Open Source and M$! WTF???

[ARhere]

Alright,

I have been reading about Microsoft and moving toward (something related too) open source in slashdot.org (http://it.slashdot.org/it/08/01/17/1553206.shtml) latley.

Please, someone that is smarter then me explain WTF M$ is doing and what is going on!?!? I know for a fact they cannot be making popular binaries (like Windows and Office) Open Source, so what are they up to??

-AR

[Æniad]

I must have woken up in an alternate universe or something.

[Steveway]

Isn't that related to the Samba protocols?
They had to either pay about a quadrillion dollar or open the needed specs for interoprability.

[~LoKe]

It's in their best interest. It'll get a lot of people off their back and makes them look a lot better.

[PriceChild]

Personally I couldn't care less what Microsoft are doing... its those evil ¢anonical people I've got my eyes on.

[FuturePilot]

Personally I couldn't care less what Microsoft are doing... its those evil ¢anonical people I've got my eyes on.

:lolflag:

[The Titan]

I'm confused. Microsoft is making open source software, or releasing source code for old projects or what the heck is going on? What are the giving away?

[AlanR8]

My understanding is as mentioned higher up the thread, this relates to Samba that in the past has had to be reverse engineered to become functional. Now that this code is/could be available it should make things a lot easier, and hopefully speed things up a tad between Doze and Linux

[fatality_uk]

I think this relates to the (on-going) anti-trust action by the European Commision, MS have been forced to give software and OS vendors access to parts of it's file system structure and binaries.

[ARhere]

Isn't that related to the Samba protocols?
They had to either pay about a quadrillion dollar or open the needed specs for interoprability.

OIC, forcing M$ to play well with other OS'es on TCP/IP protocols. I like that a lot.

[Dragonbite]

(puts on paranoid conspiracy cap on )

Why should Microsoft not Open Source things... old things... things that people get excited about until Microsoft makes an announcement that they are moving to new (closed, of course) technology and therefore that which they open sourced will only work until people start installing Vista SP1 or XP SP3!!

Then it's back to square 1!

(removes paranoid conspiracy cap on )

[kripkenstein]

This has nothing to do with Samba or protocols. The big news that was reported there is that Microsoft is opening up documentation for their binary file formats - .DOC, .XLS, etc. These used to be available only if you asked for them and passed some procedure; now, anyone will be able to download the documentation (from Feb 15). In addition, Microsoft will host - on Sourceforge, no less - a project to translate these old binary formats to OOXML.

The background is that ODF has done well, and Microsoft's OOXML is finding it difficult to get branded a standard. One of the problems was that it relies on features in the old binary formats. So, by opening them up, Microsoft hopes to get OOXML accepted as a standard. In other words, the motivation for this move is the fear of ODF.

This might succeed in helping OOXML along, but it will also probably mean FOSS projects can more easily open .DOC files and so forth. So in the long run, I'm not sure if this is a good or a bad thing - it could go either way.

[dgray_from_dc]

Classic Microsoft, take a good idea like ODF and MS-tify it into something else.

I liked WordPerfect and Word effectively killed it and never gave me the features I liked.

IE unseated Netscape and I suffered until I found FireFox.

The list goes on....