Port 25 - Communications from the open source community at Microsoft

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1. norberto said:

   Good!, a googol of presentations and maybe in two more millenia the conversion will be completed. Sorry people, but Port25 project seems more like Microsoft trying to tie people from open source world than Microsoft opening itself to open source world. Who are converters and who are converted?.

   posted at 02:35AM 03/16/2007
2. einhverfr said:

   A few notes to Norberto.

   First, my view is that this isn't entirely an us vs. them sort of thing.  If it was, I wouldn't be here and I certainly wouldn't be letting my content (on MySQL and PostgreSQL) be published here.

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   IMO (as a former employee) Microsoft is a company which is seriously trying to come to terms with a changing software economy.  Part of the problem is that nobody has really decided what the best response to open source is.  Balmer's acrid statements seem to speak towards the concerns of what may be a hard-liner constituent of stockholders, while the work on Port25 (and on codeplex) speaks of a different approach.  In reality the company is probably divided on how to go forward.

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   Is open source software a competitor to Microsoft?  Sure.

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   Is open source software a way to improve the value of the Windows OS on both the server and the client?  Yes.

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   Is there a contradiction in these ways of looking at things?  No.

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   In the end, I don't think that we are going to see a simple "conversion" oriented solution to the problem but rather a slow evolution of the marketplace.  As today, we don't see much open source software used on Windows (aside from Firefox and maybe Thunderbird), I think this is a cultural matter (Windows users are used to buying software) as opposed to a matter of conversion of Microsoft or us.  A lot of people in the open source community are working to bring open source software to Windows users (myself included).  And I certainly welcome any help I get from Microsoft along the way.

   posted at 09:19PM 03/16/2007
3. norberto said:

   I'see the MS way http://www.linuxpersona.com

   posted at 01:02AM 03/20/2007
4. einhverfr said:

   norberto:  I saw that.  I am not going to go into my issues with that presentation here, except to say that TCO depends extremely heavily on specifics of implementation, and that you can't just "replace Windows with Linux" and expect savings (the optimized strategy for Linux is quite different than for Windows).

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   Does anyone want to place bets as to when we will see a Windows Persona presentation?

   posted at 09:08PM 03/21/2007
5. fsantonio said:

   "Windows users are used to buying software"

   Hey, please! Open source isn't only about cheap or free (free as in free beer) software.

   And, yes I can see a lot of people using open source even on top of Windows. From desktop productive applications to server applications and development language and tools.

   posted at 04:36PM 03/23/2007