A tour of the Microsoft open source lab [LWN.net]

A tour of the Microsoft open source lab

Posted Mar 21, 2008 14:33 UTC (Fri) by rwoodrum (subscriber, #38318)
Parent article: A tour of the Microsoft open source lab

Microsoft has no volition to work with the Open Source community.  Currently working with
several ex-Microsoft employees has only etched this into my head more deeply.  It's rather
disappointing as we have built a start-up on open-source applications and yet there are
precious few (probably 2/20) of us that give back to the community and see this opportunity as
something other than "free" software.  And yet again, many exhibit this moral turpitude that
the products are "superior" and inherently more "serious."  This is not the way technology is
evolving and I don't think Microsoft will be able to sustain its bloat in perpetuity... I will
be glad when it finally comes to terms with reality.

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A tour of the Microsoft open source lab

Posted Mar 21, 2008 17:45 UTC (Fri) by rahvin (subscriber, #16953) [Link]

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.

A tour of the Microsoft open source lab

Posted Mar 21, 2008 23:12 UTC (Fri) by vonbrand (subscriber, #4458) [Link]

This proportion of people actually contributing vs just enjoying the fact that you don't have to pay is roughly the same I see around me here. Ditto for people expounding on "software freedom" and its advantages, without doing more than talk.