Microsoft Investing In "Open Source" Lab In Philippines 95
jaromil writes "Following up its cozying up to OSCON, now Microsoft is launching its first 'open source' lab in the Philippines, paying for a huge media coverage. From the press release it seems they are also advertising the issue of 'interoperability' to outnumber one of the strongest features of open source in Asia: recycling old computers. Any suggestions for good stories about MS interoperability so far? :)"
GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Interoperability (Score:4, Insightful)
"Any suggestions for good stories about MS interoperability so far?"
Windows has interoperated with my trash can just fine. Does that count?
Re:GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Smoke and Mirrors... Otherwise Known as Buzzwor (Score:3, Insightful)
This is all about making sure all Open source apps work on windows so that the likelihood of there being a killer app that won't work on windows is reduced.
The downside for Microsoft is that now OSS apps can compete directly with windows apps and eventually if they take over then managers may very well wonder why they are paying for windows if everything they use runs on Linux anyways. But that is a much slower rate of loss than you would get from a much needed app that runs only on Linux.
Make no mistake. (Score:5, Insightful)
Make no mistake, MS is not, and will not, become a good open source citizen. The only reason they will do something like this is to defend themselves from open source.
Do you wonder why they are doing this in the Philippines? It seems likely that Open Source/Free software is taking a hold there and Microsoft is looking to build a market. Who is going to buy MS software if it's incompatible with what they are currently using (or are in the process of moving to)? This puts Microsoft out of the game. But if they can get free software developers to do the work for them and make their projects compatible with MS software, they are suddenly an option, at which point, MS can do what they do best, which is compete and destroy.
Embrace, extend, extinguish. This is no different.
Embrace: Hey, we'll join your open source club.
Extend: Now that we're compatible, why don't you run some of our software too?
Extinguish: That software of ours that you are now reliant upon? Well, here's the new version, and it doesn't work with your open source software anymore, so pay up, junkie.
Re:GPL (Score:5, Insightful)
Why? Don't you think it would be good for BSD and Apache and many other free software projects to benefit, rather than just those free software projects that are under GPL?
I can think of many instances of FOSS/MS interop. (Score:3, Insightful)
How can it be open-source and WIndows-only? (Score:1, Insightful)
I would agree, but this brings up an interesting question: how can something be open source and still be Windows only? Answer: somehow it depends on a certain Windows behaviour.
I had thought about the opposite: if I wanted to promote Linux by making an open-source killer app, what subtly devious thing could I do that would keep someone from porting it to Windows? I could rely on features in Linux, such as symbolic links, which don't really exist on MS filesystems. For example, I might find some excuse to set up a large number of config files, most of which are symlinks to a small number of "real" files. I could update a large number of such files by updating the contents of one or two "real" files, so that the symlinks would be updated accordingly.
To reproduce this on a MS filesystem without links, the equivalent Windows program would have to set up multiple copies of the config files, which would not only take up more space, but also not automatically update.
Not quite devious enough to enter the Underhanded C Contest, but maybe enough to try a bit of Microsoft's own game of "ours works better than yours".
Re:GPL (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd probably wager that a large chunk of GPL'd projects actually violate the terms of their own license since most people dont know any better.
I wouldn't be surprised. I'm in a similar situation - (co)running a BSDL project and trying to keep GPL'd code out. We also have issues with incompatibilities between LGPLv3 and GPLv2.
Most of the people who release their code under the GPL display a woeful lack of understanding of what the license actually says. Even on Slashdot usually the people most vocally advocating the GPL don't actually understand what it says.
That's putting a bright face on it (Score:3, Insightful)
My first instinct reading the summary was, well, now that they've embraced/extended the word "open" so that -- astonishingly -- their tarball of an XML format qualifies in common parlace, I suppose they'll start in on making "open source" mean something other than what it actually means.
For Act III, I don't imagine they'd have much difficulty in redefining "free software" so that it means "MS software with a price tag of $0"
Re:Interoperability is not Open Source vs. MS (Score:3, Insightful)
There are OOXML implementations whose deviations from the spec (ECMA or ISO) are as small as the deviations of OpenOffice from the ODF spec.
So, it's your choice: either there are no working OOXML implementations but also no working ODF implementations, or there are working OOXML and ODF implementations.
Re:Why the Philippians? (Score:2, Insightful)