Submitted by “Does Microsoft have an open-source strategy – beyond finding new ways to thwart Linux and other non-proprietary wares? Sam Ramji, Microsoft’s Director of Platform Technology Strategy and the company’s Open Source Software Lab, says it does. I met with Ramji last week when he was passing through New York on his way to Europe, and had a chance to ask him to provide a succinct definition of what Microsoft means when it refers to its own ‘open-source strategy’.”
How about making Samba or something else work seemlessly with Active Directory, instead of having to modify the schema to fit some odd configuration of LDAP?
That means working with OSS developers such the Samba team to get stuff working right.
In other words, I’ll believe it when I see it, but I won’t hold my breath.
If MS was doing this for customers’ benefit, they’d have made something like this work a long time ago.
As it stands now, they clearly only care about getting a slice of the pie for money’s sake, not for the customers’ benefit. They’re a business, that’s fine. But please don’t pass it off as you’re being the customer’s friend and doing them a favor.
I think that MS would do that, if it weren’t for the fact that most of the people trying to “work seamlessly with Active Directory” are actually trying to replace it — not interoperate. So, seriously, why would MS work to eliminate the usefulness of its own product?
Substitute “competitor” for every occurrence of “customer” in your statement. Because that’s what we’re talking about here, not the customer. MS isn’t in the business of making its own products useless. The fact that others can’t easily replicate what they do is primarily what gives them value. Anybody who thinks that they’re going to give away that advantage to competitors is high — or delusional.
You mean like this?
http://www.eweek.com/c/a/Linux-and-Open-Source/Likewise-Extends-Act…
http://www.centeris.com/products/likewise_enterprise/
Open source, even:
http://www.linux-watch.com/news/NS2350659361.html
Been there, done that. already got the T shirt.
How about a copy of SQL Server that could be hosted on Linux or FreeBSD? How about licensing the .NET Framework under X11/MIT or BSD license?
Microsoft’s definition of “open source” is far closer to mySQL’s definition than the one you’re proposing; that is, corporate customers can see the code, but that’s about it.
Because the definition of “open source” is larger than just those licenses.
“Microsoft’s definition of “open source” is far closer to mySQL’s definition than the one you’re proposing; that is, corporate customers can see the code, but that’s about it.”
Everyone can see the code to MySQL.
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html#source
Where did you get the idea you couldn’t? Microsoft will only show the code to paying corporate customers, where anyone can get the mySQL code. Big difference don’t you think?
No, wrong. There are two editions of mySQL: the Enterprise Server and the Community Server. Source code for the Community Server (as the name implies) is available to everyone, but source code to the Enterprise Server is available only to paying customers.
See http://www.betanews.com/article/print/MySQL_to_Distribute_Commercia…
That’s like Microsoft handing out source code for its Jet database engine but reserving the source code for SQL Server for paying customers. Same basic premise.
“No, wrong. There are two editions of mySQL: the Enterprise Server and the Community Server. Source code for the Community Server (as the name implies) is available to everyone, but source code to the Enterprise Server is available only to paying customers.”
Interesting. Someone better tell mySQL AB about that then so they can remove it from the download page. The difference between Community and Enterprise is support and redistribution in a commercial product, as well as patches, which will only appear as source form for the community edition, or rolled into the next community release.
http://dev.mysql.com/downloads/mysql/5.0.html
The Community Edition on that link is NOT the same as the Enterprise Edition that’s available to paying customers. Enterprise customers have access to enhancements, bug fixes, and rapid updates that aren’t listed there. Nice try, though.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/09/2047231&from=rss
“The Community Edition on that link is NOT the same as the Enterprise Edition that’s available to paying customers. Enterprise customers have access to enhancements, bug fixes, and rapid updates that aren’t listed there. Nice try, though.”
You should actually read the link. All those are listed there, as I pointed out in my post as well. The patches and such are what’s called “support”, which is what you pay for. You do not pay for access to the source code. Nice try, though
I think that Microsoft has a fairly good open source strategy (if you own Microsoft stock).
When most companies they they have an “open source strategy” they are referring to how they can leverage the products they have and build an open source community around them.
Microsoft open source strategy is try to make their products as appealing as possible to open source communities, so that they can sell more proprietary Microsoft software.
I don’t think it is a bad idea on Microsoft part, and I don’t hold it against them, but no one should be mistaken into thinking that microsoft is in any way contributing to the open source community.
Microsoft is in no way contributing to the UNIX open source community. They are however, doing a heck of alot to build up one around their technologies.
Give me a few examples where Microsoft is open sourcing their technologies to the community.
Edited 2008-02-02 09:11 UTC
There are examples of that (the DLR, the AJAX community toolkit, the huge array of starter kits), but what I was referring to was more their efforts at community building. Stuff like codeplex, or how they are hiring high profile open source guys like Rob Conory, or the way they are working with novell to put out moonlight. They have no interest in helping out the UNIX world (obviously, as they are in direct competition), however it is really a fantastic time to be a microsoft developer.
Edited 2008-02-02 14:09 UTC
DLR is a great example of what I was suggesting above. It is an example of microsoft building a community around a spec that in the end allows them to sell more visual studio, and windows servers running .net.
Codeplex. Come on. Codeplex is just a project hosting site. Once again what technology has microsoft opened up to the community?
The AJAX Control Toolkit is another example of the same thing. It is built on extended ASP technologies, which are not open source.
All of these are just open source hooks to sell or encourage purchasing more Microsoft software. They are nothing but open source crumbs.
What i said was that they are putting work into building up an open source community around their products, not using open source in some altruistic for the good of everyone sense.
It is their job to encourage people to buy into their platforms and solutions. It would make no sense that a company doing as well as they are to completely change their strategy and bet the farm like IBM did. The fact is, ecouraging this open source eco-system is fantastic for those of us in MS land. As I said before, its a great time to be a microsoft developer. Because of that, they are doing their job quite well.
The point of the article was about Microsoft ‘open source’ community. I’m not saying that microsoft doesn’t do a good job of building communities around their proprietary software, but that is very different then building an open source community.
Microsoft is trying to increase the value of their products. They want community support in a form of free scripts, additions and related applications. It will make those products more appealing to the customers. For example one may not need to wait for some feature in next release, there could be a free script that implements it.
The picture is inverted, in a way. Windows and MS SQL should in the center and Java, PHP and Ajax around it. That is what Microsoft really meant, probably.
So Microsoft and their customers will benefit. People on the outside of Microsoft world will not.
1. Threaten the entire Open Source community with patent lawsuits based on nebulous claims of infringement.
2. Make deals with or acquire companies with Open Source products that compete with or threaten existing or new MS software products using number one, above.
3. Profit. Continuously.
Recent examples are the acquisition of Yahoo -which, granted, may or may not happen due to regulatory uncertainties- who own Zimbra and the agreement with Novell, who were developing iFolder. Zimbra competes with MS Exchange and iFolder competes with MS Sharepoint. Novell’s iFolder is particularly telling because the development has been at a standstill since this time last year. If the scenario plays out the same way with Zimbra; then it’s dead, also.
Edited 2008-02-02 03:29 UTC
You seriously think MS is going to pay $40B just to kill Zimbra?
And let’s be real, iFolder was stalled long before the MS deal. If anything stalled iFolder, it was the decision to base it on mono, which in turn is based on an MS technology to begin with.
I’m certainly not an MS advocate, but let’s be serious. MS won’t buy off OSS projects just to kill them off, simply because purchasing them in the first place validates the OSS model, and Ballmer will simply never allow that to happen under his reign. MS could have bought out mySQL long before Sun did, if that was their intent.
So MS wants FOSS to port to Windows, work on Windows, then they hope FOSS will become dependend on Windows so they can even leverage FOSS to force ppl to use Windows. Maybe that works with firefox (it’s windows version gets more attention than the Linux version) but it wont work for eg KDE, I think. Its architecture allows easy integration in Windows, sure. But that doesn’t exclude linux integration, so it won’t have the lock-in effect MS hopes for… If KDE integrates for example Active Directory, it would do so by using the plugable architecture of KConfig – so supporting Novell directory services would be as easy as writing a backend for that as well. There goes the lock-in… This isn’t gonna save MS (at least not in regard to well-designed code like KDE, it might work for firefox) but it might help linux/FOSS adoption even more. So let them play their game.
And with the work going on to improve the GTK/gnome architecture (like the GIO stuff), in time, it might not work there as well. Which is a good thing for sure.
This is an attempt by Microsoft to keep people on Windows more than anything else. I dislike Microsoft as much as anyone else but I don’t blame them for taking the approach they are taking. As a business they are trying to both make inroads in the OSS world and support as much popular software as possible. OSS has proven itself and Microsoft is taking it seriously now but they have an obvious interest in trying to get people to switch to their platform.