Port 25 - Communications from the open source community at Microsoft

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1. priyank said:

   This has been a great source of light on microsoft look to open source, and the world be a much better place with this approach. I agree with the fact that MS Windows & VS rocks. But I don't completely agree about things said about open source. I agree that open source guys says, Free as is Freedom. But there is also a Free as is Free approach associated with, may be microsoft clients does bother about the fact, but others do. There are many countries which can't afford windows, it costs people there, 1 month salary to buy a license. Now in that case, it doesn't mean that they can't use a computer or internet. Similarly for developer its not always money, I write open source software not for money, but I love to write and share with people. The fact is that microsoft makes money from big companies and much of the business is in G7 countries, does mean that there are only 7 countries. As a end user from a developing country I see what the software company is charging me and what I can't get from the market. I love Visual Studio, but at the same time I love Firefox for security and features over IE, and not for FREE or FREEDOM.

   posted at 06:35AM 09/16/2006
2. Sam Ramji said:

   Priyank - this is an issue I care about a lot... people should be able to use software to improve their lives, and not have pay beyond their means to afford it.  Recently a group of people inside the company put together a new licensing model for emerging markets called "FlexGo"; it's a pay-as-you-go approach modeled on prepaid cell phone cards.  Pricing is lower, and tied directly to consumption.

   If you're interested you can check it out here:

   http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1965541,00.asp

   You may or may not agree that this is the right solution, but it is a big move in the right direction.

   posted at 01:46PM 09/16/2006
3. priyank said:

   The issue is not pay as you go, the issue is pay per capita, Windows XP costs a 6 months salary for the people of East Timor, Somalia, Sierra Leone. Do MS cares? Do the people have the right to improve there lifes?

   Talking about Indian state mentioned in the interview, the govt. and the schools needs basic computing resources and not any high end techo marvels. If RMS comes India many times a year just to provide commitment for support, why can't MS provide the same support for Indian languages, just becuase they don't see big profits here, does not mean you can safely ignore the 1 billion people, who provides a large number of geeks to the US.

   Also talking about the testing strategy defined as Ad-hoc model. If MS has a business model, why can't Open source have one. This is there strategy, where they provide directly to community to test and get feedback, saving a lots of time and money. After all, this is part of XP programming model, where you provide all what you written, without the fear that this will broke on particular machine or not, and get help of the community to fix those strange and rare issues. And MS also started doing the same by providing beta for downloads.

   posted at 02:22AM 09/17/2006
4. priyank said:

   Talking about the MS shared source license: When you say at one side that its the customers who drive the development. Did you ask the community what they needs, before saying use this, this is better than that. Even when the OSS appraoched MS for evaluation of the license, MS rejected (Slashdot). Why I trust MS when it didn't ask for my opinion, whereas GNU recently called for a conference at Bangalore for GPL v3 discussion. I have a feeling that MS targeting only SugarCRM, and not the actual open source community. May be MS license it better than GPL, though I haven't read it. But  do I really need it, can I really trust that license which MS lawyers carefully drafted without no public interactions. What I really need is a license that help me to share my code, so that people can use it and protect my IP, so that people can't go and make my code into closed source $$$.

   posted at 02:52AM 09/17/2006
5. JackCXue said:

   Microsoft will progress as they recognizing the pros and cons of successful OSS product like Linux and MySQL etc. I hope you can make more interviews available on Port25 showing insights from the staff of the MS OSS Lab.

   -Jack  

   posted at 11:38PM 09/20/2006
6. hypovex said:

   oh, THAT "channel 9"?

   Bollocks, I thought we were gonna see his collection of old computers on the Antique Road Show.

   posted at 01:56PM 09/27/2006
7. EllqvqDkHl said:

   doors.txt;10;15

   posted at 06:27AM 09/15/2009