Sam Ramji: Donating code to an established, consensus-driven organization such as the Apache Software Foundation benefits both our customers and the open source community at large
Reminds me of a quote:
Perhaps... in several thousand years... your people, and mine, shall meet to reach an agreement. You are still half savage... but there is hope.
When I joined IBM, it was the undisputed evil empire. Here’s hoping that Microsoft makes the journey successfully.
if I may...
when a large company — like Microsoft, IBM, or Oracle — donates code, there is always a capitalist angle.
either they are attempting to achieve street cred with the alpha geeks, they are end-of-lifing useless software, or they are trying to keep down the competition.
In this case, Microsoft is propping up their monopoly position as the de-facto word processing standard by helping the Apache POI project work better... so plunk this in the ‘keep down the competition’ bucket.
In other news this week... IBM is ‘keeping down the competition’ by donating $10 million to the open source PostGRESQL folks.
In other news this week... Oracle is ‘keeping down the competition’ by open sourcing their XML database XQilla.
I see no hope... just more of the same.
If I may, whenever a small company or an individual participates in open source, there always is a significant bit of self interest involved. Either they are attempting to achieve street cred with their peers (or land a job), they are trying to offload/share maintenance responsibilities, or they are part of a Movement.
I remember when XML itself was considered something that Microsoft would usurp and encounter. This lead to the IBM donation what was to become Xerces and Xalan. By making available quality and conformant implementations under a “no excuses not to” license early, XML never got into the “but it works with IE” sad state that HTML current is trying to dig out from under.
I have to believe that $10 million will prove helpful to the PostgreSQL community. I don’t know anything about XQilla, but in both cases, as a user: no matter what database you may use, such contributions will either prove directly or indirectly beneficial, or at worst be neutral.
From my perspective, I sincerely hope we see more of the same. Lots more.
"to the Odd..."
The odd what? I guess I’m missing the reference...
The IBM donations that created Xalan and Xerces did indeed help end-users, and kept Microsoft from ruining XML... at something of a cost. However, in many cases, open source by large companies is just another dimension of FUD.
Why spend money on decent software X when big company Y makes grand promises about free software Z?
Maybe free software Z eventually gets good, and everybody wins. Maybe it stagnates due to lack of resources — like many open source projects — which would be neutral. But what if it simultaneously kills the market for decent software X? That’s a big negative...
Time will tell...
Obviously, we all understand that Microsoft is doing this out of self-interest, rather than out of the goodness of their hearts. And I’m sure you all realize that their ultimate objective is the acceptance and wide usage of the OOXML specification. With that in mind, I respectfully disagree that this will ultimately lead to some happy future where open source walks arm-in-arm with Microsoft and everyone lives happily ever after. Frankly, this barely even counts as a first step in that direction. Microsoft still thinks of open source as a weapon.
It’s a genuine first step when Microsoft realizes that they’re better off making a long-term bet, implementing support for ODF in Office, and working with the community to improve whatever limitations are present in that spec instead of producing their own format.
I’ll be willing to give Microsoft some serious kudos and maybe even a smidgen or two of trust if it ever does happen, but I’m not holding my breath.
In the meantime, I’m inclined to say that this is one case where the typical open source practice of supporting every format under the sun may be a mistake. Inevitably, this will be used as a selling point for the OOXML specification. Microsoft will point to this implementation and say, “See! You can approve this as an international standard because even the open source guys can read the format!” I don’t know about you, but that doesn’t strike me as a favorable outcome.