Microsoft Keeps Eye on Open-Source Prize

Rob writes to tell us that at the recent Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco Microsoft's director of platform technology strategy, Bill Hilf, outlined why Microsoft is staying involved with open source. From the article: "Challenges of working [coopetively] in the open-source space include the balance between competing and cooperating with a rival, he said. Perception also is a 'big' challenge for the software giant. 'In many regards, the Microsoft open-source story lends itself to a great metaphor of David and Goliath,' he said. 'That is a challenge over perception.'"

Market through a mirror

[chrisbeach]

You could say that when Microsoft paddles in OSS water (e.g. SourceSafe vs CVS/Subversion) it has the market disadvantage of charging consumers for products that are free elsewhere.

And when OSS teams paddle in Microsoft's water (e.g. Firefox vs IE) they have the disadvantage of competing against a hugely entrenched market leader

Maybe each party should stick to where they are most profitable, although innovation would suffer as a result.

Re:Freudian slip!!!

[Hieronymus Howard]

In fact, the dictionary [answers.com] has two appropriate definitions of co-opt:

To take or assume for one's own use
To neutralize or win over through assimilation

Re:C'mon. Seriously?

[dfgchgfxrjtdhgh.jjhv]

there are 99,700 google results for the word coopetition, looks like it is becoming quite a popular new word.

Microsoft has used opensource code before...

[fak3r]

The BSD Licence allows for code to be used for proprietary software w/o the need to redistribute ala GPL, one of the reasons BSD is seen as more 'corporate friendly'. Plenty of history here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:History_of_Micro soft_Windows [wikipedia.org] and if you're in Windows you can see traces of BSD throughout. One example, drop to a CMD line in Win32 and...

c:\> strings.exe c:\WINDOWS\system32\ftp.exe | grep Copyright
@(#) Copyright (c) 1983 The Regents of the University of California.

Re:Is this a case of david defeating the goliath

[truthsearch]

Actually they realized it years ago. From a quarterly report filed with the SEC by Microsoft [msversus.org] on January 31, 2003 (emphasis mine):

Item 2. Management's Discussion and Analysis of Financial Condition and Results of Operations...

Challenges to the Company's Business Model. Since its inception, the Company's business model has been based upon customers agreeing to pay a fee to license software developed and distributed by Microsoft. Under this commercial software development ("CSD") model, software developers bear the costs of converting original ideas into software products through investments in research and development, offsetting these costs with the revenues received from the distribution of their products. The Company believes that the CSD model has had substantial benefits for users of software, allowing them to rely on the expertise of the Company and other software developers that have powerful incentives to develop innovative software that is useful, reliable and compatible with other software and hardware. In recent years, there has been a growing challenge to the CSD model, often referred to as the Open Source movement... The popularization of the Open Source movement continues to pose a significant challenge to the Company's business model, including recent efforts by proponents of the Open Source model to convince governments worldwide to mandate the use of Open Source software in their purchase and deployment of software products. To the extent the Open Source model gains increasing market acceptance, sales of the Company's products may decline, the Company may have to reduce the prices it charges for its products, and revenues and operating margins may consequently decline.