It appears that Microsoft is reaching out to the Open Source Community. While my immediate response was something along the lines of “What are they up to now?”, after reading the entire article and thinking about it for a bit - I think they may be genuinely interested. Why? First, the culture over there has slowly been changing. With a company the size of MSFT this may take a long time, but it's a change that is coming from the inside out. That is, developers within the company are leading the drive. I've talked to numerous Microsoft employees at recent conferences that really some to “get it” and that's encouraging. Second, I think at a higher up level they are starting to realize that, from a business perspective, it's in their best interest to cooperate at this point. They aren't going to be able to squash this Open Source thing as easily as they probably thought they could. There is finally a case where cooperating may help them ship more units and it appears they may be willing to do so. I'd guess it's the middle tier in the company that will be the last to understand all this, but isn't that what you'd expect? So, in the end I would welcome open dialog. In fact, if anyone from Microsoft reads this, I'd even be willing to participate in open dialog. One final note, if you really want to “extend an olive branch”, how about proving that you are serious this time? Opening up document formats would be an outstanding start.
–jeremy
Archive for April, 2005
Firefox has now hit 50,000,000 downloads. Amazing. If you aren't using Firefox yet, you should really try it out - regardless of what OS you are using. Keep up the good work FF team.
–jeremy
I mentioned this a while back, but that post focused more on acquisitions. The trend is continuing and VC is now coming back to the Open Source space. JBOSS recently got $10 Million and the articles reports that almost $150 Million was raised by Open Source companies in 2004. Luckily, the funding seems to be a little more rational then it was during the bubble. Hopefully it will stay that way.
–jeremy
Apple continues to do its best to make people not like them, which is a shame since they make some really cool products. You may remember they recently sued sites giving them free press. They have now completely pulled all books published by Wiley from their stores, as a result of them publishing a biography on Steve Jobs that they didn't like. Amazing. Imagine if a company like Microsoft did something similar to this…you'd be enraged, right? You should be just as enraged that Apple is doing it (unless the book it factually incorrect and libelous, which it doesn't appear to be). I hope Apple stops acting like this before it is too late - eventually people are going to start caring.
–jeremy
A little overdue, but LQ Radio is finally getting off the ground. The first LQ Radio show should be available next month and the first LQ Radio interview has been posted. The interview features Tom Adelstein and Sam Hiser. We cover a variety of topics and I think the end result is fantastic content wise. Skype gave us a huge amount of problems and we ended up ditching the p2p bit and I called both Sam and Tom via Skypeout. Let me know what you think.
–jeremy
It's unfortunate to see both the Open Source community and a small town taken advantage of like this. Kudos to Robin 'roblimo', both for taking the time to do the reporting for that article and for having the patience and fortitude to be able to have a discussion that long with some one who is clearly lying and pandering. It's a reminder that just because someone uses the words “Open Source“, it doesn't make them right or necessarily good intentioned. This guy is most certainly not OSI approved.
–jeremy
For any of you who may be in the area, I'll be presenting at the next Buffalo Professional Linux Users Group meeting. The main topic I'll be covering is MySQL. If you'll be in or around Buffalo next Thursday, make sure to stop by the meeting.
–jeremy
The second Keynote of the day was from HP Canada CEO Paul Tsaparis. A large part of the keynote was a “Power of Linux” video, which was basically a testimonial from Dreamworks. The video has some interesting bits, but was a little too pro vendor IMHO. The video explained that over 50% of Shrek 2 was rendered remotely “On Demand” (it was all rendered on Linux). This “On Demand” system allowed them to hit rendering peaks and make the deadline for the movie while only actually having to purchase enough infrastructure to do the average amount of computing. This is the direction that a lot of computationally intensive apps seem to be going, and I know that IBM has a similar service. While this is obviously only something that a couple niche industries would use, it is very slick. The best quote from the movie was from a Dreamworks employee (the CTO if I recall correctly), which said point blank “We are interested in Linux”. He then went on to say that Dreamworks went with HP because they understood Linux. Hopefully other companies will listen to statements like this one. While it wasn't disclosed in the video, I'd say the dollar amount for the products and services purchased for Shrek 2 were substantial.
The presentation also explained that HP deploys Linux internally. They don't do so to “eat their own dog food” as some companies claim, but they do if for the same reasons they recommend it to their clients. They have over 13,000 internal devices with Linux installed, their Linux email cluster (15 machines) processes over 3TB of email a year, their entire DNS infrastructure (160 servers) runs Linux, they use Jabber for internal secure IM and much of their wifi network is Linux based.
–jeremy
While I was a tad late to this session by maddog, entitled “Free and Open Source Software: Back to the Future”, the part I did catch was very good. His first point was that, until the early 80's the only way you ever got software was with the source (even though it wasn't necessarily called “Open Source” at that time). Back then software was often owned by the purchasing entity on contract, instead of licenses like it is today. He went on to cover why software patents are evil and how they really stifle innovation. He made the point that in most cases, patents come after software has already been written and are the work of lawyers - not programmers. He explained that since large companies are able to build large stockpiles of patents, they are able to negotiate with each other and avoid problems…while the little nimble companies with no or few patents end up being the losers in the current system. He went as far as to say that given the choice between the Devil, George W. Bush and Patents that he'd pick the Devil. He also wondered why software (an art form in his opinion) has patents but neither music or painting does. He asked, “what if Beethoven had to redo the 9th symphony due to patent infringement” or “what if Michelangelo had to repaint the Sistine Chapel because someone claimed they had patented a brush stroke he had used”.
Finally, he covered some proprietary myths and some advantages of OSS. One example he used was that, Microsoft once touted to him that one of their products supported almost 50 languages. After congratulating them, he explained that, with OSS since anyone who finds a native language missing from a product can contribute to the project, it lead to the first ever word processor supporting Swahili…or all 18 official languages of India plus many of the local tribal dialects, plus - well, you get the idea. Overall a very good session - thanks maddog!
–jeremy
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