A tour of the Microsoft open source lab

Come on. Such comments are uncalled for.

Brand loyalty is the phrase you're looking for.

Microsoft needed blogging, because everyone was blogging. People who ran companies that make
beans were blogging. Grandparents were blogging. So Microsoft needed to be blogging too. Some
individual Microsoft employees had been blogging, as ordinary users of (often Linux or *BSD
based) blog sites. But at a corporate level Microsoft couldn't just use an existing blogging
site, and they definitely couldn't install some sort of LAMP solution. It needed to use as
many Microsoft technologies as possible - So they went with Community Server.

But Community server isn't very good. It's riddled with bugs, and it seems that adding
features you might want is either very difficult, or at least hard to do without effectively
forking the project. Microsoft's own Community Server installs have had weird problems,
outages, big feature gaps compared to competing blogs people are familiar with and so on.

So it all looks rather poor, particularly for the Microsoft bloggers working on .NET (the
platform used) and to a lesser extent SQL Server (the RDBMS used). It's also causes
embarassment for the IE group (it doesn't obey anything resembling web standards, so they get
beaten up about that, and it sometimes used to trigger rendering bugs in IE, so they'd get
beaten up even more about that).

Hey "mgb",

We noticed this already, this should be fixed now.  Keep your pants on next time man! ...no,
really, keep them on.

Steve

One example we know of, which presumably used this lab (although it's possible they originally
acted on reports from a customer running pre-release software) is a bug in Samba. A
typographical mistake meant that Samba incorrectly handled a type of message which wasn't yet
being used by shipping Microsoft CIFS clients (it was to be introduced in Vista). When tested
with clients which did use the feature IIRC it caused directory listings to be truncated.

Microsoft eventually made the decision not to use the feature supported by this new message
type, in part because it was unreliable with Samba†, and there are large enterprise customers
running Samba. So that's an interop success story, although not one that reflects very well on
Free Software in this case.

† Obviously the Samba team fixed this, but that only helps people with new installs, or who
know to update their system (which may be a black-box storage device they bought from some
Taiwanese outfit). So Microsoft decided it wasn't practical to go ahead. You should be able to
find the long debates about this on Raymond Chen's "The Old New Thing" blog if you're
interested.

It's true that the blog entry is a bit light on information. But then, that's true for about
99% of all other blog entries out there.

As I see it, this is a completely ordinary blog entry about some folks on the Microsoft Campus
who have some really sweet hardware to play with open source code. Their team seems to total
all of four employees. Can you think, what kind of influence a team of four may have within a
company like Microsoft? That seems to reflect the importance level that is attributed to
interoperability there.

Be that as it may, you sure can't blame these four guys for company policy. For all we know
they might be perfectly respectable hackers just doing their job in a world filled with suits,
just like the rest of us.

Can you imagine, what it must feel like to work on OSS at Microsoft? No wonder these guys may
feel a bit isolated. So they just wanted to announce their existence to the world in a blog
post. I don't see why they have to be held to higher standards than the rest of the
blogosphere just because they happen to be on Microsoft's payroll.

> I am curious what exactly Microsoft researchs? Performance? Features? How
> to make winapps compatible?

Yes :)  Add interoperability and education too.

Steve

Of course it's propaganda. All companies have some form of propaganda to promote it's products
or try to drum up attention.

Fundamentally it's not much different then any open source program with a FAQ page that
answers the question "why use our software?". The major difference is that it's trying to be
'un-corporate". Hence my astroturf comment above.

Same thing with their other similar website called 'Channel9'. That website is a bit worse,
though. Also has more useful and interesting information, too. 

If the port25 people want respect they are going to have to do more then just a blog though...

For example a how-to on making Samba be a PDC for Vista, with work-arounds, configuration
gotcha's and maybe some patches. _Then_ they might be taken seriously. Actually providing
useful details on integrating Windows servers and desktops with Linux servers and desktops
would be a huge step forward. 

Another example would be maybe something like using MySQL or Postgresql as a backend for
Access 2007 in order to make forms built in MS Office be multi-user.

This sort of information is stuff that people actually need, a Windows knowledge base for
Linux users, since the majority of Linux admins are going to be dealing with Windows whether
they like it or not.

Of course if most people here are right there is now way in hell Microsoft would allow them to
publish information, and even details on Microsoft's products, that will make it possibly
easier to replace MS products with FOSS.

Microsoft loves the open source community. They absolutely adore the work of the various
flavors of BSD and happily use their work at every opportunity. 

In a perfect world we wouldn't need a GPL, the BSD license would be all that's needed. The
reality is that companies like MS are happy to take the work of others and provide nothing
back, really that's why the GPL exists. Microsoft would never admit publicly that they
couldn't get a working TCP/IP stack until they took the BSD code and you don't see any
gratitude or giving back. But don't doubt for a minute that MS loves open source, just not the
GPL kind.

>Doesn't it seems a bit immature to condemn all of them just because they work for Microsoft ?

I have to agree here.

"Some of these companies primarily developed non-free software, but the two activities were
separate; thus, we could ignore their non-free products, and work with them on free software
projects. Then we could honestly thank them afterward for their free software contributions,
without talking about the rest of what they did." is a quote of rms I agree with.
So if the people at the ms linux-lab are actually making contributions to Free Software, it is
unfair they should be shunned or ridiculed. Or alternatively, all contributions from people
receiving their paycheck from proprietary software vendors (such as HP or IBM) should be
shunned, which obviously would be very detrimental to Free Software.

I understand how great it feels to unite under a single banner against *the enemy*, but in
truth microsoft is just *a* proprietary software vendor out of many.

>Yeah, sure everybody should quit their Microsoft jobs - the hell with feeding their family,
the mortgage, etc.
Depending on what their job is that might be a good idea. 
"Feeding their family" is almost always an appeal to emotion. In reality it is often closer to
"have a second car" or "own a detached house" or similar luxuries. 

I wouldn't be worried about alienating them.

If they didn't think that they were not going to get flack for working for Microsoft then they
are morons. Any reasonably intelligent person should realize this and, accordingly, not give a
crap one way or another. Let it roll off like water on a duck's back.

 

What did you find objectionable or incorrect in that post?

Don't really worry about that. There are two kinds of OSS people. The first are those who are
most of the time busy doing real work and you won't find them in those kind of flames.

The second is just people with _lots_ of free time who like to play the "us and them" game.
a.k.a, slashdot, digg, (some little portion of LWN comments when the article is _non_
technical, LWN can't be blamed for this portion though).

I'm sure Corbet had a good point in his mind to post this article.

You are a Senior Director of Open Source and Linux Strategy at Microsoft, and you are posting
a comment as a "guest" on LWN.net.

A bit stingy to get an LWN.net Corporate account?

"""
I realize you have many frustrations with the company's history,
"""

Oh?  All in the past now, is it?  

And Stephen's work led to the discussions with Samba? Are you sure that pending
multi-hundred-billion euro fines from the EU didn't influence the decision just a bit?  At
least we know now that $1.4 billion is the threshold where MS actually notices.  I don't
believe that the treachery is intended, by your company, to be "all in the past".  But I am
hopeful that with the help of ongoing investigations and watchdog efforts by the EU, that the
treachery *will* end here and now, for good.  Finally, someone had the guts and the clout to
take on MS and make some headway.  Save your PR for the EC, because I strongly suspect you're
going to need all you can get.  And it's pretty ineffective on people who have been watching
you so closely all these years and know better.

As an advocate and implementor of Unix in small business, you guys have been stepping on my
toes, unfairly, for coming up on 20 years.  And I'm keeping plenty of popcorn handy for the
duration of this part of the show.

i dont know, but things like exchange 2007 OWA being a sh*it in firefox, 
not having support for public folders, not having rich text support, when 
supporting the public folder is just a matter of putting there the damn 
link, rich text support is just a matter of dropping TinyMCE (its LGPL, so 
not any problem using it) or using correct html and javascript instead of 
activex... OR adding support for odt in office (and sharepoint) and drop 
ooxml (or at least use BOTH)... or let activeX die and promote the use of 
correct html and javascript... or adding working support in outlook and 
exchange for other protocols other than MAPI (like webdav, caldav)... or 
add native support for other filesystems (HFS+, ext3) and protocols (ssh, 
nfs)... or  (etc, etc, etc)

only when MS stops putting stupid limitations in it own software and start 
to use standard protocols (without extending it), we people will give you 
some slack

dont get me wrong, your work is important, but for each thing you manage 
to improve, other parts of MS manage to break or limit 3 or 4 other 
things. Apple have done a system that mostly plays well with others, MS 
keep trying to play alone and only listen to other kids with big guys 
(gov's, big companies) force then to.

Competition is good, if your software is good, there is no need to make 
business by enforcing a monopoly and using grey methods!!

so again, you guys are doing a good thing, please dont stop, saddly there 
is still ALOT to be done