Novell’s Chief Marketing Officer pulls out an interesting comparison.
On what is I assume his official Novell blog, John Dragoon, the Chief Marketing Officer for Novell makes an illuminating comparison in the consideration of Microsoft’s recent virtualization submission:
Of course this announcement is about much more than 20,000 lines of code Microsoft is committing (which by the way once accepted into the Linux tree will far surpass those contributed by Canonical).
Stay classy, Provo.
He follows up with this:
To misquote Neil Armstrong from 40 years ago, “this is one small step for Microsoft, but one vast leap for open source.”
Uh, that is just about 100% ass-backwards, isn’t it? It is a vast leap for Microsoft; they are the ones who, having spent years demonizing and attacking Open Source, are now finding themselves in the awkward position of having to support it because of customer demand. It is a small step for Open Source, because this represents 3(?) new drivers, that’s like infinitesimal percentage of all Linux drivers, right?
I encourage everyone to read the entire blog entry and the earlier one I already talked about. Very defensive for PR / Official Statments I think. Guilty conscience?
Novell has steady been attacking Red Hat, and now it seems Canonical is under fire as well. That’s corporate business for you, sure. It is just a shame it has to taint the Free and Open Source community. Wouldn’t be pragmatic to speak well of the competition, though. Only a hippie idealist would cooperate instead of denigrate.
There is a cost to the contributions that corporations make to the community.
[Update: Mr. Dragoon comments.]
#1 by Jo Shields on July 28th, 2009
Red Hat are equally dismissive of Canonical’s contributions to the kernel – it kicked off a bit at UDS, in fact. Can’t find a video though.
#2 by John Dragoon on July 28th, 2009
Jason,
Very much appreciate your passion and more importantly your approach that values the argu-ment vs the argu-er.
Yes that was my official / Novell blog. You’ll note I’ve made no attempt to delete or quell the numerous comments and remarks on my intentions or agenda and have approved all comments (accept those with personal attacks).
It is indeed interesting that in a lengthy post the only comment parsed is the fact that I secured through those in the know that MSFT’s contribution would exceed Canonical’s. I made absolutely no attempt to qualify the quality of the respective contributions nor was there any intent whatsoever to take a shot at Canonical – a critical partner in the overall Linux ecosystem. To suggest I am taking shots at Canonical is pure speculation and FUD by those who dislike Microsoft (or Novell for that matter).
I’m no Microsoft apologist (yes I’ll take heat for that comment I’m sure) but simply call them as I see them. We continue to compete aggressively with them on many fronts but they’ve been a good partner in areas we partner and when they do something right, I’ll call it as I see it. As you say – it doesn’t make it right but that’s the point of a good argument.
Thanks for listening.
John
#3 by Richard on July 28th, 2009
Be charitable.
Microsoft is, like it or not, the dominant operating system provider, and will be the default hypervisor provider for many companies. Cooperation like this is “one vast leap for open source”, because skilled people don’t have to spend their time mucking about and trying to reverse-engineer things to make them interoperate better. They can spend their time doing more useful things instead. This is the sense that Dragoon means it in. He is praising Microsoft for this step — see his next sentence, which you have not included in your quotation.
I also think that he’s not sniping at Canonical as much as using them as a yardstick. Canonical does a lot of great stuff, but they’re not a bunch of kernel hackers; Dragoon is pointing out that this is one way in which Microsoft is contributing more than a leading light in the community.
And, yes, he’s the Chief Marketing Officer. Of course he wants company partners to be seen in a good light! There’s nothing wrong with that; individuals do it, corporations do it, everyone does it. It’s not even “spin”, since the action really does benefit Linux. He ends by putting it all in language that Microsoft is familiar with: the language of customer needs. If this step of theirs is successful, perhaps they’ll start walking and then running on the open-source track; give them a chance.
I don’t see why you wrote this at all. If Microsoft is taking some good steps, pat them on the back. If they drop the ball, point it out. Treat them the same as you’d treat any other company that’s undergoing a bit of open-source change…
#4 by Lex on July 28th, 2009
Ahem… let me double check this. Hmm… looks factually correct. OK then… It looks like, according to the numbers, that Microsoft is better for Linux community than Canonical! Any questions?.. No, I am not spinning this the wrong way. Next.
#5 by Jason on July 28th, 2009
@Jo,
I am not aware of Red Hat’s comments in this area, so I can not address them.
@John Dragoon,
Thank you for your comments! It is true that you leave up dissenting comments, which is commendable.
@Richard,
This is not about Microsoft. This is about illustrating what I perceive as Novell’s anti-community behavior.
I hate to even add this disclaimer, but it seems like if I don’t some people will try me:
It does not mean I think everything Novell does is anti-community.
It does not mean I think Novell is the only entity that ever acts in what it thinks are its own best interests at the expense of others.
#6 by Richard on July 28th, 2009
Thanks, these are helpful clarifications. It seems that I misunderstood the reason for the post. I’m going to leave it at that, since I don’t even get into the concept of “anti-community” — far too many worms lurking in that can!
#7 by Dan Serban on July 28th, 2009
I’m seeing terms like “dividing the community” and “anti-community” so often these days, it’s hard to even take one step back and think about how you define the term “community”.
Is Microsoft all of a sudden an admirable member of the community because they contributed x lines of code?
Richard says give them the benefit of the doubt already and move on. I say Microsoft and Novell will be on probation for a long, long time to come before the common man thinks of them as members of the community.
P.S. I’m eagerly watching this space and
http://www2.apebox.org/wordpress/linux/
for a quality release
#8 by vexorian on July 30th, 2009
Well actually, it is to promote their virtualization tech. Everybody knows their contribution is self-serving and that’s actually a good thing and often the case with most FOSS.
It may not convenient to have MS win the virtualization battle, yet I wonder if other proprietary technologies have bothered to release GPLv2 drivers for Linux like that. A google search for VMWare GPLv2 drivers for Linux seems to give me pages about MS’ move. Let’s talk about hype. So I kept looking and they did, but there is no hype or anything about VMWare’s drivers (odd? ), there are no statements from certain companies about how it proves VMWare’s good will about Linux… Neither there are no warnings from advocates about how VMWare’s drivers are a trap…
I really prefer MS doing things frantically like this, everyone, including themselves acknowledge that they are doing it for their stockholder’s share, and is no case of charity or a sign of free will. In the case of MS’ that’s the preferable way to get their contribution, isn’t it?
#9 by vexorian on July 30th, 2009
“Well actually, it is to promote their virtualization tech. Everybody knows their contribution is self-serving and that’s actually a good thing and often the case with most FOSS”
That does not mean the full FOSS users and freedom do not get any benefit. That’s the thing with free software, unintentional benefit to users. It reminds me of apple embracing CUPS. It is an indirect cause my HP printer works just fine in Linux. That happy face OS/X logo in printer packages actually means they will work in Linux, and that’s cute…