Microsoft's Mundie to Continue OSS Outreach

Techie writes "In an interview with eWeek Craig Mundie, Microsoft's new co-head-honcho and chief research and strategy officer, says he plans to continue to push the Redmond software titan forward with its goal of greater interoperability with software licensed under the GPL." From the article: "Even in Bill's own public remarks, he pointed out that he thought his iconic status and the way that was reported tended to overemphasize his role in the company's innovation and execution. This is really a transition that has been in the works for a couple of years, with a couple to go before, and we will see the emergence of a lot of great talent that has today been portrayed as all Bill. This is a company with, in many cases, the best people in the world. "

You can only trash something for so long

[Freaky Spook]

I think they are realising that OSS isn't going away, each year it continues to get stronger and because of its structure they cannot aggressivly compete against it in a traditional sense.

We are already seeing huge benefits of OSS and what it can achieve and I think Microsoft have realised if they are going to have any future in it they need to work with it to some extent.

Let's see if I have this right...

[greenguy]

I am neither a programmer nor a lawyer, so there may be some nuances I'm missing, but here's how I see it.

- FLOSS reveals everything there is to know about how it operates and interoperates.

- Microsoft reveals as little as possible about how it operates and interoperates.

- Microsoft has a high-profile, highly-paid person trying to figure out how to make the two work together. So far, this appears to be quite a challenge for them.

Unless I've missed something crucial, Microsoft will never fix this problem to everyone's solution. The problem isn't in their software. The problem is in their business model. But they can never admit that, so they'll go on trying to figure out which size wrench to use to hammer the light bulb into the socket.

M$ finally learning the IBM lesson

[i_want_you_to_throw_]

IBM was the Microsoft of it's time and now it's a darling of geeks everywhere. All companies eventually have to learn to transition from being an entity that makes standards to merely contributing to them. Microsoft will learn this lesson albeit the hard way but they will learn.

Then in the future we can adjust our ire towards future threats like Apple for closing Darwin off to development and Google who is probably amassing more power than any one company should.

Re:I'm not following the question

[killjoe]

Looks it's a computer journal. The job of a computer journal is not to ask hard hitting questions. It's to suck up to your advertisers and to make sure you get their press releases published as articles and to generally act as their publicity agents.

If Ms wants to play nice all they have to do is the publish some specs. NTFS, SMB, Active Directory, Office file formats etc. I mean full disclosure. They could also remove the DRM from their file formats which prevents open office from even attempting to open their files.

Ask yourself this question. Is a company which makes sure that the sample files it ships with office can only be opened up with MS office serious about playing nice? I don't think so. NOTE TO SHILLS: The previous statement has nothing to with the capability, the files are locked and refuse to be opened by open office.

Anyway this is Mundie we are talking about. If he doesn't lie a dozen times by lunch he feels quesy.

Re:Don't trust Mundie

[Umbral Blot]

Or you know, maybe he changed his mind. Not everyone who has strong opinions is irrational.

Re:M$ finally learning the IBM lesson

[rm69990]

How is Apple closing off Darwin any more of a "threat" than Microsoft never opening Windows in the first place? You're being ridiculous.

How is Google amassing so much power....by launching a bunch of free services that next to no one actually use? I'd be far more scared of a company like Yahoo!, which has far more data about its customers than Google will have in the next 5 years. Yahoo! offers the full range of portal services, and unlike Google, people actually use these portal services. Portal services can amass far more data than search records ever could. Gmail is far behind Yahoo! Mail in terms of users, as is Google Finance, Picasa Web, Google Calendar, Froogle, Google Maps, Google Talk, etc. Despite having better technology (IMHO), Google is an also-ran in the portal market.

With a Calendar service, for instance, the Calendar provider could potentially view your entire life schedule and what you do in your time and use that for advertising purposes. With a Mail service, they have access to your communications. With the majority of people using google.com, they have access to search records attributed to a random IP address, and they have absolutely no way of actually tracing that IP address to a person without a court order, which they simply would not get.

Wow, Google has like so much data about like the 5 million people worldwide that actually have accounts on Google.com! Oh, and they can trace your IP ADDRESS!!!! *shivers* (/sarcasm)

Oh, wait, I'm on Slashdot, conspiracy theories and fearing all companies that make more than $10 million a year in profit is the norm here. Carry on then!

(disclaimer: I use services from both Yahoo! and Google, depending on the service, and also MSN Messenger. I have no problem doing so, because I'm not paranoid of everything that exists to make money)

outreach? please don't bother

[argoff]

I tell you what. If MS puts their patents on the table and removes their support of SCO and copyright liability, then I'll consider talking. Until then, forget it, actions speak louder than words.

what else do they want?

[m874t232]

I'm not sure what all this "outreach" is supposed to be about. FOSS licensed software is there for all to use, including Microsoft. FOSS developers are making enormous efforts to accomodate Microsoft already, to interoperate with Microsoft software, and even to reverse engineer Microsoft's protocols.

If Microsoft wants even more cooperation from FOSS developers, all they have to do is dedicate patents in areas like FAT, .NET, and SMB to the public domain (so that people can create interoperable implementations without nagging legal questions), and document and stabilize formats and protocols like those used by SMB, Exchange, Office, Sharepoint, and others.

So, open source is already doing all it can do under the limits that Microsoft itself is setting for open source. If they want open source to support Microsoft products even better, it's in their hands.

Wasting our time...

[jkrise]

Several techniques to waste your time

1. Speculating WHY / WHETHER REALLY Microsoft is suddenly cosying up to Open Source and GPL.
2. Speculating WHY Vista is getting delayed.
3. Speculating WHY DNF is getting delayed.
4. Speculating WHETHER Gates really stepped DOWN ... FROM Chairman TO Chairman.
5. Speculating WHETHER Ballmer might get promoted to Chair-Man.
6. Profit! (Note... this list is always Profitable for Microsoft - not you. One last time... Misrosoft is not a philanthropic organisation - Gates might be one individually. MS is answerable to it's shareholders, and it's only motive is MONEY, not shipping Vista, developing a better Office, kicking Gates, or rewarding Ballmer.
7. If we want to spend your time PROFITably, I guess we can simply skip such articles, and start using REAL open source apps, or writing more code under the GPL.

Such articles are a real waste of time, IMHO.

Re:M$ finally learning the IBM lesson

[Nefarious Wheel]

Good point. Centralisation of power did neither the USSR nor ancient China nor IBM any good, and Microsoft is growing into a monolith large enough to suffer from to similar problems, problems that have their origin in the difficulty of internal communications -- e.g. not the type of mail, but the sheer bulk of it. By the time any catastrophe has made it through all the layers of frightened functionaries, the only message from within your own Empire that survives is refined into "All is well with the Empire, your Majesty".

I think a bit of decentralisation is in order, if Microsoft is to survive the transition you speak of. This was a lesson known to IBM when they set up a separate, independent subsidiary to build an answer to the Apple ][. The PC that resulted from that (irrespective of it's tragically poor initial design) allowed them to create a product that did not have to answer to layer upon layer of Mainframe-oriented processes and their entrenched apologists.

If Microsoft were to break up Office into separate parts with the "glue" between them componentised, then perhaps that "glue" could be adherance to a standard rather than tight coupling of applications. It seems as if they're still trying to develop a "Lotus 1-2-3-4-5-6-7-8-9..." instead of a decent series of independent products (Drag and drop is nice, but sometimes I just want to copy a table, not embed a spreadsheet in a document).

One wonders if the communications between all the components of Office isn't beginning to break the boundaries of efficient operation in much the same way. Messages grow exponentially, irrespective of the medium.

To be honest, Bill is one bright geek. But even if he were the right hand of Heaven on earth he can't resolve detail out of a message once it's suffered from bureaucratic data compression.

I guess that's why they call some people "Exponents" of a particular technology.

Re:You forgot a line.

[donscarletti]

The source is Starwars VI Return of the Jedi nomatter where else you've heard it. IIRC Admiral Akbar utturs these highly profound words when he witnesses the power of the "fully operational battlestation".

It is not supprising you have heard the line elsewhere though. George Lucas was never one for highly momentous lines, witness the usually talented Natilie Portman looking like a moron when she says pearls like "hold me like you did on naboo" and "you're breaking my heart Aniken". Hell, the only memorable lines in the 6 movies were Han Solo's which were probably snuck on the script when Lucas was visiting the shrine to himself for his daily devotion.

Re:Let's see if I have this right...

[Coryoth]

Not all free software (let alone all open source software) is easy to read, nor well maintained. In many cases, it's just barely more readable than a disassembly.

Sure, but that's because Free software is a ridiculously big umbrella. Not all commercial software is particularly easy to read (even if you could get the source) nor well documented, nor well maintained. For every random crappy sourceforge project you care to point out, I can find a crappy Win>insert name here< demoware program that's just as bad. What we're talking about here is major Free software products - you know, the ones that Microsoft might actually give a crap about interoperating with, like Linux, Apache, Mozilla, OpenOffice, etc. I think you'll find those projects are actually relatively easy to read, quite well documented, and well maintained. In fact I'll bet that they are at least as easy to read, and at least as well documented as Microsofts own stuff - the issues with turning over documentation of APIs in the EU antitrust case strongly pointed to the poor and chaotic state of even Micorosofts internal documentation.

Re:Wasting our time...

[russ1337]

7. If we want to spend your time PROFITably, I guess we can simply skip such articles, and start using REAL open source apps, or writing more code under the GPL.

If only the comments within /. could be used for GPL code..... it would be pretty buggy tho'

Proof precedes belief.

[HiThere]

With some groups, I'm willing to extend trust. MS, however, has a track record. They will need to PROVE that they are trustworthy before I will trust them. Even then it will be an iffy kind of thing for a decade or so.

But proof comes first.

1) Stop campaigning for closed standards. This is the first step towards earning trust.
2) Stop attempting to corrupt existing standards. This can be done simultaneous with 1.
3) Stop spreading FUD. If you continue to act like an enemy, there's no way I'll be willing to trust you.

Those steps are negative, but essential. Until those conditions are met there is no possible positive action that I would trust.

4) Do something positive. There are lots of options here, but if a government forces you to it, then it doesn't count as a positive action from you. Merely neutral (at best).
Possible examples of positive actions are:
1) Pushing an open standard, and adopting it in your own programs.
2) Opening the file format specifications beyond what the EU is demanding. (Alternatively, creating a new Open file format specification and adopting it...but this is 1 again.)
3) Releasing a version of MSWind that doesn't automatically remove the ability of other OSs on the same drive to boot. (Yeah, Linux isn't so good about this either. SuSE seems to do this, but most distros presume that they are the grand PooBah *AND* the Lord High Executioner wrapped into one bundle.)
4) Other. (I said there were lots of choices. There's really too many to enumerate.)

But proof comes before belief.

Re:gay flamebait getalife (fagging beta)

[fufubag]

While the AC put it so un-eloquently (sorry to all you grammar nazi fucks if that isn't a word, but you know what i mean don't you?), it had a good point. Any jokes like this or smack talk about Linux or Apple, are modded troll, flaimbait, while jokes against MS are funny. Why don't you just stop lying to yourselves and create a mod named: (Score: +1, So true. MS is just not as stylish and geeky enough for this site, while at the same time holding too much of the market share to be considered counter-culture, so if we act like we like it, it totally undercuts our vision of ourselves being geek-chic). Yeah, I know, (-1: Troll). Thank-you, may I have another. BTW, don't even think about modding me up to make yourselves look good either! ;)

Free as in Craig Mundie

[TehBeer]

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1978009,00.as p [eweek.com]

Microsoft executives have recently said they are committed to a greater outreach to the open source community and to make Windows software interoperable with that licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Is that a priority of yours and something you plan to move further forward?

I have been one of the principle people architecting the way we are going to step up to this bigger question around interoperability, and that will certainly be a focus of mine going forward, along with Bob Muglia.

You can download a copy of "Free as in Freedom" from here. I believe it's published under the FDLicense
http://www.grimstveit.no/jakob/files/text/freeasin freedom.pdf [grimstveit.no]

Download that PDF and search the term "Mundie"
You'll quickly find this on page 6

The subject of Stallman's speech is the history and future of the free software movement. The location is significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior vice president

--
Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting the General Public License, or GPL,
--

a legal device originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox laser printer-the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. In simplest terms, the GPL locks software programs into a form of communal ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons"-through the legal weight of copyright. Once locked, programs remain unremovable. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection-even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code.
--
For this reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the GPL a "viral" license, because it spreads itself to every software program it touches.1
--

Slashdot says
Microsoft's Mundie to Continue OSS Outreach

When you read about what he said in his speeches, do you really think this guy is going to carry on much of anything for FOSS or OSS integration?

It's all about talk, and show, and complacency for them. There is no substance to it.

Re:Bad analogy

[ShieldW0lf]

This is a company with, in many cases, the best people in the world.

I don't know which is more disturbing. I mean, I use windows, I form an impression about the quality of its makers, and I think how scary it is, that good management can bring such a bunch of monkeys to world domination. Then I read something like this, and I think how scary would be if he was right, that bad management really can cause the best people in the world to produce something like windows.

He can't be right, can he?

Re:infoworld industry lapdogs, not journalists

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not timely and relevant. As a former IT manager, I can tell you that eweek was a completely worthless publication. I used to receive it at my office, and even though I told their circulation department to stop sending it, it kept coming. I just kept throwing it away as soon as it was delivered.

Maybe your fine publication is different, but I have found that the bulk of tech journalism to be worthless crap.

Re:Evil Microsoft agrees with many others though..

[Jeremy Allison - Sam]

"As you will notice EVERY BIT of information and the license to utilize the CIFS technologies is fully available for free from Microsoft, no reverse engineering required."

This is completely untrue, as I'm sure you know. I could enumerate all the still-unknown parts of CIFS, but I don't normally engage with trolls unless it's to point out when they are spreading lies, which is what I'm doing here.

Jeremy Allison,
Samba Team.