With Linux widely installed among its corporate clients, Microsoft has chosen to accommodate it rather than ignore it.
Earlier this year, the company said that its management software would be able to keep track of both Windows and Linux machines, and its forthcoming "hypervisor" virtualization software will be able to run Linux and other x86-compatible operating systems.There are other indications that Microsoft is learning to live with Linux and open source.
According to sources, Ballmer met with Matthew Szulick, CEO of Linux distributor Red Hat, in New York earlier this year, though neither company has acknowledged the meeting.
Microsoft has hired a number of programmers who have a high profile in open-source circles, including Gentoo founder Daniel Robbins, who joined the company last month under Bill Hilf to help Microsoft development teams understand open-source development. Another employee, Jim Hugunin, is working on the IronPython project to support the Python scripting language--popular among open-source Web developers--in Microsoft's .Net software.
Indeed, as open-source development products, such as Eclipse or the so-called LAMP stack, become more widely used, Microsoft cannot afford to ignore them. The application written with open-source tooling can lead to more Windows sales, for example.
"We understand ways that have to support the (open-source) community as well," Michael Werner, director of the emerging business team for Microsoft in New England, said at a recent conference on open source. "We have a vested interest if a MySQL (open-source database) developer is developing on our platform--we want to make sure it's a successful interaction."
"Allergic reaction"
Still, there are no illusions that Microsoft
management has embraced the economic
model of open source or that the company's hard-charging competitive ways
have slackened.
"Microsoft is now interacting more with the open-source community, which is good, but at the same time, they're doing it along with protecting their core markets and environments," said David Patrick, vice president and general manager of Novell's Linux, open-source platforms and services group.
Patrick noted that Microsoft is interoperating with Linux and other third-party platforms. But that work doesn't involve deep technical integration.
On the licensing front, too, Microsoft's fortunes rely on a proprietary approach. Yet, through its "shared source" initiative, in the past year it has released a handful of development-related products under open-source licenses, including Windows Installer XML toolset (WiX), which the company says has been downloaded by almost 150,000 people from SourceForge.net.
Open-source practices are particularly important in the realm of software development where a community of active users can be far more effective than traditional marketing efforts. And programmers, who can influence the decision of big-ticket server software to run business applications, have shown a liking for free tools and the ability to see how they work.
"In the past, there wasn't a sense of community in the Microsoft world," said DotNetNuke developer Walker, who is president and CEO of Perpetual Motion Interaction Systems. "It took longer to emerge than the LAMP community, which came together more quickly."
Indeed, the IT industry's largest companies--IBM, Sun Microsystems, Novell, Hewlett-Packard--have all sought to harness or sponsor open-source projects to curry favor with developers and take advantage of Linux.
Some company observers contend that there is a split within the ranks of Microsoft over how to approach open source. The company remains deeply committed--financially and philosophically--to a proprietary software model.
"It's a culture around, 'Look, you can't tell us we're wrong, because look at how successful we are with packaged software.' So you protect your intellectual property at all costs. You don't share it--you license," said former Microsoft employee Stephen Walli, now vice president of open-source development strategy at services company Optaros.
In 2003, Walli met with Microsoft's head of Windows development, Jim Allchin, in an effort to convince Allchin to distribute an open-source product. Even though he understood the potential benefits, Allchin "couldn't take that step" because the product would have been shipped with every copy of Windows, Walli said.
Miguel De Icaza knows about mixing open-source practices with Microsoft products. He is the lead developer of Mono, an open-source development environment based on Microsoft's .Net software.
De Icaza said Microsoft's shifting stance on open source is pragmatic. After management realized that Linux was not going to upend its business entirely, the company adjusted its strategy.
"You can tell they are learning--Microsoft is not a stupid company," said De Icaza. "They had an allergic reaction to open source...I think it's a wound that needed to heal."
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