Microsoft President Brad Smith Acknowledges They Were Previously Wrong On Open-Source

[Vistaus]

IMHO if there is one thing we DON'T need on Linux, it's proprietary, lock-in, subscription-based ransomware office software. Rather than releasing MS Office for Linux I wish they simply released the full documentation (not just the XML schema, but the nitty gritty implementation details) of the OOXML formats.

"WE"? Speak for yourself. I, for one, welcome MS Office for Linux.

[mdedetrich]

People who are saying that Microsoft should release Office to open source to justify anything are deluded.

You can't just open source code, the entirety of the source needs to be reviewed for any patents/IP and in software as large as Office this may be practically impossible. Microsoft would have to do a clean room implementation of office with engineers who never touched the current office codebase (and even then that might not cut it).

This is why Microsoft's new products (i.e. Visual Studio Code) are open source, they were started from scratch by separate independent teams.

Same problem with NVidia not releasing their driver to be open source btw.

[JustinTurdeau]

People who are saying that Microsoft should release Office to open source to justify anything are deluded.

You can't just open source code, the entirety of the source needs to be reviewed for any patents/IP and in software as large as Office this may be practically impossible. Microsoft would have to do a clean room implementation of office with engineers who never touched the current office codebase (and even then that might not cut it).

This is why Microsoft's new products (i.e. Visual Studio Code) are open source, they were started from scratch by separate independent teams.

Same problem with NVidia not releasing their driver to be open source btw.

Most people saying "make Office open source or gtfo" are just being facetious, but the points about Microsoft working against standards and going to great lengths to make their formats opaque and non-interoperable are still very valid.

Microsoft are most definitely not acting in good faith when it comes to open source. It's so clear as day that I seriously have to question the motives (or mental faculties) of anyone stating otherwise...

[bnolsen]

Just because they admit things doesn't mean they can be trusted. Their current strategy is to again use corporate managers to force adoption of windows because apparently you can seamlessly develop for any platform using windows.

[onlyLinuxLuvUBack]

I just push to GitLab and have it push to the mirrors. I also make sure to use the GitHub repo as a big ad for GitLab.

What about https://codeberg.org/ , hosted in europe maybe safe from microsoft except munich.

[increasechief]

Office 365 and all the apps that accompany it all run very well on Linux in a browser window

You've clearly never tried to format a document layout in the outrageously limiting version of what passes for Office online.

[AdamOne]

Is Windows or Microsoft Office Free software yet? No? Guess this guff is so much hot air from the rear then. So much for the importance of "open source". I'm sure they enjoy making money from Gnu+linux on their stupid online virtual machine and virtual container service.

Ironically those vindicated feel more emotionally hurt than the original offender. _Stop being so emotional people, at least that idiot Balmers' stance on open source is destroyed by the MS president.

[k1e0x]

Sorry.. I don't trust commercial software vendors to do anything that isn't in their own interest. The corporate structure just doesn't allow that, irregardless of the people who do it.

Be it Microsoft, Intel, Google or even RedHat (IBM)

If the choice is ever between the right thing to do (that does not cause them harm) and the profitable thing, a public company must chose the profitable thing to answer to their shareholders.

And I'm not some commie, I believe good honest business is a benefit to everyone, but I don't believe for an instant any one of these companies wouldn't want to dominate open source projects in an abusive controlling way for their own bottom line.

OpenSource survives by competition between these powers. If one ever takes a majority control (Looking at you Google Chrome) we are in trouble.

[JustinTurdeau]

Stop being so emotional people, at least that idiot Balmers' stance on open source is destroyed by the MS president.

Saying "GivE MiCrOsoFT aNoTheR cHaNCe GuYS -- THeY'vE ChaNGeD!!1" is actually the emotional response. Not trusting them after 2 decades of being led by absolute psychopaths is just the sane thing to do.

[SteamPunker]

I know that almost all responses here have been dismissive of Microsoft. And I concur that they have done some pretty nasty things over the years, including going as far as needlessly integrating a web browser in an OS, just to destroy Netscape, and in doing so not only killing a competitor and holding back the web for about a decade, but also unleashing an untold number of needless security headaches upon the world.

But let's give credit where credit is due. This is an actual admission that they were wrong and that they regret those words. And I have to say, I've been liking the new Microsoft since Satya Nadella took over the helm. Although at the end of the day they are a large publicly traded company that will of course put the interests of their shareholders first, the means through which they have been doing so has made them far less of an evil company than Facebook, Amazon and, sorry to say, also Google these days.

Linus Torvalds once said: "Talk is cheap. Show me the code." And by that metric, Microsoft has been putting their money where their mouth is. Aren't they one of the largest contributors to the development of the Linux kernel these days? Visual Studio Code has been by far the most heavily developed open source project on GitHub in the last few years, IMO even having reached the point where it may start cannibalizing revenues from the commercial Visual Studio IDE.

Plus .NET is now entirely open source. Which is especially nice, considering another company that is many times more evil and a much bigger threat to Open Source at the moment:

Oracle.

Thanks to their greed, the worldwide software development community is now holding its breath, pending an upcoming decision of the Supreme Court of the United States, regarding the question whether APIs are copyrightable. If the decision ends up being favor of Oracle, it will be desastrous to the entire software industry, not to mention the open source community. And all of this due to Oracle's greed and spite for not having profited off the success of Android.

Microsoft is no longer a threat to open source. I'm not claiming that because I'm naive, it's simply because Microsoft's interests no longer conflict, and in some ways now even happen to coincide, with those of the open source community. Will that change again eventually? Perhaps. But for now, Oracle is the company we should all be rooting against, and against those scumbags, I welcome almost any ally, including Microsoft.