Sponsored link
Serve your customers, not your servers, with VERIO Linux VPS. Full-access test-drive here.
| Weekly edition | Kernel | Security | Distributions | Search |
| Archives | Calendar | Subscribe | Write for LWN | LWN.net FAQ |
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 24, 2008 19:26 UTC (Mon) by elanthis (subscriber, #6227)Parent article: Bruce Perens and the OSI board
"Microsoft and its employees do not currently contribute to open source in any substantial way, so there is little that would lead the board to nominate them." That is bullcrap. _Microsoft_ might not contribute in any meaningful way (even that is highly debatable these days), but many of its employees do contribute to OSS in their free time. I've worked with several myself on smaller Open Source projects, including one of my own projects. Statements like that one above are exactly the point the OSI board is trying to make - it elects people, not companies, and the people who work at Microsoft happen to be real people with hobbies, agendas, and merits not dictated by their employer.
(Log in to post comments)
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 24, 2008 19:30 UTC (Mon) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]
> people who work at Microsoft happen to be real people with hobbies, agendas, and merits not dictated by their employer. Much as we'd all love to believe that, I trust you'll pardon me for being a bit skeptical, based on microsoft's track record.
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 24, 2008 19:57 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]
Much as we'd all love to believe that, I trust you'll pardon me for being a bit skeptical, based on microsoft's track record.This really is a problem in the standards organizations. Like OSI, many of them elect people without regard to the fact that they really may be out to represent a company agenda. But I've seen a Microsoft representative at IETF - an avowed "individual acting only for herself", with four of the assistants that came with her visible in the audience feeding questions to the discussion, and what was coming out was clearly the Microsoft line.
It's easy for people to game the process. And it's easy for others to close their eyes to it.
Bruce
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 24, 2008 20:05 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
Unless a person is willing to go ask a bunch of people who work at Microsoft about that.. that person is only left with prebuilt decisions which are basically prejudice. There are over 100k Microsoft employees. In that number there are going to be people who want Open source and people who do not. There will also be some number who are sadist, masochists, and child molesters.. but that does not mean they all are. However, the human brain is built to deal with large groups via prejudice (positive or negative.) It will try and label all of a group as those they feel represents that group. Thus every Microsoft employee is Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates because they must be or they wouldn't be Microsofties. And to people outside of Linux, every Linux person is some member who they have seen on Zdnet or somewhere: Eric Raymond, Bill Perens, or these days Hans Reiser. And if they aren't like that, they wouldn't/shouldn't use Linux.
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 24, 2008 22:38 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]
I have met lots of Microsoft people, and they are mostly perfectly nice folks. They do sometimes have to take orders. The ones that are corporate climbers can be more aggressive and enthusiastic about implementing those orders - even if there's some nasty stuff involved.
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 24, 2008 23:20 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
Yes.. all people are told to follow orders at some point in time. Sometimes those orders come from the people writing the checks, sometimes they are from the voices in ones head. Each person gets to decide what ones they will follow, and some people are complete slime balls. Every community gets them.. you have been vilified and threatened by some in the FLOSS community. My main problem is that I find too mamy people using the Microsoft bogeyman the same way as other 'bogeyman'. It gets an emotional reaction and turns off people's reasoning circuits and turns on their partisan circuits. You don't get a reasoned debate about the merits of someone after that has happened.
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 24, 2008 23:33 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]
you have been vilified and threatened by some in the FLOSS community.Yes, but that was a long time ago, and nothing like it has happened lately. The guy who did it was eventually made to pay in a gruesome manner that I would not have wanted inflicted upon him: He was made fun of. For years.
Read this, please. I think it makes the point that MS thinks they really are at war. We really have to watch out for their trying to game the system, and warn folks when it happens.
Bruce
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 25, 2008 20:00 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]
I am not saying that the executives inside of Microsoft are not out to try and keep their monopoly at all costs. I am saying is that the implication that everyone from Microsoft is verboten is wrong. I say this from the fact that I still get the "Oh you worked at Red Hat, aren't they the Microsoft of Linux trying to taking away the GPL from people?" 8 years after I left. No amount of explaining ever changes it for them.. and every time someone starts complaining about companies in Linux they come out and say that Red Hat is the worst of them, blah, blah, blah. The same for people who are anti-Novell, anti-FSF,etc. Its just that Microsoft gets the most angry villagers. You are sure to get a whole bunch of pitchforks, torches, and angry emails by raising the spectre that Microsoft is going to control XYZ. Heck I remember when the rumour that Red Hat was going to be bought by Microsoft how much hate email hit the servers... first from the Red Hat haters, and the others who hate Microsoft and thus sure that we were all in it.
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 24, 2008 19:58 UTC (Mon) by jake (editor, #205) [Link]
My point, which perhaps I didn't make clear, was that Microsoft's employees don't (currently) make the kind of contribution to Open Source that might get them considered for the OSI board. That whatever contributions they make were not "substantial" enough to get that kind of consideration. It wasn't meant to be a bash at MS or MS employees really. jake
bashing MS or MS employees, generally
Posted Mar 24, 2008 21:16 UTC (Mon) by ncm (subscriber, #165) [Link]
... not that there would be anything wrong with that.
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 24, 2008 22:43 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]
Jake,OSI has certified two Microsoft licenses. Microsoft claims that they are officially active in Open Source. So, I'm not sure you were on base at all. You also completely neglected my comment during our interview that Matt, who sets the program for OSBC, gave Microsoft the keynote speech. I had some IMO concrete reasons to be worried. Look at the farce MS is running in ISO, which is all about ballot-box manipulation of organizations.
Bruce
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 25, 2008 0:14 UTC (Tue) by sergey (subscriber, #31763) [Link]
First of all, IANAL, but I try to follow legal matters to the best of my ability. If these individuals were employed by a company that operates in the same industry (software, in this case), which Microsoft does, surely they must be required to get permission from their employer to contribute to FOSS. So, did you ask for, and receive, proof of such permission?
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 25, 2008 16:00 UTC (Tue) by mpgoodwin (subscriber, #33555) [Link]
I know that MS employees are requested not to dapple in Free Software, because management does not want to run the risk of "They have taken this GPL stuff and added it to that MS product - now it has to be open source". Of course they cannot prevent employees from participating, but I am sure that public participation would be frowned upon. Martin
Microsoft employee contributions to free software
Posted Mar 28, 2008 23:15 UTC (Fri) by giraffedata (subscriber, #1954) [Link]
That sounds like the opposite of the "permission to dabble in Free Software" that we usually talk about. You're saying MS employees are asked not to use or look at free software, to ensure they don't steal (i.e. cause MS to steal) someone else's copyright material.
I can believe that, but this thread is about contributing to free software. Some companies don't allow that -- to the extent that employment contracts and law permit -- because they don't want to risk losing valuable intellectual property. E.g. MS wouldn't want some software that could earn MS money (developed at MS expense) going into Linux for free.
And furthermore, recipients of free software contributions often require a release from the contributor's employer so they don't have to worry about the employer coming by later, showing that the employer owns the copyright, and demanding royalties for it.
So the suggestion is that we'd be able to tell if MS employees are contributing because there would be all these formal releases around.
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 26, 2008 5:57 UTC (Wed) by jhs (subscriber, #12429) [Link]
Microsoft releases IronPython, IronRuby, and their common platform the Dynamic Language Runtime under the Microsoft Public License. That license was approved by the OSI and is considered a GPL3-compatible free software license by the FSF.
Bruce Perens and the OSI board
Posted Mar 30, 2008 3:21 UTC (Sun) by njs (subscriber, #40338) [Link]
> Statements like that one above are exactly the point the OSI board is trying to make - it elects people, not companies, and the people who work at Microsoft happen to be real people with hobbies, agendas, and merits not dictated by their employer. I'm sure there are lots of wonderful people working for Microsoft. I'm also sure, based on extensive evidence, that there are number of people working at Microsoft whose ethics and goals are diametrically opposed to my own. I'm not sure I can tell the two apart, especially in situations where the latter are motivated to impersonate the former. (It's not like the MS salespeople show up to companies, the ISO, etc. and say "hi, we're here to illegally abuse our monopoly, can you help?") Besides which, probably most of the people at Microsoft, like most people everywhere, fall somewhere in between those two extremes: they're more or less reliable on different issues in different situations. And it's rather common that someone with the best of intentions finds themselves in a situation where acting on those intentions ends up playing into some larger, negative outcome. Microsoft as a company again has a long history of taking advantage of such situations. So it's quite possible to believe that there exist great people working at Microsoft, and simultaneously be deeply suspicious of the idea of MS employees serving in any kind of F/OSS leadership position.