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? :)"
Why the Philippians? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:GPL (Score:1, Interesting)
What country owns the IP? (Score:4, Interesting)
Why does an American company need to outsource thinking? Will Americans be expected to pay for this?
Smoke and Mirrors... Otherwise Known as Buzzwords. (Score:5, Interesting)
This is why I have such a dislike of "big business".
Forget for a moment the wasteful philosophy getting people to upgrade for new shiny (and I am by no means saying the 'upgraders' are guilt free).
Dismiss the fact that Microsoft has no desire to "embrace" open source -- quite the opposite, it wants to control the market with it, or rather redefine the market on its terms -- sure, you can use all of our codebase that we provide as open source, but you only get to plug-in our components, using our tools, with our licensing restrictions.
What irks me most is this marketing bullshit that gets thrown into the air. Right now, reading through the PHB technical mags and rags, one can't go an issue without seeing something on "open sourcing" saving money here, or "interoperability" brings new efficacy to the table, or "free software" causing a major paradigm shift breeding synergy in the multi-faceted workplace.
And that is what this is. It has nothing to do with functionality, and certainly if one goes by Microsoft's track record with open source, it has more to do with embrace and extend.
Now, at this point it would be easy to say: "don't condemn them yet, IBM was once seen as Satan too!" (Not withstanding IBMs frivolity in the patent market).
All I can say to that is maybe, and I damn hope them have learned their lesson. The open source community, however, has been burned far too many times with MS' carrot and the stick act.
MS promises to feign interoperability better (Score:5, Interesting)
MORDOR, Washington, Friday - Microsoft today announced carefully-phrased promises to appear more open about its business practices and technologies, so as to expand its reach through developers, partners, customers and competitors' wallets.
The interoperability principles and promises are an apparent, lengthy, reluctant, and necessary step for Microsoft's sudden efforts to fulfill the obligations outlined in the September 2007 judgment of the European Court of First Instance (CFI). And to have half a chance of getting OOXML through ISO.
"These pronouncements appear to be an important change in how we share information about our products and technologies and a significant expansion in apparent transparency," said Microsoft CEO Heave Stallmore. "While we've promised considerable progress over the past several years, today's announcement takes our virtual commitment to a new level.
"For the past thirty years, we have carefully shared misinformation with thousands of now-bankrupt partners around the world. By promoting greater interoperability, opportunity and choice, we hope to share even more of their information to our benefit. Pay no attention to that man behind the curtain."
Microsoft has already embraced and extended the open source paradigm to its users' personal files, which can be accessed freely by hundreds of thousands of Web sites providing self-installing keyloggers, adware, rootkits and botnets. Work is under way on a graphic markup language for more powerful commands, such as embedding an individual letter "t" with a directive to send the last ten recorded fingerprints from the user's touchpad to a Nigerian Web server.
To enable third-party developers to connect to Microsoft products, Microsoft will publish !!!for free!!! voluminous documentation, setting a new low in information per page, to contaminate developers with claimed knowledge for which their employers can later be sued, should they not cough up what Microsoft considers reasonable and non-discriminatory (or not unreasonably so) royalties. Open source developers !!!may use these protocols too!!! precisely so long as they do not do anything that involves people not giving Microsoft money.
"Microsoft's new promises will benefit the broader IT community," said Vomit Togel, head of Microsoft partner Perception Management, "where 'IT community' is defined as 'Microsoft partners.' This provides remarkable opportunity for IT consultants and increased choice of us in the marketplace."
Microsoft will expand industry outreach and dialog through a new Interoperability Forum and Fee Collection Channel. In addition, an initiative will address data exchange between widely deployed bank accounts.
"Sincerity is the key," says Microsoft founder Jill Bates III. "If we can fake that, we've got it made."
Founded in 1975, Microsoft (Nasdaq MNPLY) is the worldwide dominator in software, services and solutions that make people and businesses help it realise its full potential.
Re:Smoke and Mirrors... Otherwise Known as Buzzwor (Score:1, Interesting)
No matter what Microsoft's intentions may be with regards to the open-source community, the entire Mono codebase is licensed with GPL. That is supposedly Microsoft's future wrt all the MCSEs training with Visual Studio and C#. I'm not convinced .NET is an "upgrade" from VB in terms of performance - it is more an upgrade to security wrt the dangerous and stupid things programmers have been allowed to do in VB.
Whether people upgrade to the .NET world or just start sandboxing their Windows environment is up to individual users. Microsoft's concern is keeping the need for a Window's environment because that's how they make money. The fact that they are trying to foster open source now shows that the ball game has changed because the choices are so similar now.
Interoperability Shminteroperability (Score:2, Interesting)
How is that Evolution exchange-connector working since the deal with Novell and the promise of interoperability? That's right, it isn't
Re:Make no mistake. (Score:3, Interesting)
They are doing it because the entire Philippines (population circa 91m people), has been using a single corporate licence key for XP since the day it was released (well in fact before actually, as we tend to see a lot of beta releases here even before the real product launch day).
Coupled with the fact that before the "I Love You" worm (proudly made in the Philippines), we didn't even have any hacking laws, never mind IP laws. You can still go to any shopping mall and pick up a DVD of Vista for 120 pesos (about 3 USD). And hell, if the O/S is crap, at least the DVD's make interesting decorations dangling from a jeepneys front windscreen :-)
It's not like Microsoft could sell any LESS copies than zero, so they decided it's a good place to promote free software.
M$ trying to distract people away from true FOSS (Score:2, Interesting)
smell a rat... (Score:3, Interesting)
definitely smell a rat in here... these friendliness towards OSS lately (which used to be the devil, according to ms) is puzzling. ...though it'll be interesting to see what comes out of this, right now it doesn't sound too exciting.
Re:Why the Philippians? (Score:3, Interesting)
I'm just speculating but it could be that there are now enough computers in the Philippines that MS want to make sure they don't get the Linux bug.
Vista practically forced me to use Linux in order to get any work done.