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Does Microsoft Have an Open Source Heart?
8/1/2008
The mistake that Microsoft has made with its products is to not be agnostic, according to Ramji. He added that Microsoft plans to focus more on interoperability, working with platforms such as Linux or Solaris.
Ramji clarified the open source comments by Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO, spoken earlier this month. Ballmer denied that Microsoft's products would become open source at the company's Worldwide Partner Conference in Houston. Ramji explained that Ballmer was referring to Microsoft's core products, such Exchange, SQL Server and others.
Ballmer described it this way at the conference, per a Microsoft-issued transcript.
"Number one, are our products likely to be open sourced? No," Ballmer said. "We do provide our source code in special situations, but open source also implies free, free is inconsistent with paying for lunches at the partner conference. (Applause.) With that said, there are a number of different things. Will we interoperate with products that come from like Linux, from the open source world? Yes, we will."
Still, Ramji will have a tough time convincing some in the open source community. The Free Software Foundation, while not an advocate of open source software per se, does believe that software should be free to all.
Peter Brown, executive director of the Free Software Foundation, said of Ballmer's comments that Microsoft is trying to establish a better relationship with the open source software community to the detriment of GNU Linux.
"Microsoft wants people to build code to the Windows platform rather than GNU Linux, but the FSF's view is to build an ecosystem with free software," Brown explained.
Kurt Mackie is online news editor, Enterprise Group, at 1105 Media Inc. You can contact Kurt at kmackie@1105media.com.
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