Tim,

I recently noticed your response to the Halloween documents written by some Microsoft employees. I greatly appreciate your sentiment on these issues. I myself participated in a small way in the early development of Linux (I made on of the earliest small financial donations around 6 years ago via a small non-profit corporation of which I was then director).

I would keep a few things in mind though with respect to this document: 1) The people writing this document were not your peers, as your tone suggests. They really don't know as you do what it means to meet a payroll. Bill Gates and Paul Allen might, but these employees simply don't.

2) the Halloween document represents not a consensus of official statement on the part of Microsoft, but the position of some specific employees. That such attitudes are tolerated within Microsoft is, IMHO a problem, but the facts that

a) the document was leaked(at some risk to a persons career I would expect)

b) Microsoft is shipping open source products including Perl at this moment

c) Linus Torvalds is in fact working at a company funded by Paul Allen, a major Microsoft shareholder and one of the _real_ bosses at Microsoft given his history with Bill Gates, the position of a major shareholder and the authority that comes with being a co-founder and close ties with the early employees(who represent another major shareholder group).

Now, I would agree that relative to Microsoft's size, these efforts are inappropriately small. Still, there are _far_ worse offenders. What really have companies like Oracle and Sybase really done for the Open Source community relative to the benefit they have received? There are other companies that have benefitted from Open Source far more directly and have done much less.

The simple fact is that we are now entering a situation in which Microsoft _needs_ Open Source. Open Source products are the only viable competition that Microsoft can point to in some key markets. The existance of more such Open Source competition would lessen the trouble with the DOJ while not creating more nasty marketing types that would need to be dealt with.

IMHO Microsoft would do well to fund some substantial cash prizes for signficant advances in Open Source areas. Now, I can imagine that some of the things that Microsoft might like to see most are things that the general Open Source community might not readily understand(if I were at Microsoft an Open Source database capable of good VLDB performance would be a high priority right now). I personally see no reason why Larry Wall and other Perl developers shouldn't receive stock options equivalent to those given to Microsoft employees for development of the Win32 version of Perl which Microsoft is now shipping as part of their Resource kit (i.e. I think that Wall has helped Microsoft more than many of its employees who are now millionaires have).

RJB

Randall,

You make some very good points. If I had the ear of the higher ups at Microsoft, this is exactly what I would tell them. I have in fact sent mail to the people I do know with just such a suggestion. I'd love to see all of the major companies in the computer industry creating a fellowship to reward achievement in Open Source. (One such award is in fact being created by the Internet Society in memory of Jon Postel, one of the founding fathers of the Internet, who for years ran the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority.)

As to your specific points about Microsoft:

• I agree that many of the people in the Open Source community don't understand the pressures that Microsoft is under in terms of meeting a payroll (or more importantly, from their point of view), maintaining their stock price so the options pyramid can keep attracting high quality programmers. This is why we're seeing companies like O'Reilly, Netscape, Sendmail., Scriptics, ActiveState, Red Hat, VA Research, and many others trying to find ways to blend commercial activity and Open Source. The two need to find ways to coexist. Open Source is not a communist wet dream, it is an engine for capitalist value creation.

• You're right that Microsoft is not alone in being inimical to open systems. Many companies have done their best to kill the goose that laid a golden egg on their doorstep. At the same time, Microsoft is particularly aggressive in trying to undercut the efforts of other companies, and to use its market dominance to keep good things from happening for consumers, unless they happen to come with a Microsoft price tag attached. Other companies seem more willing to compete on a level playing field. Microsoft tries to tilt the playing field in their direction even though they already have enormous competitive advantages even if they only played fair.

• Paul Allen is certainly still in close touch with Microsoft, but I don't think he controls its strategy. And his investments are not dictated by a Microsoft master plan, nor do they indicate anything about Microsoft's strategic direction.

Still, I agree with your basic premise, which is also mine, that Open Source is good for Microsoft, and they ought to be working feverishly to figure out how it can benefit their business--and how they can give something back to the Open Source community, to encourage the development of new ideas that they can commercialize and integrate into their products.

-- Tim

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