The Dead Microsoft Sketch

The first time I was really impressed by Microsoft was back in the 1980s. I was being given a private demonstration of a hot new program for the Macintosh. I was struck not just by the beta's cool new graphical interface - a clear advance on existing DOS programs like 1-2-3 - but also by the infectious enthusiasm of the Microsoftie showing me around the beta. The program, as you've probably guessed, was Excel; the person doing the demo was Bill Gates.

On Open Enterprise blog.

Ballmer: GNU/Linux Will Win on Netbooks

Here's what he said:

"The economy is helpful. Paying an extra $500 for a computer in this environment -- same piece of hardware -- paying $500 more to get a logo on it? I think that's a more challenging proposition for the average person than it used to be."

I think this is a very frank analysis of the problem for Microsoft: after all, who's going to pay extra money just to get the Windows logo on a netbook, when they can get the same features for less with free software...?

Straws in the Wind

Alongside all the high-profile wins for free software, there are what might be called guerilla gains happening in the background – small conceptual victories that point to greater things. Here's two....

On Open Enterprise blog.

The True Value of Nothing

How much is GNU/Linux worth? Well, its price is zero, but it's clearly incredibly valuable: what to do? Here's what a new paper from the Linux Foundation did....

On Open Enterprise blog.

The Marvellous Mr. arXiv

Paul Ginsparg is one of the key players in the world of open access. Indeed, he was practising it online before it even had a name, when he set up the arXiv preprint server (originally known simply by its address "xxx.lanl.gov"), which has just celebrated its half-millionth deposit:

arXiv is the primary daily information source for hundreds of thousands of researchers in many areas of physics and related fields. Its users include the world's most prominent researchers in science, including 53 Physics Nobel Laureates, 31 Fields Medalists and 55 MacArthur Fellows, as well as people in countries with limited access to scientific materials. The famously reclusive Russian mathematician Grigori Perelman posted the proof for the 100-year-old Poincare Conjecture solely in arXiv.

Journalists also use the repository extensively to prepare articles for the general public about newly released scientific results. It has long stood at the forefront of the open-access movement and served as the model for many other initiatives, including the National Institute of Health?fs PubMedCentral repository, and the many institutional DSpace repositories. arXiv is currently ranked the No. 1 repository in the world by the Webometrics Ranking of World Universities.

"arXiv began its operations before the World Wide Web, search engines, online commerce and all the rest, but nonetheless anticipated many components of current 'Web 2.0' methodology," said Cornell professor Paul Ginsparg, arXiv's creator. "It continues to play a leading role at the forefront of new models for scientific communication."

Given his pivotal role in the open access, it's good that Ginsparg has expanded on that rather compressed history of his work in a fascinating romp through both the creation of arXiv and his own personal experience of the nascent Internet and Web.

Here's a few of the highlights:

I first used e-mail on the original ARPANET — a predecessor of the Internet — during my freshman year at Harvard University in 1973, while my more business-minded classmates Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer, the future Microsoft bosses, were already plotting ahead to ensure that our class would have the largest average net worth of any undergraduate year ever.

...

At the Aspen Center for Physics, in Colorado, in the summer of 1991, a stray comment from a physicist, concerned about e-mailed articles overrunning his disk allocation while travelling, suggested to me the creation of a centralized automated repository and alerting system, which would send full texts only on demand. That solution would also democratize the exchange of information, levelling the aforementioned research playing field, both internally within institutions and globally for all with network access.

Thus was born xxx.lanl.gov, initially an e-mail/FTP server.

...

In the autumn of 1992, a colleague at CERN e-mailed me: “Q: do you know the world-wide-web program?” I did not, but quickly installed WorldWideWeb.app, coincidentally written by Tim Berners-Lee for the same NeXT computer that I was using, and with whom I began to exchange e-mails. Later that autumn, I used it to help beta-test the first US Web server, set up by the library at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center for use by the high-energy physics community.

...

That sceptical attitude regarding the potential efficacy of full-text searching carried over to my own website’s treatment of crawlers as unwanted nuisances. Seemingly out-of-control and anonymously run crawls sometimes resulted in overly vociferous complaints to network administrators from the offending domain. I was recently reminded of a long-forgotten incident involving test crawls from some unmemorably named stanford.edu-hosted machines in mid-1996, when both Sergey Brin and Larry Page graciously went out of their way to apologize to me in person at Google headquarters for their deeds all those years ago.

...

no legislation is required to encourage users to post videos to YouTube, whose incentive of instant gratification comes through making personal content publicly available (which parallels with the scholarly benefit of voluntary participation in the incipient version of arXiv in 1991.)

Fascinating tales from a fascinating life.

Buy Windows XP, Get Vista Free

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Munich Makes Good

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Ballmer Will Buy (Into) Open Source

"We will do some buying of companies that are built around open-source products," Ballmer said during an onstage interview at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.

A refusal to consider acquisitions of open-source developers "would take us out of the acquisition market quite dramatically," Ballmer said -- a tacit acknowledgment of how thoroughly open-source development has reshaped the software market.

I don't think Steve really realises what he is saying: you can't just buy an open source company, you have to buy *into* the entire culture - it's the only way the company's product can survive. In other words, Microsoft would have to become - if only in part - an open source company, as I've maintained it would for a while, now. (See also Matt Asay's interesting thoughts on who exactly Ballmer might be getting his chequebook out for.)

Behold: Son of SCO

Well, that nice Mr. Ballmer did warn us, and here it is:

Plaintiffs, IP Innovation L.L.C. and Technology Licensing Corporation (collectively “Plaintiffs”) complain of defendants Red Hat Inc. (“Red Hat”) and Novell Inc. (“Novell”) as follows:

1. This is a claim for patent infringement arising under the patent laws of the United States, Title 35 of the United States Code.

Of course, this is replete with ironies.

First, "IP Innovation" - as in, zero innovation. These are patent trolls, and the patent - which looks like basic windowing technology - is both obvious and probably covered by prior art.

Secondly, poor old Novell: they probably thought they were immune to this kind of thing. But their deal with Microsoft says nothing about not getting sued by trolls. Or rather, trolls with interesting connections to Microsoft:

So in July one Microsoft executive arrives [at IP Innovation]; then as of October 1, there is the second, a patent guy. October 9, IP Innovation, a subsidiary, sues Red Hat. And Novell. So much for being Microsoft's little buddy.

The good news is that this is all too late: even in the US, a modicum of sanity is returning to patents as the US Supreme Court begins to rein in some of the excesses that have spawned in the last decade. The other good news is that Microsoft will come out of this looking bad, again. However much they huff and puff, the clear link back to them shows them not only to be underhand, but cowards, too.

In the Battle of the Platforms, Openness Decides

It feels strange to find myself in agreement with Steve Ballmer (eek), but I, too, find all these social networking sites rather faddish. That's not to say they won't settle down into an important role, but the gold-fever mentality (how many zeros is Facebook worth today? I do find it hard to keep up) seems destined for a dotcom-type deflation.

That notwithstanding, this is interesting, and important:

MySpace is gearing up to launch MySpace Platform, according to a number of third party developers who’ve been contacted for input on the product.

...

Suddenly Facebook, with nearly 5,500 third party applications, has significant competition around their platform - Within a month both MySpace and Google ... will probably have launched their own services. Platform competition is great for developers, but it also means they need to create and maintain separate code for each platform they choose to play on.

Well, one factor that will doubtedly affect that decision is the openness of the platform. After all, which would you rather code for: one that locks you in and tells you what to do, or one that doesn't?

Solving the Open Source Conundrum

As I've written elsewhere, people have realised that there's a bit of a problem with the term "open source". It's becoming too popular: too many people want to stick the "open source" label on their wares without worrying about the details - like whether they conform to the "official" Open Source Definition (OSD).

The real conundrum is this: how can the use of the term "open source" be policed when it has no legal standing, since it is not a trademark. Theoretically, anyone can use it with impunity - for anything. This is obviously a problem for the "real" open source world, which needs to find a way to encourage vendors to use the term responsibly.

Peer pressure is certainly important here, but there may be another factor. In the course of research for a feature, I came across IBM's big patent pledge of January 2005:

IBM today pledged open access to key innovations covered by 500 IBM software patents to individuals and groups working on open source software. IBM believes this is the largest pledge ever of patents of any kind and represents a major shift in the way IBM manages and deploys its intellectual property (IP) portfolio.

Back then, this was mildly interesting, if greeted with a certain cynicism. But today, in the wake of Microsoft's sabre-rattling, patents are much more of an issue for all open source companies, which makes the next paragraph of the IBM announcement particularly pertinent:

The pledge is applicable to any individual, community, or company working on or using software that meets the Open Source Initiative (OSI) definition of open source software now or in the future.

So there we have a major incentive to meet the OSI definition of open source: if you do, IBM will let you use a good wodge of its patents. This means that in the event of patent Armageddon, where IBM and Microsoft slug it out in the courts, you will not only be safe from any direct attacks from IBM, but might even enjoy the indirect halo effect of IBM's patent portfolio.

Although IBM has not exactly guaranteed it would come rushing to the aid of any OSI-approved damsel in distress if it were attacked by the Microsoft dragon, its patent pledge does contain an element of this implicitly. It's certainly easy to see the benefits for IBM of such a move, both in terms of positive publicity and direct competitive advantage. At the very least, Microsoft is likely to think twice about attacking any company that has this kind of patent hook up with Big Blue.

If you don't adopt the OSI approach, though, you're outside the IBM castle, and on your tod when that nice Mr Ballmer comes calling about those patents he claims your company infringes. And since you're not playing nicely with the official OSI crew, don't expect any help from its big corporate chum, IBM.

Now, tell me again why you don't want to go legit with this "open source" label?

Calling Ballmer's Bluff

This was something I was going to write about, but someone has gone one better and come up with an entire site devoted to the idea:

Open Letter to Steven Ballmer

It's come to many in the Linux community’s attention you have claimed again and again, that Linux violates Microsoft's intellectual property. Not only that, but it's been reported Microsoft has convinced businesses to pay for a Linux patent that you can't provide.

Therefore, this website will serve as a response to this accusation, and within it, a request. The request is simple, since you, Microsoft, claim to be so sure of yourself: Show Us the Code.

Show us the code, indeed.

Why Ballmer Will Go

See? It's not just me:

Stop Him Before He Speaks Again!

....

Just keep him quiet! Should we expect another mea-culpa in the inbox?

Him being Steve "The Flying Chair" Ballmer. Do read the rest of the post for further insight into the state of the good ship Microsoft.

Steve Ballmer on Open Source

I am always amused - and slightly annoyed - that so much space is devoted to the wit and wisdom of Steve Ballmer, because basically he has none. That is, his words are pure marketing-speak, full of the right phrases, but signifying nothing. But at least in this FT interview, there's some interesting information about how Microsoft understands the open source challenge:

The biggest competitive challenges that any business faces is actually alternate business models. It is not a company. If you tell me somebody wants to come compete with us and do software in an area where we compete, or that we are going to get in a new area and it’s the same business model, it’s selling software, I know we can do it.

When somebody comes with a different business model, that’s where you get… or a phenomenon comes with a different business model.

What was the number one different business model that our company has confronted in the last six years? It’s Open Source. Open Source is not a technology phenomenon; it is a business model phenomenon. Frankly speaking, exactly what that business model is, is still unclear.

But that is a different business model and we had to ask ourselves: What do we do to compete? And we wound up saying it’s all about value and total cost of ownership, and high performance computing is a good example. It’s about 30 per cent of Linux share, and we are saying: Hey look, this is actually an area where we can take a lot of share with the right innovation, and the right total cost of ownership.

We shall see, Steve.

Murder Will Out

Well, what a surprise:

In comments confirming the open-source community's suspicions, Microsoft Corp. CEO Steve Ballmer today declared his belief that the Linux operating system infringes on Microsoft's intellectual property.

In a question-and-answer session after his keynote speech at the Professional Association for SQL Server (PASS) conference in Seattle, Ballmer said Microsoft was motivated to sign a deal with SUSE Linux distributor Novell Inc. earlier this month because Linux "uses our intellectual property" and Microsoft wanted to "get the appropriate economic return for our shareholders from our innovation."

And there we all were, thinking that Microsoft really wanted to be free software's best chum.

Mixed Messages from Microsoft

Understandably everyone is jumping up and down about Microsoft's announcement that it will be working with Novell. But for me, the key phrase is the following from Steve "Monkey Boy" Ballmer:

We’re excited to work with Novell, whose strengths include its heritage as a mixed-source company.

Did you catch that? "Mixed-source" - it's clearly the Microsoft meme of the moment, as Microsoft tries yet again to get a grip on this spaghetti monster that is open source. In the past it's tried calling it "non-commercial" (as well as a few less complimentary things), and I predict that we're going to be hearing the phrase "mixed-source" quite alot - until they move on to something else.

Update: Here's a very shrewd analysis of what happened from Simon Phipps.

Microsoft's Unhealthy Move

For all its corporate rapaciousness, Microsoft has always been scrupulous in keeping its partners happy: it knows that much of its immense strength derives from the huge Windows ecosystem it has created around itself. Indeed, whatever its manifest misdeeds in terms of abusing its monopoly position, it is arguable - and the company itself has made the argument - that through this vast network it has created far more wealth than any harm it is accused of.

Against this background, two recent moves are pretty astonishing. First, there is Zune, which as many commentators have observed, is unlikely to damage Apple so much as all those who signed up to the horribly-named "PlaysForSure" initiative to provide online music services based around Microsoft technologies.

And now, even more surprising, we have Microsoft's move into offering healthcare software. The actual figures involved are minuscule, but the signal it sends is immense. For it seems to suggest that in its growing desperation at the loss of market share in its traditional sectors - and with the threat of ever-greater losses in the future - the company has decided to break its golden rule to leave to third-parties vertical markets, while it supplies (at a handsome profit) all the infrastructural stuff.

I can't help seeing the hand of Ballmer in this, eager to make his own mark on what is still Bill Gates's company. It would be an obvious thing for a hard-nosed salesman to do - to carve up former partners in an attempt to grab slices of new pies. But I predict that the move will go down very badly with Microsoft's erstwhile supporters, already unnerved by the sword of Zune hanging over them, as they begin to wonder which sector will be next on the Microsoft hitlist.

In fact, I expect they're starting to feel as sick as a parrot.

Signs of Eclipse

Microsoft never gives ought for nought. Few remember that originally you had to pay for Internet Explorer, which formed part of something called Windows Plus; it was only when beating Netscape Navigator became a priority that Internet Explorer suddenly became an indissoluble part of Windows that could never be removed without destroying the whole system (funny that I remembering uninstalling it without causing any global chaos).

So the news that Microsoft is making Visual Studio Express free begs the question: why? Since we can discount the theory that Steve Ballmer has become a closet communist, we might suspect that there is a competitive reason. Surely it couldn't be because that funny old Eclipse project is beginning to, well, eclipse Microsoft's own offerings among the "18 million recreational and hobbyist developers" that the press release mentions by the by?

Time for Mac users to see the OSS light?

The good news just kept on coming in Steve Jobs's recent MacWorld speech: $5.7 million revenue in the last quarter for Apple; 14 million iPods sold during the same period; a run-rate of a billion songs a year sold on iTunes. And of course some hot new hardware, the iMac and MacBook Pro. What more could Mac fans ask for?

How about an office suite whose long-term future they can depend on?

Microsoft may have announced “a formal five-year agreement that reinforces Microsoft’s plans to develop Microsoft Office for Mac software for both PowerPC- and Intel-based Macs,” but Mac users would do well to consider the company's record here, as its has progressively shut down its line of Macintosh software. First, it dropped its MSN client, then Internet Explorer and more recently Windows Media Player.

Microsoft has good reason to hate Apple. Steve Jobs and his company represent everything that Bill Gates and Microsoft are not: hip and heroic, perfectionist yet popular. Apple has always been Microsoft's main rival on the desktop, but the appearance of Intel-based Macintoshes will make the company more dangerous than it has ever been. Probably the only reason that Microsoft has kept alive its Macintosh division is that it looks good from an anti-trust viewpoint: “See? We're not abusing our position – we even support rivals...”. The Macintosh version of Office may bring in money, but it's a trivial amount compared to the Windows version, and hardly worth the effort expended on it.

This means that the future of Microsoft Office for the Mac can never be certain. The agreement with Apple might be extended, but knowing Microsoft, it might not. At the very least, Microsoft is likely to ensure that the Windows versions of Office has advantages over the one running on the new Intel Macs – otherwise the incentive to buy PCs running Windows will be reduced even more.

So what should concerned Mac users do? The obvious solution is to move to an open source alternative. An important benefit of taking this route – one often overlooked when comparisons are made with proprietary offerings – is that free software is effectively immortal. Sometimes it goes into hibernation, but when the code is freely available, it never dies.

Just look at the case of the Mozilla Application Suite. The Mozilla Foundation decided not to continue with the development of this code base, but to concentrate instead on the increasingly successful standalone programs Firefox and Thunderbird. Had Mozilla been a commercial outfit, that would have been the end of the story for the program and its community. Instead, some hackers were able to take the old Mozilla Application Suite code and use it as the basis of a new project called SeaMonkey.

A similar desire to get things moving outside existing structures motivated the creation of the separate NeoOffice project, the port of the free OpenOffice.org office suite to run natively on MacOS X (there is also a version that uses the X11 windowing system). As the FAQ explains: “The primary reason that we stay separate is that we can develop, release, and support a native Mac OS X office suite with much less time and money than we could if we worked within the OpenOffice.org project.” This is hardly an option for the Mac Office team at Microsoft; so when Gates and Ballmer give Mac Office the chop, there will be no Redmond resurrections.

It is true that NeoOffice is not yet quite as polished as the versions on other platforms. And maybe Microsoft Office is superior – at the moment. But there is nothing that some hacking won't fix, and with serious support from the Macintosh community (and perhaps even financial help from Apple) any outstanding issues would soon be resolved. The emergence of OpenDocument as a viable alternative to Microsoft's Office formats only strengthens the case for switching to free software.

The wild excitement generated by Steve Jobs's MacWorld announcements is understandable, but also dangerous. Mac users may be so focussed on the hot new hardware as to forget something crucial: that, ultimately, it is the application software that counts. Macintosh enthusiasts should refuse the poisoned chalice that Microsoft is offering them with its generous offer to keep Office for the Mac on life support for a few more years, and instead should channel some of their famous passion into supporting the creation of a first-class, full-featured open source office suite.

Microsoft's Next Desperation?

One indication of Microsoft's inability to handle the threat of the free software model is that fact that it keeps changing its strategy.

Back in 1999, it tried to show that Windows was more powerful than comparable GNU/Linux systems. It commissioned some research from a company called Mindcraft, which showed that Windows was indeed faster for many tasks. There were bitter arguments about the validity of these tests and their results, and several re-runs as each side tried to bolster its own position.

But what is interesting about this episode is that the weaknesses that were exposed in the GNU/Linux system were simply fed into the development process and fixed in the next release. This indicates one of the great strengths of open source. Solving problems is just a matter of skill; what is hard is pinning them down in the first place. Ironically, Microsoft did the Linux community a huge favour by spending lots of money finding the weak areas of its rival, which were then fixed.

Since GNU/Linux was soon manifestly as good as Windows in terms of performance, Microsoft was forced to change tack. In June 2001, Steve Ballmer famously told the Chicago Sun-Times that "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches". However, the business world was clearly less impressed by Ballmer's verbal tantrums than the his sales teams, and the outburst backfired badly. It merely showed Microsoft to be running scared.

More recently, the company has apparently adopted a more conciliatory attitude to the free software world - a recognition of the fact that its customers are using it. But clearly, in closed rooms around the company, it is still searching desperately for something it can against open source.

One emerging tack was evident in a fascinating article that appeared in a magazine aimed at Microsoft Certified Professionals. In it, there was a glimpse into how the Microsoft world views the free software threat. Of particular note is the assertion that "Microsoft invests north of $6 billion a year on R&D", and that "nobody in the Linux world" does anything comparable. The implication would seem to be that Microsoft is therefore a hotbed of creativity and innovation, whereas all free software can do is limp along with tired old tricks.

An extensive and thorough debunking of this assertion came from D C Parris in LXer. All the points he raises are good ones, but I'd like to focus on one in particular.

The statement that Microsoft is serious spending sums on research is true: you only have to look at Microsoft's Research division to see the wide range of work going on. Moreover, to Microsoft' credit, much of this work is made freely available in the form of published papers.

But the second part of the argument - that open source companies taken together spend nowhere near as much as Microsoft - is specious. The whole point about free software is that it represents the communal efforts of thousands of people around the world, most of whom receive no remuneration for their work. Indeed, money probably couldn't even buy the kind of obsessive attention to detail they routinely provide: it comes from passion not payment.

The new argument that the quotation from the above article is putting about comes down to this: that something given freely is worth nothing. In a way, this is the fundamental error that those who do not understand the open world make. In fact, the issue is much larger, and goes to the root of most of the key problems facing the world today. Which is why the "opens" - open source, open genomics, open content and all the cognate approaches - are so crucial: they lie at the heart of solving those same problems.