Users made us more open - Microsoft
Microsoft’s annual geek gathering, TechEd, is not the place you’d expect to hear words like “Linux” or “open source” - at least not without a good punchline.
But times are changing and Linux and open source received an honourable mention during yesterday’s opening keynote address at TechEd South Africa 2008. It was a brief mention at the tail end of an hour and a half-long opening session, but it was there.
Opening speaker, Barry Briggs, Microsoft IT’s chief IT architect and CTO, even went so far as to acknowledge that Microsoft had been “pushed” to accept the growing influence of open source software on the market and Microsoft.
Briggs talked about Microsoft’s well publicised announcements around interoperability and its recent support for the Apache Foundation.
The reason for the change, said Briggs, was because users had asked for it. “It is super important for us to work with rest of industry to ensure interoperability,” he said. “That’s what you want … what you told us you want.”
“Thank you for pushing us in this direction,” said Briggs. “It’s good for us and a big win for our users.”
Interoperability was not only on the agenda during the keynote. It was a recurring theme throughout the first day’s sessions with presenters regularly pointing out that Microsoft was serious about interoperability. It’s a very different tone from a company with a reputation for being an open source denialist.
Microsoft changing?
Over the past year Microsoft has really turned up the volume on interoperability. In the face of ongoing battles with the European Union over anti-competitive behaviour the company has announced initiatives to ensure document interoperability, it says it will now support open document formats such as ODF in its Office suite, and is even collaborating with the ODF development team to make ODF a better standard. And last week the Apache Foundation announced Microsoft was now a platinum sponsor of the project that develops the dominant open source web server Apache.
It’s about creating a “competitive ecosystem” says Briggs. That’s why putting money into funding Apache - a competitor to its own IIS web server - is good because it stimulates competition. And a competitive ecosystem is a good thing to have when anti-trust investigators come knocking on your door.
Is Microsoft changing? The answer to that is probably yes. In the company’s latest annual report Linux and open source are repeatedly mentioned as significant competitors. Microsoft is changing not because it wants to but because has to. Not because it sees the open source light but because it finally acknowledges that open source software is an equal competitor.
