back to article Microsoft ready for an open-source skoolin'

Sam Ramji wants more input from the open-source community, hoping to make Microsoft more responsive to their needs. The director of the open-source development lab at Microsoft has told a Linux Foundation event he's trying to educate Microsoft and slowly change its ways. The only way he can do that, Ramji said, is to hear from …

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  1. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    I Don't trust them, and I never will..

    M$ wanting to play nice with Open Source? Forget it!

    Rule #1. Don't deal with Microsoft.

    Rule #2. See Rule #1.

    Microsoft is fast becoming irrelevant... and I for one am happy about that.

  2. Goat Jam
    Linux

    The easter bunny is more believable

    "Sam Ramji wants more input from the open-source community, hoping to make Microsoft more responsive to their needs."

    Ok, Sam, how about you stop fucking threatening to sue us, would that be OK?

    Here is a translation of what Mr Ramji said after it was passed through my (patented) Microsoft(tm) Lie Parser.

    "Sam Ramji wants more input from the open-source community, hoping to find a way for Microsoft to pretend to be their new best friend"

    Somehow, I think he will have about as much success as the Microsoft(tm) Zune(tm) division had with their bullshit product

  3. Roger Williams
    Stop

    Culture change needed, not skoolin'

    I'm sure that Sam Ramji is a perfectly nice guy, and perhaps is genuinely interested in making Microsoft more responsive to OSS "needs" (just as long as Microsoft ends up benefiting financially from others' unpaid work, of course).

    But identifying the primary problem as one of ordinary large company inertia is completely disingenuous. Even Sam must recognise that the biggest obstacle to gaining trust from the OSS community is the fact that Microsoft's entire business strategy has always been based on bullying, misinformation, and FUD -- and it's quite obvious from their latest marketing and legal activities that the culture in the rest of the company hasn't budged an inch.

  4. Heff
    Dead Vulture

    We'd love to hear your un-trademarked, un-patented ideas.

    Is it me, or is Ramji as transparent as Blizzards UI modding department for WoW?

    "Of course, you can make anything, but if it becomes ridiculously popular, you should know we'll add native support for it and do away with the need for you completely".

    Only Ramjis more of a "I want to listen to the open source community, hear what we've done wrong, how we can make things easier for you guys out there, because primarily, thats microsofts job, right? making things easier for Open Source Developers, so we can... uh, you know. share the... uh... GPL... uh. monies. "

    Mines the tombstone with "wheres the money" written on it.

  5. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    To start with:

    How about Microsoft earning a reputation for honesty.

    http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/04/11/microsoft_flames_macs/

    With their current reputation, I just assume that any new license from Microsoft is two-faced. One face has vague promises of good intentions, and the other bites hard and does not let go.

  6. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    O RLY?

    So Microsoft wants all your OSS ideas and it wants them early so it can engage and be responsive to users needs.

    Ha ha ha ha ha! What complete and utter bullshit.

    M$ wants ideas it can either patent or "embrace, extend and extinguish". Face it folks - if they seriously did anything to promote open source, they'd be signing away future profit. Can you imagine a company like M$ saying, "Oh, that's OK, we'll happily sacrifice billions of profit in the outer years as long as people think warm, happy thoughts about us".

  7. Tim Bates
    Thumb Down

    What can they do?

    Don't sue people over software patent violations. They are stupid patents anyway. Software is a intellectual property, not an invention.

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  10. Anonymous Hero
    Flame

    Same old tired shit....

    "embrace, extend and extinguish".

    M$

    "stop fucking threatening to sue us"

    "Microsoft is fast becoming irrelevant"

    yawn.

  11. Martin Lyne

    Does..

    Does "Die" constitute helpful feedback?

    Because.. if MS died then people might start building games deliberately to work on Linux, then I could just use that and never have to worry about the registry or ridiculous OS security holes or having to pay for something that is (advertised as) working software only to find it was a beta and the REAL one is coming out 2 years later..

  12. Eduard Coli
    Linux

    Crumbles

    What Sam Ramji says here sounds a lot like "extend and embrace" or as it is sometimes called "extend and destroy". You can't trust Microsoft, they have this schizophrenia with open source.

    Like there is some internal struggle where they want open source to develop on Windows because they know that is where all the real innovation is (not innovation in the M$ sense but real solutions). Then some wag like Allchin (all mouth) or even Ballmer will go and do something stupid like try to assert FAT patents.

  13. Daniel

    The change needed is internal, as much as external

    What the world and his dog sees, when looking into Microsoft, and trying to work out how to send data in and out of it's software without problems, is much what teams within Redmond see. The Microsoft warren is an intricate battleground of minor fiefdoms based on the mutual hatreds of inividual managers and their underlings, who actively conive to keep bits of their projects from view.

    The fact that CIFS, for instance, is an arcane and mysterious soup, to anyone on the outside, is as much a function of the way the CIFS team intracts with the people at the other end of their own corridoor, as it is, how they regard Samba. CIFS used to be SMB. Why did it become CIFS? No one really knows. It doesn't matter. We'd shoot you if you fund out. NT LM; NBT, NetBT... rename your acronyms every few years. It keeps the enemy guessing. And by 'enemy', we mean those bastards in Exchange Server and IIS.

    If you've ever been baffled by the way that Microsoft's own products fail to get on with one another, then the answer is that This Feature Is By Design. Sam Ramji isn't some mouthpiece for MIcrosoft, The Corporation: he's just the manager of That Team Over There. Doubtless there are any number of knives, with his name on them, to be found around the Redmond campus. He probably has an easier time gretting answers from the people at MySQL, than he does with anyone from SQL Server.

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