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Microsoft is known for many good and great things, but being a flag bearer or even a fan of open source was never one of them. However, it seems the company is now trying hard to convince the open source users that it is "playing nice with open source"--or at least that seems to be the open agenda at the Microsoft Technology Summit on at Redmond.

In the keynote, Bill Hilf, the General Manager of Planning Strategy at Microsoft, talked about "community and collaboration" and how Microsoft is playing nice with the open source proponents. According to Hilf, the six things that matter are "relationships, platforms, communities, ecosystems, value, and making money". Hilf however added that it is all about the money, and Microsoft is in it for profit.

Bjorn Freeman-Benson, Technical Director of Open Source Process and Infrastructure for the Eclipse Foundation, retorted that while all the above reasons hold good for Eclipse too, the Microsoft refrain that "open source is a way of writing and licensing software, nothing more" is hardly complete, or impressive. He says that open source is all that, but one key differentiator, that sets it apart from the rest is that it offers the adopters choice.

"By building on open standards (such as OSGi); and open APIs (such as SWT); and with open licenses (such as EPL), Eclipse, Apache, Mozilla, Linux, and other open source efforts are providing their adopters with choice - choice to use the distro as is; choice to pay someone to modify the distro; or choice to roll their own and use only parts of the distro," said Freeman-Benson.

Open source allows its users and members to make money, have great tools, but it also gives them choice. It is not just about writing and licensing software, but also about open standards, which is alien to Microsoft. A case point here being Microsoft's refusal to just work on ODF in collaboration, instead of creating a new, bloated standard (OOXML). In response to an attendee’s question on this issue, Hilf clarified that the file format was a part of the software, which is why they could not adopt ODF as the file format for subsequent versions of MS Office.

Dinesh Nair reacted to this by saying that the whole OOXML, ECMA and ISO standards play is not about standards nor about Microsoft vs. IBM but about legitimising a specific isolated technology from a single company as a standard. Nair said, “It was an eye opener, and in my opinion, quite damning to Microsoft. Are they really trying to push through their software, in the form of the inseparable OOXML/MS Office as an international standard? Is this all about ensuring that future generations of MS Office have a purpose on the planet in the face of competition from other office suites like OpenOffice.Org?”



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  Read Dinesh Nair’s Post
  Read Bjorn Freeman-Benson’s Post