Microsoft, Open Source Leaders Coming Together (eWeek)

Posted Jul 8, 2003 23:18 UTC (Tue) by lpbbear (guest, #4827) [Link]

"Jason Matusow, manager of Microsoft's Shared Source Initiative, told eWEEK on Monday that the Redmond, Wash., software company's specific
goal at the conference is "participation."

I'll try to remember that goal next time I run my Linux version of Internet Explorer and play my DVDs in Linux.

Posted Jul 9, 2003 4:55 UTC (Wed) by einstein (subscriber, #2052) [Link]

Don't be fooled by the smile - he's hiding a very sharp knife behind his back.

Folks, this is not rocket science - microsoft would like nothing better than to deal a mortal blow to the open source community. All the rest is just a matter of politics and strategy.

If they really want to "participate", let them first put down the damn knife, then we can talk about their future support for linux and open standards.

But seriously, I could care less whether microsoft offers ie or office for linux - I prefer mozilla to ie anyway, and there are office suites for linux. What I resent is microsoft's heavy-handed use of it's considerable wealth to fight linux with dirty tricks.

Posted Jul 9, 2003 12:04 UTC (Wed) by davidl (guest, #12156) [Link]

"So, there is something we can learn relative to what's happening in the open-source community in terms of what developers are interested in and developing and making sure we understand where those touch-points are where the technologies may either be in parallel or directly imposed in some places. We wanted to understand how those things work and what those touch-points are."

In other words, we are absolutely desparate to try and find out why open source works, how we can get around it and pollute it with our shared source crap, and then through finding out the touch-points we will pressure all and sundry yo use our products come hell or high water. Oh, and we'll pretend to support open standards. I think I speak for most people when I say that I don't care about Microsoft or it's products, and f***off!

Posted Jul 9, 2003 12:25 UTC (Wed) by davidl (guest, #12156) [Link]

"So, part of Rotor's core audience has an intersection or overlap with the kind of people who attend Oscon. With Rotor we were really going after the people doing virtual machine and programming language research,"

Ha, ha, ha *falling off my chair*, this just keeps getting better!!!!!

In other words, we want to nail the really clever people in the OSS community, who are far better than our people, who are doing some truly interesting and innovative things, get them to turn their projects over to running with Rotor (which has a strangely concocted license, which basically says everything you do belongs to us), so we can steal their innovations in the future when they turn into something good. Microsoft just don't understand open source people, do they?

Posted Jul 9, 2003 13:32 UTC (Wed) by dbhost (guest, #3461) [Link]

Next thing you know that extremist Muslims will be seen helping build Jewish settlements in the West Bank. Okay boys and girls, let's get back to reality. We all know by now that having Microsoft anywhere near you is like having a shark in the water where you are swimming.

Posted Jul 9, 2003 14:38 UTC (Wed) by kfox (guest, #4767) [Link]

There are very few good places to actually
talk with Microsoft people. OSCON seems like a
good venue. Microsoft press releases don't
give us much information at all, so we'd
be stupid to pass up this opportunity. (On
the other hand, Microsoft has full access to
every Open Source project. We know almost
nothing about them and they know everything
about us. Best to be cautious...)

Other than that, I think there are two other
opportunities at OSCON.

Microsoft research is incredible -- they've
really stepped up to the plate in the last
5 or 10 years and now contribute everywhere.
Just look at ACM conference proceedings.
When smart people talk, it makes sense to
listen, even if you don't trust their employer.

Many Open Source projects support Win32
as a first-class supported platform. Perl
and Apache have excellent Win32 support. At
least a few people within these groups must
create relationships with Microsoft.