11 ms·
Microsoft admits being 'on the wrong side of history' with regard to open source
- jeffrallen 6y agoUh, duh, you think so? Christ, what assholes.
- ajross 6y agoThis remains to me the most weirdly improbable heel/face turn in tech industry history. Kids today, whose worst bad guys are Facebook and Uber, probably won't ever really understand how utterly loathed Microsoft was in the open source community. Every action they took seemed deliberately designed to impede the way we worked, the software we wanted to run (and write) and the hardware we wanted to buy. I spent decades trying to find way to avoid buying windows licenses. And now... they're just a harmless, if slightly stodgy, tech giant hawking their OS and office suite, throwing a few good tools over the fence, and generally being pleasant to work with. Post-pandemic, in fact, I've been working full time on a desktop that's running windows (with a bunch of X11 terminals from the linux development box, of course). And not only do I not hate it, I don't even feel shame.
- bayindirh 6y agoFor me, Microsoft will always be remembered with three things: - Trying to Jerry-rig ACPI standard so nothing other than Windows can run on PC platform (Bill Gates memo). - Trying to Embrace-Enhance-Extinguish Java with their fork. - Using obscure, undocumented extensions on everything (i.e. Frontpage was using IE specific extensions to make HTML files render nicer on IE but not on Netscape). I think that their current plan is a long/slow game to death-hug the Linux ecosystem if they can however, Google, IBM and other players probably won't allow them to do that. P.S.: Oh and of course, SecureBoot.
- eldelshell 6y agoAnd don't forget the stupid formats used by Office when an open standard already existed.
- colejohnson66 6y agoOffice Open XML[0] was created in 2006. In Office 2007, the default save format was changed to the new open format. If they wanted to keep it proprietary, they wouldn’t’ve created Office Open XML, and they wouldn’t’ve made it the default format. It’s my understanding that the reason for their “proprietary” format was because, at the time, there wasn’t really a format that could contain everything Word could do. Also, their proprietary format wasn’t very proprietary; it was reverse engineered, and they did nothing to stop that. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
- pritambaral 6y ago> Office Open XML[0] was created in 2006. In response to the OpenDocument Format, which was released in 2005. > If they wanted to keep it proprietary, they wouldn’t’ve created Office Open XML ... OOXML, when first released, was still pretty proprietary: it was exceedingly complex, far more than the already-existing ODF, at points even requiring reverse engineering of binary blobs and other, not-covered-under-OOXML, Microsoft-proprietary libraries. For example: "OpenXML on the other hand, is a high-level specification which describes the high level envelopes used to embed binary objects which are included in the content. The content itself contains the binary code which can call any function in any Microsoft library and has all permissions of the person opening the document." [0] It felt a lot like a hurried piece of work rushed through under short notice and short schedules. In fact, Microsoft even tried to rush through an ISO standardisation for OOXML, a process during which it did not hesitate from maligning and harassing national bodies [1] and academics [2] who reviewed OOXML poorly against the ODF. The very link you cited covers a few of the issues with the standardisation process: [3]. > Also, their proprietary format wasn’t very proprietary; it was reverse engineered, and they did nothing to stop that. That is NOT the definition of 'proprietary'. Reverse engineering is legally protected irrespective of copyright and licensing. ---- 0: https://slated.org/ooxml_dissecting_the_binary_blob_problem https://slated.org/ooxml_dissecting_the_binary_blob_problem 1: https://www.infoworld.com/article/2654142/iso-publishes-office-open-xml-specification.html https://www.infoworld.com/article/2654142/iso-publishes-offi... 2: http://deepakphatak.blogspot.com/2008/05/this-is.html http://deepakphatak.blogspot.com/2008/05/this-is.html 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#Standardization_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML#Standardizatio...
- pier25 6y agoA couple of years ago I had a Skype with someone from MS for beta testing a product. We got a bit friendly and I ended up mentioning that it was awesome that MS was investing into open source because it was MS after all, you know, the big evil corp. That person had no idea what I was talking about. Then I realized it was probably a generational thing. People in their 20s and early 30s were too young to understand or remember what MS was like in 90s and 00s.
- jacquesm 6y agoThey're far from harmless, with Github in their arsenal now they can make or break open source projects the world over. All it takes is a policy change and we're back to square #1.
- dnautics 6y agoTrue, but at least git repositories are distributed, so moving to a competitor mostly means losing your issue tracking, having to redo your actions, and having to rebuild some hooks. It's not awesome, but at least your crown jewels will be okay (and never won't).
- dredmorbius 6y agoI remember this exact conversation, 20 years ago, though: s/Microsoft/IBM/g s/Facebook and Uber/Microsoft/g I'm not prepared to trust Microsoft yet. And given what I've learned since of IBM's past, feel it was given a largely undeserved pass. The lesson to me has not been "Microsoft's now the good guys", but "infotech builds monsters". In a commercial, property-based world, the leading firms will be monopolies behaving atrociously, for extremely entrenched systemic reasons. As for tech's leaders: the industry not only attracts monsters, but selects monsters for success, and turns those who have (or appear to) good intentions into monsters. The good it spits out, destroys, or drives to madness.
- badsectoracula 6y agoThen where can i download the Windows source code and build my own version of it? I'd like to get rid of the compositor and bring back the classic theme. Microsoft was on the "wrong side of the history" wrt. open source only because others figured out how to take advantage of the shared labor programmers put towards open source and work around the markets where Microsoft had near absolute dominance - so Microsoft was forced to play ball. In markets where Microsoft still dominates (e.g. desktop) their open source efforts are of the "let's opensource the Windows Calculator, we love Open Source, teehee" variety.
- colejohnson66 6y agoIt’s actually possible to get the source code to Microsoft. Seriously. You just have to be big enough and have a good enough reason. https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/ https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/sharedsource/
- fsflover 6y agoThe source code is not the point. The point is the freedoms of FOSS.
- colejohnson66 6y agoMicrosoft can’t open source windows. Not that they don’t want to; they can’t. There’s too much of other companies proprietary stuff in it. Microsoft didn’t write all of Windows; they’ve licensed some stuff from other companies, and they almost certainly don’t have a right to release the source code for it all. Basically, Windows wasn’t written to be open source, so the effort involved to do so is insurmountable.
- jka 6y agoWould the atomic structure of the universe begin to unbind if someone at Microsoft started tagging and removing proprietary elements of the codebase and gained approval to push the remainder of it to GitHub? (my point is that "can't", "too much", and "insurmountable" are rarely words that make sense in the realm of software, especially given sufficient time -- and any missing interfaces can be removed and re-implemented; in fact it's likely that existing open source alternatives already exist for most of them)
- esotericn 6y agoThe idea that this is "history" is PR, and not even particularly good PR at that. Right now, today, they're shipping literal malware on mainstream desktop computers around the world. Oh, and it's not open source either, lol! The bloody operating system has targeted advertisements, intentionally unremovable (or at least very difficult to remove) components, telemetry, a keylogger-esque search function, the list goes on. It pains me to see people shill Microsoft as if they've "turned a corner". All they're doing is the minimum possible in order to be taken seriously by some particularly easily swayed subset of developers whilst simultaneously ratcheting up the pain on the main product that they're known globally for.
- soared 6y ago> shipping literal malware on mainstream desktop computers Source? None of the things you listed below are /literal malware/.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- esotericn 6y agoI've just installed advertising on your eyeballs, don't worry, it's an improvement for you.
- colejohnson66 6y agoIf you’re going to claim something is malware, the onus is on you to prove it.
- esotericn 6y agoI'm not claiming anything, it's definitional to me. As far as I can tell the Overton window has moved and the definition slipped over the past 10 years. I consider Microsoft a major contributor to that. The proof of that is in the fact they've shipped it in a mainstream OS. They have included software which does things explicitly counter to what the user wants. That is what malware is. Unless of course you want adverts, in that case, more power to you.
- znpy 6y agoUnless Microsoft releases at least one of its products (ms-sql, visual studio, windows, office) under an open source license i'm calling bullshit.
- elcomet 6y agoVisual studio code is open source. So is the new windows terminal.
- colejohnson66 6y agoYes. And not the “eh” open source MS-PL, but actual MIT.
- tsar9x 6y agoIf visual studio code is open source, please show me code of Remote Dev extension.
- colejohnson66 6y agohttps://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-remote-release ?
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- moogly 6y agoGoalpost moving.
- 0x006A 6y agoSo will they pay reparations for there atrocities? I.e. pay back the "Windows tax" they forced on OEM for all those years now. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bundling_of_Microsoft_Windows
- jacquesm 6y agoLet's start with interest-on-interest payback of all the expense the SCO trials incurred, and getting the 'Microsoft Tax' refunded for the last 20 years or so would be nice as well.
- narrator 6y agoYet somehow, after all that horribly deliberate and knowingly law breaking behavior, Bill Gates got resurrected recently, on a legendarily huge pile of PR bucks, as the next great savior of humanity.
- humanistbot 6y agoNo, in the 1990s when the "free software" part of the movement was far stronger and trying to build an entire alternative computing stack on strongly copyleft principles, it was certainly not in Microsoft's interest. From a corporate shareholder perspective, it was a massive threat and risk. The GPL was originally intentionally written to be the kind of "cancer" that Balmer feared, spreading to anything that used components of it. In the past few decades, the part of the movement that has become far more popular is the very corporate-friendly, weakly-licensed side. Especially in an era of cloud computing, you can take whatever volunteers from an MIT-licensed open source product make, build whatever you want to with it, and not release the modifications or give back to the project's developers in any way. From a corporate shareholder perspective, what's not to love?
- aNoob7000 6y agoMicrosoft is only open source friendly right now because Satya Nadella thinks the future is the cloud, and I would guess that the majority of software running in Azure is open-source. You have to look no further than .Net Core. Microsoft's attempt at allowing their developers to write code that runs on something other than a Windows server/PC. I would guess they still don't like open-source; they are just doing whatever they can to support their cloud business.
- jacquesm 6y agoIt's simpler than that: the desktop OS has become irrelevant, Google is a big threat to Office (assuming they will finally get their heads down, iron out the kinks and invest heavily into Sheets). The bulk of the home users out there now run their OS with one goal: to start up their browser. Desktop software is a thing that still exists in the business realm but there too cloud based services are making huge inroads. So the future is the cloud, but not Azure, that's just a hosting facility which MS can't complete concede to Google and AWS from a paranoia perspective. But Docs hits them where it hurts, and if it gets any better then outlook->gmail and office->gsuite becomes a real threat.
- scarface74 6y ago
- colejohnson66 6y agoSo much resentment in this thread. Do people seriously think Microsoft is going the EEE route again? Companies are not monolithic entities that never change; They’re made of people. It’s been almost 25 years since the lawsuit, and I can guarantee you that practically no one from the 90s is still working at Microsoft.
- jacquesm 6y ago> Do people seriously think Microsoft is going the EEE route again? Frankly: yes. MS has changed it's colors but the nature of the beast is still exactly the same, don't forget that the current CEO was right there when all that stuff was going down. Browser wars, SCO trial, MS tax and on and on.
- colejohnson66 6y ago> MS has changed it's colors but the nature of the beast is still exactly the same And your evidence is? > don't forget that the current CEO was right there when all that stuff was going down. And? Just because he was there doesn’t mean he agreed with it all. Microsoft has provided much evidence that they actually support open source, and you all are sticking your heads in the ground and ignoring it all, while also providing no evidence to show the contrary.
- jacquesm 6y ago> Just because he was there doesn’t mean he agreed with it all. My evidence is that he didn't leave. When you're working for an unethical company you have but one choice: leave. If you don't - and especially not at that level - you are implicitly ok'ing it. At a guess with your MS advocacy all over this thread you don't see anything wrong with it, past or present. And if you did then you'd think twice about staking your reputation on this. But as always, the mortgage comes first.
- tmottabr 6y agoLeaving is not the only option. He may not agree but decide to stay, learn from its errors and work to make it better.. If people that do not agree just left microsoft it would never have changed, because only the ones that agree with the status quo would be left. Microsoft changed not because the people left but because the people choose to stay and work to change it.
- anq10 6y agoCurrently OSS is being destroyed by corporations flooding it with money. You can see people in projects becoming more corporate and political, doing very little and trying to protect and extend their power. You can see largely useless features going in just because some corporation wants them. I wonder what will happen if the destruction is complete. Will things revert to closed source entirely or are the corporations happy with being the puppet masters of OSS?
- outside1234 6y agoWell, what is the other way we have to get OSS funding outside of the corporations that use it? Not saying that it can't exist, but it doesn't exist, and that is why.
- canada_dry 6y ago> OSS is being destroyed by corporations^^ flooding it with money ^^ with competing interests Microsoft's interest in all things linux is a tad worrisome IMHO. How 'bout instead of the "keep your enemies closer" strategy, MS start releasing their products as open source and leave Linux be.
- amelius 6y agoAt least they were not selling spyware like some other big companies do right now.
- DangitBobby 6y agoI suspect they would if they were positioned to and thought they would profit from it. Some people (in this very thread) consider Windows 10 to have a significant amount of spyware.
- jacquesm 6y agoThey're not on the wrong side of history at all, they were simply criminals, and I'm not quite sure about the past tense there.
- dzonga 6y agothis is the power of the web. made the underlying OS irrelevant. folks in the industry let's invest in good skills i.e making performant web apps i.e Figma quality. using wasm + all. & then gradually people will be free to build | use new OS's.
- Gollapalli 6y agoOkay, I'll believe it when they open source windows. It's not like they've open sourced their core business, they're open sourcing things to make Windows more attractive, so that people won't leave for other environments. So this is really pandering. And Microsoft shouldn't HAVE to open source their software, though it's good that they're open sourcing some of it, and I certainly appreciate it. Why shouldn't they have to? Because software costs money to develop. And until we have some sort of legal construction or open source business model that obviates the need for closed source (at least in the limited sense of source available, rather than commonplace definition), then Microsoft is not wrong for keeping their source closed, and I'm not sure that they believe differently. Part of copyright is the right NOT to free software that you've written, just as it's my right not to run it. I'll appreciate their open source offerings, but I don't believe that they believe much of anything about "the right side of history".
- Proven 6y agoAs far as the GPL is concerned they weren't wrong. The GPL (especially 3, but also 2) really is crap and at that time that was promoted as the OSS alternative against commercial closed source software. I've no issue with their stance in the 00's.
- tsjq 6y agoby saying sorry and trying to befriend the ardent supporters of FOSS , this sounds like one just a step in Microsoft's Embrace-Extend-Extinguish strategy.
- stunt 6y agoIt sounds sarcastic and probably is. But, most enterprises that don't have open-source in their blood do what ever it takes to pleases investors and their revenue stream. It was aligned to their interest to stay close, and now there is more gain to support open source. Microsoft is doing a lot of positive contributions, but I don't think they will ever become an open-source company. And we shouldn't expect every company to become open-source either. Any company that benefits from open-source should support, invest, and contribute to open-source.