New on LowEndTalk? Please Register and read our Community Rules.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
All new Registrations are manually reviewed and approved, so a short delay after registration may occur before your account becomes active.
Tech firms to fund open source projects following Heartbleed bug
Don't see this posted here yet. If I missed it I apologize.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/internet-security/10785665/Tech-firms-to-fund-open-source-projects-following-Heartbleed-crisis.html
Comments
Amazing. I hope that the results of these investments will be beneficial to the different open source projects that are to be funded.
Ironic how Microsoft is contributing money to an initiative led by The Linux Foundation
.
I was about to say the same about Micro$oft .Anyway the funding amount should be increased so more people can work in the open source projects.
Sound great. All founding backers most came from the giant IT industry player, where $300k is small amount. More fund more people involved.
Microsoft understood long ago that there is no IT without open source, at least not as we know it. Without the individuals that create small projects, there is no complete ecosystem, we cant all have windows, ms office and adobe stuff on our PCs and phones, even companies are no longer happy with the monoculture.
There are lots of quotes from Ballmer showing that he never understood how something that did not sell licenses or subscriptions could succeed. If he did he would have made a version of Office for Linux.
I'm sure the new guy understands open source a lot better but until I see M$ make a version of Office for Linux I won't believe that M$ really understands open source and how resistance is futile.
Im sure the Linux desktop market share had as much to do with a lack of Office for Linux as much as any other reason.
Ballmer might have not understood it, but others did. But even if he was convinced that open source cannot "succeed" in the way he saw "succeeding", he knew it will never die, no matter how many SCOs would they back up in idiotic lawsuits and other stunts. Better not be an enemy of something unkillable.
Linux accounts for 1.49% of the desktop market share. There are a number of extremely mature open source solutions that exist. There's probably 0 economic sense for Microsoft to spend millions to create a and support a product on a platform that few people would even want to pay for. They can't release an open source version of Office because they have to actually employ people and pay costs, which isn't exactly satisfied by donations. So what should they do?
There isn't a version of internet explorer or any other M$ software for Linux as far as I know. Office is just one example. They have a version for Mac so I don't see why they couldn't make one for Linux with minimal effort.
In the fast changing software world it's not about market share today and reacting to that. It's about what market share will be in the future and reacting to that today since software tends to take years to mature. M$ clearly did not see Linux as a threat to their server market share and now it's almost too late. They still are big in the enterprise and application server market but Linux is slowly but surely chipping away at that as well.