little academic attention focused on this question, Harvard Business School professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-
Masanell decided to dive in. Most research to date into the OSS movement has focused on the organization and management issues surrounding OSS. Ghemawat and Casadesus-Masanell chose to explore the fundamental competitive dynamics question: Will OSS ever displace traditional software from its market leadership position? "We believe that there is still a great deal of confusion and puzzlement on how this competitive battle will develop," say the authors of the academic paper Dynamic Mixed Duopoly: A Model Motivated by Linux vs. Windows, which has just been accepted for publication in a special issue of Management Science.
- Microsoft Open-source software
IN MAY, the city of Munich decided to oust Microsoft Windows from the 14,000 computers used by local-government employees in favour of Linux, an open-source operating system. Although the contract was worth a modest $35m, Microsoft's chief executive, Steve Ballmer, interrupted his holiday in Switzerland to visit Munich and lobby the mayor. Microsoft even dropped its prices to match Linux-a remarkable feat since Linux is essentially free and users merely purchase support services alongside it. But the software giant still lost. City officials said the decision was a matter of principle: the municipality wanted to control its technological destiny. It did not wish to place the functioning of government in the hands of a commercial vendor with proprietary standards which is accountable to shareholders rather than to citizens.
- Analysis:
Microsoft vs. open source
Microsoft is facing a growing battle against open-source software that is edging into politics on a global scale. Just last week, the German government announced a deal to replace parts of its IT system with open-source programs, and Taiwan officials announced, as part of an effort to curb Microsoft's dominance in software, preliminary plans to promote the development of local Linux software. Germany and Taiwan are only the latest countries to take sides in a software battle in which Microsoft and developers of commercial, or proprietary programs, are increasingly facing off with proponents of open-source software. "We are seeing a lot of traction for Linux in the government sector, particularly in China," said Rajnish Arora, senior program manager of enterprise servers and workstations at market research company IDC in the Asia-Pacific.
- Microsoft: Open source 'not reliable or
dependable
I don't think (open source) is anti-Microsoft in the sense that it's giving people choices in the technologies that they use," Jonathan Murray, the vice president and chief technology officer of Microsoft Europe, told BBC World in the first part of the documentary "The Code Breakers," which aired this week. Some people want to use community-based software, and they get value out of sharing with other people in the community. Other people want the reliability and the dependability that comes from a commercial software model. And again, at the end of the day, you make the choice based on what has the highest value to you," Murray continued. It isn't clear from Murray's statement which category he believes commercial open-source companies such as Red Hat and MySQL fit into. Nicholas Negroponte, the founder of the One Laptop Per Child project, was also interviewed in the documentary, and he disagreed with Microsoft's claim that open source is inferior.
- Open Source Code Finds Way into Microsoft Product
In a move that shows just how far Microsoft Corp. has come, and how pervasive open-source software is in certain areas, the software powerhouse is, for the first time, including open-source technology in one of its shipping products. Microsoft plans to include the Message Passing Interface-a library specification for message passing proposed as a standard by a broad-based committee of vendors, implementers and users-in its Windows Server 2003 Compute Cluster Edition, which went to public beta this week at the Microsoft Developers Conference here and is on track to ship in the first half of next year. MPI is key middleware that was designed by a consortia of all the supercomputing vendors in the 1990s to allow the easy portability of code. It abstracts away things like low-latency interconnect, and our focus is making it super easy for ISVs to move their code," Kyril Faenov, Microsoft's director for High Performance Computing, told eWEEK in a recent interview at Microsoft's campus in Redmond, Wash.
- How Microsoft invented open source
The open source movement wouldn't exist without Microsoft, Bill Gates told his company's shareholder meeting earlier this week. Open source is also a follower, not an innovator, and destroys jobs, the economy and world peace . Gates was responding to a question from the audience. The transcript doesn't say who it was, but the question itself makes you wonder how the blazes some Linux-loving hippy longhair got into the meeting in the first place. It appears to me that the open source movement is gaining momentum, and as I understand it the key to success of a software product involves efficiently building an ecosystem of developers and users, resellers, and so forth. Historians will note that this is absolutely not what Microsoft came in and said, if it can be deemed to have come in and said anything at all of significance, back in the early days. Microsoft said it would produce an operating system for the IBM PC, and retained the rights to sell MS-DOS to other computer manufacturers.
- Microsoft's Open Source Olive Branch
BOSTON - It seems kind of strange to have Microsoft, long considered the open source "enemy," to deliver a keynote at a conference about Linux, but that's exactly what happened in Boston today. Microsoft Platform Technology Strategy Director Bill Hilf delivered a keynote on interoperability between Windows and Linux and discussed the maturation of the debate between the two operating systems. He also detailed Microsoft's own test efforts in its Open Source Software Lab and officially announced the launch of Port 25, the communications and blogging site that gives some additional character and personality to those efforts. Knowing that he stood at the head of an audience that may not have been particularly enamored of Microsoft, Hilf took every opportunity to make sure the audience knew that he knew what they think about Microsoft.
- Microsoft open source tactics
Mike Olson, the outspoken CEO of Berkeley DB provider Sleepycat Software Inc., believes that the successful open source players of tomorrow will incorporate at least some aspects of proprietary computing into their business model. In this conversation, Olson discusses why he thinks ever-evolving attitudes toward open source will make these hybrid offerings lucrative. He then runs through an interesting "thought experimentation" to show what would happen if Microsoft ever decided to embrace open source. If you had asked me that question at one and a half year intervals since 1998, I would have given you different answers all the way along. When Linux began to be successful, a number of the big platform vendors, notably Microsoft, launched pretty vituperative anti-open source campaigns. The General Public License was communism written into a copyright statement. And at that time, buyers were just terrified of open source.
- Microsoft, Open Source Claim XML Success
Microsoft's recent announcement that it would offer royalty-free licensing for its Extensible Markup Language (define) schemas in Office 2003 has both the software giant and open-source advocates claiming victory for the open standards movement. But analysts and industry experts say the real winners are the independent software vendors (ISVs), whose hearts and minds are up for grabs in the Web services (define) movement to expand the use of XML and open standards. The royalty-free licensing program, which Microsoft announced on Nov. 17th, is related to Microsoft's new Office 2003 versions of Word, Excel and its InfoPath back-end, information-gathering programs. The suite uses schemas (define), or metadata, (define) that describe how information is stored when documents are saved as XML files.
- Open Source Ever Defeat Microsoft
While Microsoft has had some 20 years to make Office what it is today, most industry analysts say that new open-source contenders, such as OpenOffice, measure up reasonably well against Redmond's suite. But they also say that while these suites do have most of the features of Microsoft Office, they lack certain advanced capabilities that make all the difference. Clearly, Microsoft continues to define the office space and likely will dominate office software for the foreseeable future. But an interesting question to ask is whether a group of volunteers -- however large -- can ever hope to measure up against Microsoft's millions of dollars. Gates and crew have poured countless programmer hours into Office over the past 20 years, while OpenOffice and other alternative product groups consist almost entirely of volunteers.
- Microsoft open source
executive
The name Microsoft still engenders boos and moans from the crowd at Linux World, but increasingly open source advocates and Microsoft executives recognize the need for the two camps to play nicely. To that end, Microsoft hired Bill Hilf, an open source industry veteran to help it chart its strategy in the choppy open source waters. Hilf, director for Microsoft?s platform technology strategy organization, is leading a technical session at Linux World ? a first for Microsoft ? that focuses on managing Linux in a mixed environment. Network World Senior Editor Jennifer Mears sat down with Hilf at the show to hear about Microsoft?s Linux/open source software lab and where the software giant sees the industry heading. What follows is an edited transcript of the conversation.
- Microsoft: Getting to grips with open source
Microsoft's recent decision to partner with virtualisation specialist XenSource has added momentum to the notion that it is softening its stance on co-operation with the open source community. But while Microsoft can point to numerous examples of sharing its source code and other data, hardcore open source advocates will no doubt argue that it's just pragmatism on the part of a rapacious competitor. The company's UK technology officer, Jerry Fishenden, claims Microsoft is part of a "broad ecosystem to enable greater interoperability with our technologies". Examples include recent partnerships with open source-based commercial vendors such as database giant MySQL, web server vendor JBoss, and most recently XenSource. Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference, held in London last month, Fishenden told delegates that Microsoft is facing a challenge to decide how much it should co-operate with the competitors.
- Microsoft open-source ODF
Avanade Inc., the Seattle-based systems integrator formed in 2000 by Accenture Inc. and Microsoft Corp. -- which still own a majority of the company -- has 3,000 consultants that work exclusively in Microsoft technologies. Nearly three quarters of Avanade's revenue is derived from enterprise IT work done on behalf of Accenture or Microsoft, and that revenue has grown steadily over the past six years. Privately held Avanade, which files SEC reports because of its large number of employee shareholders, is on track this year to report about a half-billion dollars in revenue and its third profitable year. With that backdrop, Computerworld recently spoke with Avanade co-founder and CEO Mitch Hill on a variety of IT topics.
- Microsoft executive lauds open source
Microsoft is not viewed as an open source proponent, but a key executive said Wednesday the company recognized the benefits of open source and was becoming more open itself. David Kaefer, director of Business Development, Intellectual Property and Licensing at Microsoft, said open source had bolstered innovation in a distributed fashion, and he called the open source software movement a "very powerful force in the industry." I think one of the exciting things about the open source software movement is it actually brought together a very distributed group of developers," Kaefer said, speaking at "Business of Innovation," a Valley Speakers Series event held at Microsoft's Silicon Valley offices. Microsoft does have a stake in open source, he said. "Certainly, it?s not as big a bet as a company like IBM would be making in open source.
- Microsoft: Getting to grips with open source
Microsoft's recent decision to partner with virtualisation specialist XenSource has added momentum to the notion that it is softening its stance on co-operation with the open source community. But while Microsoft can point to numerous examples of sharing its source code and other data, hardcore open source advocates will no doubt argue that it's just pragmatism on the part of a rapacious competitor. The company's UK technology officer, Jerry Fishenden, claims Microsoft is part of a "broad ecosystem to enable greater interoperability with our technologies". Examples include recent partnerships with open source-based commercial vendors such as database giant MySQL, web server vendor JBoss, and most recently XenSource. Speaking at the Open Source Business Conference, held in London last month, Fishenden told delegates that Microsoft is facing a challenge to decide how much it should co-operate with the competitors.
- Ex-Microsoft execs launch open source biz
Paul Allen, a Microsoft co-founder, established the Experience Music Project museum in Seattle with its focus on the guitar god. Charles Simonyi, a billionaire software developer who can take much of the credit for Word and Excel, is working towards a 2007 trip to the space station. And, perhaps the most unlikely activity of them all for an ex-Micosoftie, Scott Collison, former director of platform strategy at Microsoft, is the CEO of Ohloh, an open-source startup out of Bellevue Wash. Ohloh, which is both bankrolled and staffed by former Microsoft executives, will be using open-source software to provide companies with a service to help them choose the right open-source software for their needs.
- Ex-Microsoft staffers set up open source directory site
A few former Microsoft employees have launched a website that evaluates open source projects. The site, called Ohloh, is not a reviews site but instead a directory of open source software, its co-founders said. We collect from the infrastructure the open source community uses to develop the software," Ohloh co-founder and CEO Scott Collison told silicon.com sister site CNET News.com. "It also serves as an open source directory. You can find open source projects and compare them, and gradually find one that's right for you." The site could appeal to developers who are frustrated by the number of open source projects that lack clear explanations. Ohloh also seeks to help developers make a build versus buy decision by offering code analysis, said Collison, who along with co-founder Jason Allen, previously worked at Microsoft.
- Open source Microsoft's nemesis
If Microsoft Corp. investors are concerned about the company's lacklustre shares, they must be downright terrified by the legions of computer programmers who want to drive the technology behemoth into the ground. Open-source software -- which involves, in some cases, thousands of highly motivated programmers teaming up to develop and modify free versions of commercially available software- are invading Microsoft's home turf with increasing ferocity. Linux is the best example. The free alternative to the pricey Windows operating system has already proved popular with computer enthusiasts and now has more casual computer users warming up to it as well. Even Linux's logo, a reclining penguin, was donated to the cause.