The article is a crock of excrement

Story: Matching Microsoft on INteroperabilityTotal Replies: 14
Author Content
softwarejanitor

Aug 09, 2009
12:26 PM EDT
It implies that the FOSS community hasn't done anything to build interoperability with MS products. That can't be further from the truth. As a matter of fact so far just about all meaningful steps towards real bidirectional interoperability have come from the FOSS community. For MS interoperability so far has only meant moving things TO them and away from FOSS or has been more lip service and half @$$ed junk than it has been anything decent.

Furthermore, efforts by the FOSS community have historically been met by scorn and derision by softies at best and threats and intimidation of legal action (patent saber rattling, etc) at worst. They are only trying to make an appearance of playing nicely now for political reasons. Once they think those reasons have passed you can guarantee the gloves will be off again. And even when they are talking nicely they will probably be working in the background to undermine any real progress. You just can't trust MS.
caitlyn

Aug 09, 2009
1:53 PM EDT
Seriously, how do you really feel about the article?

I agree with you, of course. To claim that FOSS hasn't made serious interoperability efforts is to ignore major projects like Samba. As you said, the article is more about politics and positioning than anything to do with reality.
tuxchick

Aug 09, 2009
2:20 PM EDT
Maybe it's a typo and the article was supposed to go under "Comedy" instead of "Opinion."
softwarejanitor

Aug 09, 2009
5:19 PM EDT
@tuxchic One could only hope.
flufferbeer

Aug 10, 2009
1:42 AM EDT
bah any hope for Micro$haft. Always remember their _REAL_ INteroperability ploy for FOSS: EEE == Embrace, Extend, Extinguish ! booo, arggghhh, hisss.... >:-{
penguinista99

Aug 10, 2009
9:06 AM EDT
Then What is Samba?
softwarejanitor

Aug 10, 2009
11:28 AM EDT
@penguinista99 Samba is an olive branch from the FOSS world to MS, but that project is a good example of something that softies have at various times heaped scorn on, made threats against for supposed violation of MS IP, and only recently provided specs to due to legal action against MS from the EU and fears on MS's part on more.

If you've followed Jeremy Allison's thoughts about Microsoft over the past few years you should know the great efforts that the FOSS community has put towards building interoperability and how MS hasn't held up their end.
gus3

Aug 10, 2009
2:07 PM EDT
Quoting:MS hasn't held up their end.
It goes further than that. MS actively work to thwart interop efforts. Samba is target #1. OpenOffice.org is target #2.
softwarejanitor

Aug 10, 2009
4:06 PM EDT
@gus3 Yes, that is actually a more accurate way of stating it. If it isn't threats and intimidation, its them needlessly changing the way things work in order to make their products a moving target. They really seem to be afraid to allow real, bidirectional interoperability. It can be viewed as sort of a tacit admission on their part that they know their customers are at best ambivalent towards them and in many cases actively hate them and would gladly switch to a competing product if they could.
tracyanne

Aug 13, 2009
6:20 AM EDT
One thing Linux will never do is match Microsoft on the number of reboots required.

We just "discovered" the downside of hosting virtual machines on a Windows host. It goes something like this. Intitiate updates on Virtual machine 1, Initiate updates on Virtual machine 2, initiate updates on Virtual machine 3 (we have 3). Initiate updates on Host machine. Shut each virtual machine down, reboot Host machine, reboot each virtual machine. Fun isn't it.

And then there's the issue of the Host machine not shutting down cleanly, so all 3 Virtual machines are still unavailable, one of which is the beta website, another runs the vault serve, our software versioning archiving tool, and the third our job tracking system. Still sound like fun.

And of course we have to have anti virus on all 4 machines. So that's more software wasting cpu cycles.

The comment from MS cheer leader was. "they'll have to fix this if they seriously want to compete in the enterprise space."
softwarejanitor

Aug 13, 2009
12:32 PM EDT
@tracyanne

HA HA!
mrider

Aug 13, 2009
1:40 PM EDT
@tracyanne

Okay, I blatantly ripped this off from an old Slashdot post (and of course I realize it's not actually true), but:

Stability of Windows combined with the ease of use of Linux. What's not to love? :)
caitlyn

Aug 13, 2009
7:52 PM EDT
@mrider: Except that Linux is easier to use than Windows, particularly if you're teaching it to someone who doesn't have the Windows way of doing things engraved in their brain. Teaching it to kids is pretty darned easy.
gus3

Aug 13, 2009
9:47 PM EDT
@caitlyn:

Did you realize that was sarcasm? Unless it's obviously otherwise, it's safest to assume anything from Slashdot is laced with sarcasm.

Kind of like "Washington, DC: All the civility of the North with all the ingenuity of the South." Except that isn't sarcasm.
caitlyn

Aug 13, 2009
10:16 PM EDT
Yes, gus3, I realized. My point was that the sarcasm was based on assumptions which just aren't true.

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