Comments on: Microsoft creates open source subsidiary

By: Black First Name

Black First Name — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 19:52:00 +0000

Can not see a CORPORATE entity doing good in a Open world. They love profit too much. As soon as a technology starts to take off, they turn the code into code you need to pay for. Look at Bing API and how they decided to start charging for use.

How will this be any different than a for-profit corporation taking advantage of volunteers and profitting from their work and leaving the liability of the table.

They fail to understand that they only commit to projects that profit. Look at all the projects they have bailed on only after a few years of release. Once they see that there is no money in a volunteer-only environment, they will bail. Once they see all the lawsuits that start coming, they will bail. Once they see how much 60 engineers costs after a few years with zero revenue, they will bail. This has a lifetime of about three-four years.

What about the Free Software community? Open and Free are complete different and FREE will always win in the end for the consumer/developer.

The internet in the 80-90′s was ALL ABOUT FREE SOFTWARE. Thats how it evolved so quickly on the backs of volunteers of free software. The open community is much different and MS still has no clue how to deal with this.

Maybe they will destroy the terms of Open when they start digging for profits, demanding money, squeezing every little profit as possible in order to cover costs. WHen you think of OPEN today, will not be the same as OPEN ten years from now after corporations have taken over the volunteers and turned them into human slaves with no pay. Makes great sense to have other people create your development for you and profit from those poor volunteers.

Look at all the projects they have bailed on after a few years though, what makes the community think they will commit longer than three years?

By: Larry Garfield

Larry Garfield — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 16:40:00 +0000

And no company besides Microsoft ever submits code to an open source project that would benefit them. No, never. All other companies submit code that they benefit from not in the least, just to be nice to people. Right.

I’m a heavy OSS contributor, and I can tell you that’s BS. :-) I don’t trust MS either, but “they contribute stuff that helps MS products” is not a condemnation of anything.

By: Aaron Baker

Aaron Baker — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 02:56:00 +0000

You succeeded in getting trojan horse Elop to destroy Nokia and its open Symbian and open Meego and drop QT the best solution to bring app developers from everywhere. All the carriers are boycotting your Nokia windows blows phones taking your money and not selling them but instead offering Androids and Iphones. You made sure of that when you bought skype and stuck little fat waddling trojan horse Elop into Nokia. Symbian is more carrier friendly worldwide and has more handsets out there than anyone with its support of languages from everywhere and carrier billing and you replaced it with carrier unfriendly (now with even more unfriendliness-skype) windows shat.
HOW ARE WE SUPPOSED TO BELIEVE THIS IS NOT AN EFFORT TO KEEP TABS ON OPEN SOURCE SO YOU CAN BLOCK IT AND HINDER IT.
Windows phones is getting boycotted. With your free xbox 360 and discounted to free BS, YOU’RE STILL GETTING BOYCOTTED. Remove Elop now.

By: Matti

Matti — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:41:00 +0000

Finally, someone who get’s it!!
Whatever Microsoft contributes to the FOSS community stands to benefit Microsoft first and foremost, whether it’s Windows virtualization, .Net or whatever.

By: Kloplop321

Kloplop321 — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:33:00 +0000

UNIX is not open source.

By: MonkeyDo

MonkeyDo — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 13:05:00 +0000

“In fact, not long ago Microsoft made the list of the top contributors to the open source Linux kernel”Could this be more out of context in favor of Microsoft? The contributed code was for Hyper-V. Their motivation? who the hell is going to use Hyper-V if you cannot virtualize anything but windows?

By: MonkeyC

MonkeyC — Fri, 13 Apr 2012 12:44:00 +0000

…blah…blah..blah..and they shut down their operations in a couple of years…