Microsoft Founds Open Source Company

By Douglas Perry
published

Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. may not exactly be a company that makes immediate sense. Open Source and Microsoft? How does that mix?

At a closer look, Microsoft has quite a few open source, open standards as well as interoperability interest that will be organized with this new subsidiary. For example, Microsoft's contributions to the W3C, especially in the range of HTML5, as well as the recently outlined HTTP 2.0, as well as participation in DMTF and OASIS will find a home in Microsoft Open Technologies. A major task will be to make sure that open technologies will be available to Microsoft.

In an announcement, Microsoft said that Microsoft will continue to engage outside of Microsoft Open Technologies with open source communities as well as foundations, such as the Outercurve Foundation, and the Apache Software Foundation. However, the open source-focused subsidiary is created to provide a structure to establish defined links between proprietary software and open source and open standards and enable Microsoft to accelerate the "release open source software", accept contributions from the community and increase the company's involvement in open source efforts.

Douglas Perry
25 Comments Comment from the forums
  • kristoffe
    the world is coming to and end, a good one. M$ is going open source a bit, and apple is getting infected.
    Reply
  • mrmike_49
    It's a scam to get patent protection from other companies patents
    Reply
  • lancelot123
    Yes mike, cause EVERYTHING is a conspiracy. I hate it when people act like that.
    Reply
  • lightbulbsocket
    lancelot123Yes mike, cause EVERYTHING is a conspiracy. I hate it when people act like that.
    You say that like no one ever has ulterior motives. My knee-jerk response was that MS is working some sort of an angle. If they didn't think it was going to PAY off then there's no way they'd be doing it. You don't become a fortune 500 company by doing things out of the kindness of your heart.
    Reply
  • Pinhedd
    lightbulbsocketYou say that like no one ever has ulterior motives. My knee-jerk response was that MS is working some sort of an angle. If they didn't think it was going to PAY off then there's no way they'd be doing it. You don't become a fortune 500 company by doing things out of the kindness of your heart.
    People are going to use open source applications and open standard whether Microsoft likes it or not. I'm sure that they would much rather people use an open source product developed by Microsoft than one developed by someone else. You should really take a look at some of the stuff that they've done recently. They've been moving swathes patents into their community promise, various new and experimental developments are done on github, their Hyper-V virtualization modules are in the upstream linux kernel, their F# programming language is now under the Apache license, they provide community hosting and support for numerous open source .NET applications (including the only real web hosting application for Windows). They have a whole section dedicated to open specifications on the MSDN.

    Their "ulterior motive" is nothing more than the simple fact that having dozens of competing products serving the same function does nothing but create problems. Microsoft could stay at the head of the pack in the 90s due to a lack of competition (partly their doing) and lack of competence (sorry Real Networks and Corel) but that's easier said than done when facing pressure from giants such as Google, oracle and Redhat.
    Reply
  • IndignantSkeptic
    9359805 said:
    You say that like no one ever has ulterior motives. My knee-jerk response was that MS is working some sort of an angle. If they didn't think it was going to PAY off then there's no way they'd be doing it. You don't become a fortune 500 company by doing things out of the kindness of your heart.



    I don't really like Microsoft because I suspect them of using dirty business tactics. However I do not like people spreading around this very common misconception that rich people must be evil. In principle, the point of capitalism is to give certain people greater wealth than everyone else as a reward for making the world wealthier. In other words, in principle, rich people get a larger angle of the pie of wealth than most people, but what most people don't seem to realize is that this is the rich people's reward for increasing the pie's overall size.
    Reply
  • Zingam_Duo
    lancelot123Yes mike, cause EVERYTHING is a conspiracy. I hate it when people act like that.

    Yes, it actually is! I live in a country where the only viable business is stealing government money. In the USA where there are much, much, much, much more money, I doubt that it is much different. Well, actually there are way too many proven and obvious cases about that there too.
    Reply
  • amuffin
    MS and Open Source? WHAT!!! BLASPHEMY!!!!
    Reply
  • uruquiora
    well if they're planning to have the same level of involvement as Oracle... C ya in a few dozens of years...
    Reply
  • madooo12
    actually they do support open source projects including the linux kernel (one month they were the #1 contributer to it and in whole 2011 they were #17), they supported moonlight (some silverlight runtime for linux), they host open-source .net projects (something like sourceforge), C# and office open are two open standards they made, I could write a whole book about MSs contributions to open-source/standards

    now if only they open-source the windows kernel, that would make windows kernel marketshare much higher
    Reply