Microsoft admits being 'on the wrong side of history' with regard to open source

https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/05/15/microsoft_brad_smith_open_source/

78 89 6 years ago

theregister.co.uk

ajross• 6 years ago

This 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.

bayindirh4• 6 years ago

For 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• 6 years ago

And don't forget the stupid formats used by Office when an open standard already existed.

pier25• 6 years ago

A 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.

jacquesm5• 6 years ago

They'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• 6 years ago

True, 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• 6 years ago

I 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.

badsectoracula2• 6 years ago

Then 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.

colejohnson669• 6 years ago

It’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/

fsflover2• 6 years ago

The source code is not the point. The point is the freedoms of FOSS.

badsectoracula2• 6 years ago

Then it isn't open source. Nor any useful to me or most people, really.

esotericn• 6 years ago

The 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.

soared2• 6 years ago

shipping literal malware on mainstream desktop computers

Source? None of the things you listed below are /literal malware/.

fsflover2• 6 years ago

https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html

robinson7d• 6 years ago

It’s arguably adware, since users paid for the OS and then advertisements have appeared in new places since Windows 10’s initial release. E.g. some ads appeared for many people in the file explorer a few years ago.

Adware is considered a form of malware. Not the worst type of malware by any means but still “literal”.

GNU hosts a list as well; though I believe many items on it to be a stretch, I feel at least a few are justifiable. https://www.gnu.org/proprietary/malware-microsoft.html

thomaskcr• 6 years ago

This is a picture from a Windows 10 Enterprise domain joined machine with a whole set of GPOs we try to keep up with this type of stuff: https://imgur.com/a/M5d9MVt

That's a lot of space devoted to just old versions of games. I understand malware has a specific definition, but I don't know what's in these folders and we obviously didn't want them on user machines.

Deleting them required a whole dance around SYSTEM access, it was insane.

Enterprise.

outside12342• 6 years ago

I see you haven't turned the corner either.

m4632• 6 years ago

RMS once said "proprietary software subjugates users". At the time I thought the statement was a little over-the-top.

Now with every bit of windows software hooked into the network, I see it a little differently. (same with basically all phone software)

znpy3• 6 years ago

Unless Microsoft releases at least one of its products (ms-sql, visual studio, windows, office) under an open source license i'm calling bullshit.

elcomet• 6 years ago

Visual studio code is open source. So is the new windows terminal.

colejohnson669• 6 years ago

Yes. And not the “eh” open source MS-PL, but actual MIT.

tsar9x• 6 years ago

If visual studio code is open source, please show me code of Remote Dev extension.

znpy3• 6 years ago

I was talking about "visual studio", not "visual studio code".

satysin• 6 years ago

They have a couple of open source products.

However they are not one of the big 4 as you have listed.

I have heard MS employees talk about open sourcing some of their bigger products and the conversation always comes down to the issue of the third party code (libraries, etc) they use that cannot be open sourced along with the main product.

I'm not defending Microsoft in any way just giving an explanation I have heard over the last few years. I believe Mark Russinovich has talked about open sourcing things a number of times if you want to look into it further.

scarface744• 6 years ago

So where can I download the code for Google’s search engine? The backend code for Docs/Sheets? Google Play Services?

traskjd• 6 years ago

Likewise for Google. Until that search engine is open source, it's like they've done nothing for open source. /s

zrka• 6 years ago

Not a Googler, but an OSS dev. Google is different in that a) the Googlers inside OSS projects generally behave and are not power hungry and b) Google has started and open sourced large projects like Chromium or Go.

Microsoft tries to aggressively buy its way into existing mature projects.

bdcravens2• 6 years ago

What (large) companies have open-sourced their core product? I don't think anyone is accusing Shopify, Facebook, Google, etc of being anti-open source.

2fast4you• 6 years ago

Gitlab

znpy3• 6 years ago

IBM, sun microsystems.

0x006A• 6 years ago

So 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

jacquesm5• 6 years ago

Let'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• 6 years ago

Yet 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• 6 years ago

No, 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• 6 years ago

Microsoft 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.

jacquesm5• 6 years ago

It'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.

scarface744• 6 years ago

No for profit “likes” open source. They just open source the parts that don’t put them at a competitive disadvantage. You don’t see sang major corporation open sourcing their core software.

iforgotpassword• 6 years ago

Can't you even do this with GPL code really? Unfortunately they didn't predict the cloud specifically. The GPL seems to only enforce that you cannot distribute modified versions of some software without also publishing the modified source code. If your modified GPL software only ever runs on your cloud infra and you don't share the binary, did you break the GPL?

baylessj• 6 years ago

You're correct, this scenario is why the AGPL was written. A lot of companies allow the use of GPL software but forbid the use of AGPL software.

Gollapalli6• 6 years ago

Yeah, fixing that issue is what's good about the SSPL.

colejohnson669• 6 years ago

So 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.

jacquesm5• 6 years 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.

colejohnson669• 6 years 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.

craftinator3• 6 years ago

Why do you think they bought GitHub? They're are doing EEE on git...

colejohnson669• 6 years ago

And like my other comment, I ask: where’s your evidence?

bdcravens2• 6 years ago

So they are planning to extinguish git? Acquiring a dominant company and becoming the go-to solution isn't full EEE.

ToFab123• 6 years ago

They're are doing EEE on git No, I don't think that git has anything to do with why they bought GitHub and I don't think any single GitHub technology was the motivation, but if there were, I would say it is Electron and not git.

Microsoft still wants their phone and a phone needs apps. I bet somewhere inside MS a team is working hard on a version of Electron that comes with the OS and that does not have all these memory issues that the current version have and that behaves like a native app (multiple windows etc.). When a large % of apps are using that MS going to release a new phone.

m4632• 6 years ago

I think there's a new business model that's taken over.

EEE -> Embrace Extend Exfiltrate

or maybe:

III -> Install Identify, ...Income!

(google makes billions just by identifying individuals)

anq10• 6 years ago

Currently 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?

outside12342• 6 years ago

Well, 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• 6 years 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• 6 years ago

At least they were not selling spyware like some other big companies do right now.

DangitBobby• 6 years ago

I 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.

jacquesm5• 6 years ago

They'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• 6 years ago

this 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.

Gollapalli6• 6 years ago

Okay, 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".

tsjq• 6 years ago

by 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• 6 years ago

It 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.

Microsoft admits being 'on the wrong side of history' with regard to open source

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