Microsoft Launches Its Own Open Source Foundation 344
darthcamaro writes "Microsoft already had its own open source (OSI-approved) licenses, its own open source project hosting site and now it's adding its own non-profit open source foundation.
That's right, the company that is still banging the patent drum against open source now has its own 501(c)(6) open source foundation. Officially called the CodePlex Foundation, it's a separate effort from the CodePlex site and is aimed at helping to get more commercial developers involved in open source. Considering how they continue to attack Linux and open source, will anyone take them seriously?"
Parental oversight (Score:4, Informative)
Seems like a meta-organization for open source entities, under the watchful eye of Redmond.
Re:trap (Score:0, Informative)
Windows 7 is the best OS ever. Hell, even Windows Vista makes Ubuntu and OS X look like pathetic jokes.
Re:Coal.. Kettle? (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Coal.. Kettle? (Score:1, Informative)
Re:Coal.. Kettle? (Score:5, Informative)
Link [groklaw.net]
Note that MS tried to keep the auction secret, but apparently someone within AST clued OIN in as to what was happening.
Even though AST claims they are not into litigation, there be demons within.
Codeplex will be no different.
Did you hear the news? Buy a copy of Windows7, and get a discount on new designer sheep clothing.
Introductions are in order... (Score:2, Informative)
Left hand, this is the right hand. You two should talk sometime, and find out what each other is doing.
Re:Coal.. Kettle? (Score:5, Informative)
Wrong. Microsoft sued first and TomTom responded with a countersuit.
See http://www.reuters.com/article/technologyNews/idUSTRE52J1IE20090320 [reuters.com]
Re:Jealousy (Score:3, Informative)
There is truly innovation in the programming language sphere, and Microsoft has a record of hiring successful open source language designers. Simon Peyton-Jones (of Haskell fame) is a recent example.
Recent? Simon Peyton-Jones has been working for Microsoft Research since 1998. In fact, he is still working on GHC as a Microsoft employee - LINQ was definitely inspired by some things in Haskell, but Simon didn't design it.
If you want a better example, it's ex-Sun, ex-Google Neal Gafter of Java closures fame [javac.info], since last year working for Microsoft (not MSR) on .NET languages.
Re:Coal.. Kettle? (Score:4, Informative)
The way it went was actually this:
1. TomTom warned Microsoft that the latter infringes on TomTom's patents. This isn't the same as suing, but it can only be interpreted as the first step towards doing that. The purpose of notification is to make sure that, as far as law is concerned, the infringing party infringes knowingly; if they don't stop, the penalties grow significantly (3x, if I recall correctly).
2. In response, Microsoft sues TomTom.
3. In response to that suit, TomTom sues Microsoft over the same patents it warned about at step 1.
MS-DOS 1.x was a clone of CP/M (Score:2, Informative)
> DOS was not a clone of CP/M
It was very much a clone of CP/M.
Both SCP and MS were DRI OEMs and had all the CP/M OEM materials that DRI supplied. At the time one could obtain 'decompilers' for the CP/M BDOS which contained hand coded source and comments that was sequenced by an actual BDOS (to avoid copyright issues). SCP put this source through the Intel 8080 -> 8086 converter and brought up an 8086 Zebra system by building it with CP/M and then swapping the CPU boards to boot it with QDOS. Later they swapped out the CP/M file system and replaced it with MS's FAT from 'Stand Alone BASIC' while retaining the FCB processing.
Early MS/PC-DOS systems could display a DRI copyright that had been buried in the CP/M code and they also had a bug in the FCB code that was in CP/M 1.3. When shown this IBM settled by rewriting MS/PC-DOS to remove copyrighted code, agreed to sell CP/M-86 alongside PC-DOS (but shafted DRI on price and never updated the product) and granted DRI the right to sell PC-DOS clones (which is why they were never sued over DR-DOS).
MS/PC-DOS 1.x software such as dBase II, Visicalc, WordStar, and PearTree were simple 8->16 converts using Intel converters because the MS-DOS process environment was almost identical to CP/M.
Later MS produced another clone of CP/M: MSX-DOS which ran on Z80 MSX machines and could run CP/M programs.
Re:Will anyone take them seriously? (Score:3, Informative)
I have to laugh at comments like this.
You can bet that most open source versions of closed source programs are more efficient and less resource hungry, because they typically don't implement all the features of the closed source version. Samba is on different, with whole swaths of functionality not implemented. Also, SMB2 tests have shown to be significantly faster than Samba as well. If you want to read up on why, check this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Server_Message_Block#SMB2 [wikipedia.org]
Hell, I have a Linux based NAS which uses Samba 3.1 and it's slow as molasses.
It's pretty clear MS is not pushing Open Source (Score:1, Informative)