Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Open Source 154
tlockney writes "Next week at Microsoft's MIX, whurley will be leading a discussion on 'Open Source, the Web, Interoperability, and Microsoft'. To kick off a bit of pre-session discussion and enlist the help of others in putting Microsoft on the spot, whurley, king of all things open source at BMC has written an article entitled 'Seven Reasons Microsoft Loves Open Source'."
Well... (Score:1, Informative)
Kill their lock-in on the office document software market, and customers can buy whatever they please... which probably won't be Word, especially for the more price conscious.
Anyhow, what's the worry? Ultimately, they fear losing business, and by extension, they fear anything that could free people from their lock-in strategies. I mean, if new games and new applications didn't need Vista, why would their customers need it, either?
Re:Reason zero (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Reason zero (Score:3, Informative)
Re:No competition = stagnation (Score:3, Informative)
http://www.catb.org/~esr/halloween/ [catb.org]
Re:I can see microsoft doing what apple did (Score:4, Informative)
That sounds plausible except for a few minor details. The first of which is the GPL. One of the major cornerstones of the GPL is that there are protections to prevent people from exploiting GPL code in the way MS would certainly exploit it. Microsoft has built an empire of locking every other competitor out (sometimes through illegal means). The famous extend part of the embrace, extend, extinguish ploy would not be allowed by the GPL.
Also, Apple was able to develop OS X not using Linux. Apple acquired NeXT which had developed some advanced technologies used in OS X. Also they based their kernel on BSD which does not have the same restrictions as Linux.
Re:I can see microsoft doing what apple did (Score:5, Informative)
Apple not only maintained is own Unix distro of A/UX, sold AIX servers, and created its own Linux distro prior to OS/X, but also ported the Mac environment to other Unix variants, using MAE and laster MAS.
- Steve Jobs and 20 Years of Apple Servers [roughlydrafted.com]
And everybody knows that NT's "POSIX compliance" was a bullshit dance designed to make NT legal to sell to the government. NT never offered anything more than pretend support for POSIX, and it was of no more importance to Microsoft as a subsystem within NT than was OS/2.
Further, since POSIX compatilbility is techniclly a paid seal of approval on a specific implementation of Unix APIs, of course Linux as general idea can't ever techically pay to attach the POSIX trademark to itself in the way Microsoft pretended to.
The reality is that the only value of POSIX is as a general synonym for "Unix-like compatibility." In the real world, Linux currently helps define what that is; NT does not offer this at all.
Are you really trying to argue that NT provides some useful sort of compatibility for Unix apps? Citing the Wikipedia as a source does not do much to create credibility for your conjecture.
Re:I can see microsoft doing what apple did (Score:3, Informative)
NT POSIX memories. (Score:5, Informative)
In the NT3 timeframe (approx 12 years ago now), there was a big effort to sell NT to companies, such as the one I worked for then, supplying back office /server room style products. Many/most products of the time were running on Unix boxes or similar. We were using Unix x86 boxes (SCO etc) for compter tephony applications. NT had to check a few boxes to encourage people to switch: POSIX and streams driver support. This gave people a reasonable porting avenue to a cheaper OS (NT was about half or a third of SCO's cost at the time).
The POSIX and streams drivers were very inefficient, and were dropped within a short while (once the bait and switch had worked).
This ploy was very clever on MS's part. Using ourselves as a benchmark for people in this space, our customers were putting on some pressure to provide NT based products because they were eating the MS blurb and wanted to reduce costs. Our techies looked at NT and figured out what would be needed to port: POSIX-check, streams driver model - check. So we say that on paper it can be done with trivial architectural change. Marketing start hyping the NT-based offering. The business people say make it so, so we do. Unfortunately we find the POSIX and streams driver model are very slow on NT, so end up having to start doing native drivers and non-POSIX code. We start slipping, marketing starts screaming and the portability gets dumped in favour of getting shipping. The bait and switch has worked.
We never got any benefit from NT POSIX or the MS streams driver. Our systems went from requiring low-end (16-25MHz) 386s to 100+MHz 486. Basically a very bad case of bait and switch.
"Love"? GMAB. A Naive List... (Score:2, Informative)
But enough from me. Be sure to read the comments below the article on the source page. They are very insightful and diverse.
Re:I can see microsoft doing what apple did (Score:3, Informative)
Indeed, and they work with Mainsoft for the Unix ports of some of their applications. (Not to mention Microsoft Xenix back in the day!)
Re:I can see microsoft doing what apple did (Score:3, Informative)