Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software

http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2012/01/meet-bill-gates/

by ageektrapped • 14 years ago

50 11 14 years ago

fsniper• 14 years ago

This headline is misleading. Article is about, "How Bill Gates changed Microsoft's perspective about opensource software.".

moondowner• 14 years ago

What a misleading title indeed. Bill Gates: the man who said that Open Source software is "A New Communism"[1].

MS now embraces Open Source because they can't fight it (and hopefully they've seen the benefits of it?).

[1] http://www.humaniteinenglish.com/spip.php?article319

larrik• 14 years ago

What a load of crap.

He changed open source software because of one meeting in 2008?

Maybe he changed Microsoft, but I don't buy the idea he is "the man who changed open source software." Nothing in the article convinces me otherwise.

Overblown, linkbait title (and it IS the original Wired title, not the fault of the submitter).

bwarp• 14 years ago

It's Wired - what do you expect? Nothing quality has come out of them for at least a decade.

bad_user• 14 years ago

So as evidence that Microsoft changed Open Source Software, the example of Azure was given, having built-in support for some open-source platforms.

However, this is a reaction that didn't change anything: Windows Azure came after Amazon's AWS. The business of hosting your own software was already shifting to the cloud in a big way. Azure isn't even that successful anyway, being used more for keeping Microsoft's customers from switching from their own Windows servers to the more convenient EC2 (and it's children, like Heroku), which is cheaper and better if you're running Linux.

Microsoft also hasn't stopped attacking Open Source. They're just taking the indirect approach of threatening companies that rely on open-source, making them pay royalties, with the ultimate purpose being to make open-source software more expensive then their own alternatives. They also can't attack open-source directly, as other big companies rely on it (e.g. IBM).

Also, taking a good look at their strategy regarding Open Source, you can clearly see that it's all for marketing and defensive purposes (i.e. doing the minimal amount of work required for them to be considered open-source friendly, but without actually being so). For instance, they open-sourced ASP.NET MVC, but not Razor.

freehunter• 14 years ago

Baby steps, my friend. Microsoft is a big company, and getting everyone and every project to buy in is a complex and political process. They're not going to switch to open source overnight. The very fact that they're working and contributing even a little is a good step.

It's too early to tell where this will go, but I'm willing to hear them out with cautious optimism.

xcthulhu• 14 years ago

Isn't Microsoft's schizophrenic relationship with FOSS old news? The same company that claims "Linux is a cancer" also employs K.Y. Srinivasan, a topic linux kernel contributor [1], and Simon Peyton Jones of Haskell fame.

Microsoft's competitors Apple and Google have dealt with OSS much more gracefully. While I don't approve of this approach, these companies 'embraced' open source with projects like Darwin and Android OS, and then twisted the efforts in proprietary directions. I don't know if this strategy was ever really available to Microsoft, however.

[1] http://lwn.net/Articles/451243/

pjmlp• 14 years ago

Yes they are quite schizophrenic and it is funny that you mention Simon Peyton Jones.

There are actually many open source technologies, whose development is done by Microsoft Research employees or mainly funded by Microsoft, Haskell and Ocaml being two of them.

But working for big corporations was taught me that they are quite schizophrenic usually.

ryanbrunner• 14 years ago

The article seems to be more about how Open Source changed Microsoft than how Microsoft changed open source.

I do think Microsoft is doing many things that should be viewed as admirable around open source - they've opened up portions of the .NET framework such as ASP.NET MVC, they (as this article states) contribute back to open source projects, they support projects like Mono, and they started initiatives like the Outercurve Foundation. Most of the negative opinion about Microsoft and Open Source is really outdated. But I'd hesitate to say that Microsoft has had a signficant enough impact to say they've "changed" open source in any substantial way.

DrHankPym• 14 years ago

What kinds of negative opinions about Microsoft and Open Source are really outdated?

boubountu• 14 years ago

I don't like the fact that people either love Microsoft or don't. The same applies to Google and Apple. As developers, we should always objectively question all big companies and give them credit when they deserve it. I, for instance, hate Microsoft for not living up to its potentials. I don't hate because it sells its software, but because, it creates a vendor-lock set of software, preventing integration of third party tools and making their clients completely dependent on them.

Meet Bill Gates, the Man Who Changed Open Source Software

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