Response to "Microsoft at OSCON"

Zack Urlocker has written a blog on his OpenSource blog at InfoWorld about Microsoft's participation at OSCON. Please read that first.

I started writing this as a comment on his blog but it was getting a bit too long .. so I thought I'll blog it directly:

Zack, conventional wisdom seems to be that Microsoft must do open source by releasing the source code for one of their cash cows. If you're a shareholder of MSFT, does that make sense at all?? They're making $60B an year and we expect them to open source any of that? No way.

Take IBM. We all give IBM a lot of credit for being a "good" open source player right?? Hmmmm. Really? Which product of theirs is open source? Compare with MSFT: Windows == mainframe (totally proprietary). Office == WebSphere family (totally proprietary) etc. etc.. Not a single major product of IBM's is open source. (I don't consider WebSphere Community Edition aka Apache Geronimo a serious play.) Should IBM open source DB2 or WebSphere or any of their other market successful products?? Hell no. Why should they; certainly their share holders aren't calling for it!

The way Microsoft can and should do open source is by (a) interoperating with open source stuff and enabling open source to run well on/with their products, and (b) by using open source to expand the markets they play in.

We (WSO2) are working with them closely on (a). For example, right now we have a joint booth with them at OSCON demonstrating WS-* interop between .Net, Java, PHP, Ruby, Perl and Spring. (Please do drop by and take a look!) In May we were part of a keynote speech by Bob Muglia (MSFT SVP Server & Tools) at TechEd ITPro where we showed an earlier version of that demo. That's the first time an open source company was part of a major MSFT keynote.

I'm not here to defend MSFT. Yes, they have DEFINITELY done all kinds of things to try to destroy the open source movement. IBM, on the other hand, has indeed helped in NUMEROUS ways with helping open source (esp. in market/technology segments where they were not players .. they're VERY smart). However, I think the conventional wisdom that MSFT can do more with/for open source only by "showing me the code" is wrong.

That's where (b) comes into play. The way I see MSFT entering open source is by buying one or more open source companies and entering into market segments they do not play in now. When? Who knows. Who? Who knows. Obvious candidates go from Redhat to Novell to Spring to a bunch of others. Why should they enter spaces they are not in right now? Because the enterprise space is inherently and permanently heterogeneous and if you want to eat bigger and bigger chunks of that market, the only way to do that is to play in multiple segments of that market. You will not succeed by trying to get Java developers to convert to .Net. Nor PHP ones. Nor mainframe ones.

There certainly could be a (c): open source one or more of their products. However, as anyone who has tried to open source a closed source products knows, it is REALLY difficult to make such an open source project succeed. First of all, getting legal clearance and scrubbing the code takes a long time (for example, someone told me that Sun decided to open source Solaris 5 years before they were finally able to do it .. no idea whether its true). Second, open source code is naturally modularized and better documented because there are geographically and temporally separated contributors from day 1 who communicate to each other thru such module boundaries. What that means is that it is VERY difficult to form a community around a complex piece of software because no one can easily "carve out a corner for themselves". Even building such complex software is hard and may require resources that a typical developer notebook can't deliver.

So even if the MSFT business were to decide that (c) made sense (and I really don't see why yet), the practical reality of getting the code out and making it work as a true community effort is going to be so hard that in the end they'd be holding a lemon of an open source project.

Thus, to me, the current MSFT strategy of doing (a) makes perfect sense. (b) will come when the time is right. Whoever will get bought out first will be making history.

WSO2 interoperability demo with Microsoft at TechEd 2008

Earlier today WSO2's Jonathan Marsh, Director of Mashup Technologies, was on stage with Microsoft's Greg Leek, Director of Connected Systems Division during Bob Muglia's keynote at TechEd IT 2008, to demonstrate how interoperability is real between some of WSO2's open source technologies (WSF/PHP and WSO2 WSAS) and Microsoft's WCF. This was done by demonstrating plug-n-play between different implementations of pieces of the Stock Trader interop application, originally defined by IBM.

You can watch the keynote here.

For us in WSO2, interoperability is everything. The main value of XML, the Web and Web services comes from being able to interoperate seamlessly between different systems. Web services is in fact the first ever platform that ALL vendors have agreed to as a single common platform for interoperability. Yes of course there are lots of minor and (some) major quibbles, but for the first time Web services have achieved what no other integration technology (CORBA, J2EE, DCE etc.) was able to achieve: get the entire computing industry to agree to a single set of integration protocols.

While the standards process for Web services is now nearly over, the real problem of ensuring that everyone's bits work with everyone else's bits is still not done. What happened with this demonstration was that WSO2, the leading open source SOA vendor and the brains and brauns behind many of Apache's Web services projects, and Microsoft, the leader in defining the Web services platform, got together to show that this stuff really does work :-).

Are we done? Far from it. It took many many years of hard work before every TCP implementation interoperated with every other implementation. There's no doubt that it will take more time and effort to get every single implementation to interoperate seamlessly. However, this is a great start as the leader in open source Web services and the originator of Web services demonstrate that things really do work.

If you'd like to download the actual bits and give it a whirl, visit WSO2 Oxygen Tank and MSDN.

Microsoft buys open source company

Microsoft has just bought their first true open source business! No, not WSO2 :-).

Zimbra.

Assuming the Yahoo! deal goes through, MSFT will be the proud owner of Zimbra .. a company which gives its software away for free under an OSI approved license and makes (a lot of) money by offering a service. It also happens to be a serious Exchange alternative. So now it doesn't matter whether you stay with Exchange or not .. you'll still be paying Microsoft!

I don't see them changing Zimbra's business model at all- while the revenue may be trivially small by MSFT standards, they reportedly had tremendous revenue growth. Plus combined with the fact that whatever revenue they get from that is revenue they are probably losing from Exchange, its a sweet deal.

Interesting times .. but makes perfect sense to me. Open source is here to stay- I suspect this'll be the first of many open source purchases for MSFT .. and maybe not indirectly the next time around.

SAP is now the only major software vendor without an open source play of some sort. Who will it be?

Bill Gates: The skills you need to succeed

I agree 100% with everything Bill has written here.

Yes I'm a FOSS fanatic but I admire Bill Gates more than pretty much any other technology or business person. MSFT certainly pulled a few unfair business practices along the way, but his passion for winning and passion for finding a better way have had more impact on the world than most other things.

Plus the dude's running around giving away like $30B for really good causes like injections without needles.