“There’s free software and then there’s open source”, he suggested, noting that the company gives away its software in developing countries. With open source software, on the other hand, “there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with”.
Open source, he said, creates a license “so that nobody can improve the software”.
He is Bill Gates, reported by Wired.
If open source software doesn’t improve, then I would like to understand why the beta of IE8 emulates the behaviour of Firefox, and not vice versa.
Ray Ozzie, Microsoft’s Chief Software Architect, while speaking today at the annual conference of the company Most Valuable Professional, has given some perspective about the relationship between Microsoft and open source, as reported by Todd Bishop. What I see as a dangerous problem, especially when you look at interoperability between applications and file formats (especially ODF and OOXML), is the fact that Microsoft ignores the open source community.
If we look at OpenOffice.org, the three markets where the open source office suite is competing most successfully with Microsoft Office are probably Germany, France and Italy, followed by other European markets like Spain and the Netherlands. In Italy, where I have the updated numbers, we are hitting today - maybe while I’m writing this post - one million downloads since January 1st, 2008 (over 350.000 since the announcement of OOo 2.4 in late March). Although we don’t have Microsoft figures for Office 2007, we estimate a maximum of 1.8 million licenses sold in 2008.
I already know the reply: “You can’t compare licenses with downloads…”. Of course, gentlemen, but do you really think that one million downloads in slightly over one hundred days (at an average of over 9,200 downloads per day) still equals to a few thousands users? Do you really think that a small bunch of people, just the same small bunch of people, can get all these downloads? Come on, we’ve other stuff to do. Please, be realistic. We’re eating your pie, quickly. We’re hungry.
I don’t know the figures for Germany and France, but I’m quite sure that they are even better than those for Italy. The results in these markets are mainly due to the daily activity of the local community, while Microsoft - with the exception of Italy, where Associazione PLIO is recognized and respected - apparently ignores the reality. I am sure, for instance, that Microsoft’s Document Interoperability Initiative would greatly benefit from the involvement of the open source community.
Technorati Tags:
ooxml, open source, openoffice, microsoft, odf
It looks like at Sun they enjoy April Fool’s day, starting from the CEO Jonathan Schwartz.
Technorati Tags:
open source
Some key findings:
- Approximately 81 percent of respondents feel the economy’s turbulence is “good” for open source software
- Respondents revealed that the top three factors that make open source software attractive include:
- lower acquisition and maintenance costs
- flexibility/access to libraries of community-developed code
- freedom from vendor lock-in
- More than 55 percent of respondents believe that in five years 25-50 percent of purchased software will be open source vs. proprietary
- The Web Publishing/Content Management market is expected to be most vulnerable to disruption by open source in the next five years
- Respondents expect the Security Tools be least vulnerable to disruption by open source in the next five years
The full survey results can be downloaded from here.
Reprinted from the Open Source Initiative web site:
Tags: Open Source, softwareThe Requirement
An “open standard” must not prohibit conforming implementations in open source software.
The Criteria
To comply with the Open Standards Requirement, an “open standard” must satisfy the following criteria. If an “open standard” does not meet these criteria, it will be discriminating against open source developers.
- No Intentional Secrets: The standard MUST NOT withhold any detail necessary for interoperable implementation. As flaws are inevitable, the standard MUST define a process for fixing flaws identified during implementation and interoperability testing and to incorporate said changes into a revised version or superseding version of the standard to be released under terms that do not violate the OSR.
- Availability: The standard MUST be freely and publicly available (e.g., from a stable web site) under royalty-free terms at reasonable and non-discriminatory cost.
- Patents: All patents essential to implementation of the standard MUST be licensed under royalty-free terms for unrestricted use, or be covered by a promise of non-assertion when practiced by open source software.
- No Agreements: There MUST NOT be any requirement for execution of a license agreement, NDA, grant, click-through, or any other form of paperwork to deploy conforming implementations of the standard.
- No OSR-Incompatible Dependencies: Implementation of the standard MUST NOT require any other technology that fails to meet the criteria of this Requirement.
Technorati Tags: open standard
Yesterday’s post was definitely a mistake, and therefore the text has been replaced with a fake one (lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetuer adipiscing elit, et caetera) to avoid the cache trap.
Today I’ve had a long conversation with Pierpaolo Boccadamo, Microsoft Italy Platform Strategy Director. He is a real gentleman and has been very kind to me, although he was involved in a very important server announcement and my words have been quite a problem for him, Sam Ramji and Andrea Valboni (the people I’m in touch with at Microsoft). I apologize, guys, seriously.
I’ve been told that this blog is now seen by Microsoft as an authoritative voice of the open source community. I’m happy and surprised at the same time: I’ve never been a corporate person, and I’m not the best one for the role but I will try to stick to it at least until we will get to know each other in a better way.
Please do understand, though, that the open source community isn’t and can’t be similar to a large enterprise. Therefore, the language will always be different in tone from what you could expect if we were a “regular” company.
But there are advantages, too. You have my mobile phone number, and you are not just asked by warmly invited to call me whenever you feel that I’ve made something wrong. I don’t have any problem today and I won’t have any problem in the future to acknowledge my mistakes (if any, of course).
I’m a volunteer, and I use my free time for the the community. I don’t have a status to defend, and if I lose my “job” I will have more time for myself, my family and my hobbies. It’s a different perspective from yours, as you are in a corporate position.
Of course, this doesn’t translate into a lousy attitude. I try to do my best, as I have been doing for all my professional life: you know the results, and therefore you may understand how seriously I handle the task.
Let’s start working at the interoperability project and forget - for the time being - the other issues (although I know that we will be carefully watching each other on a daily basis). You have my commitment, and the commitment of Associazione PLIO.
Any idea about the author of this sentence?
The world is different today than it was 10 years ago, and so are we. Here on the city campus, MacBook Pros aren’t unheard of, and people with knowledge of Linux are in demand. Some of those MacBooks are running Vista, administrators are running PHP and ASP.NET on the same machine, and we’re seeing adoption of open source in and on top of a range of our technologies. As the world has changed, so have we, to the benefit of the company and our customers.
I have met this gentleman in the US a couple of weeks ago, at the Open Source ThinkTank. Still clueless? Then read the entire post: Why I’m excited about Yahoo!
WHDb writes “The Top 50 Proprietary Programs that Drive You Crazy–and Their Open Source Alternatives.”
Most of these programs are familiar old friends, like Ubuntu and OpenOffice, but the list includes some that are new to me, such as Archimedes CAD.
The list is mostly focused on open source programs to run on Windows, though most (yet, not all) of the key applications are cross-platform for Linux and Mac as well. (I maintain a list of my preferred FOSS programs for Mac OS X here.)
Tags: Linux, Open Source, openoffice