Microsoft's stingy DreamSpark program
Microsoft thinks it can win the hearts and minds of future developers by giving them free development tools today. This would be a noble gesture but for one, tiny little fact:
There are 150,000+ free and open-source software projects on Sourceforge (and another 80,000+ on Google Code). The day of placating developers with tools is over. Open source has raised the stakes dramatically. Forever.
Bill Gates, forever stuck in the past, declares:
We want to do everything we can (except open source our software, quips Matt) to equip a new generation of technology leaders with the knowledge and tools they need to harness the magic of software to improve lives, solve problems, and catalyze economic growth. Microsoft DreamSpark provides professional-level tools that we hope will inspire students to explore the power of software and encourage them to forge the next wave of software-driven breakthroughs.
Alas, dear Mr. Gates, too little, too late. You see, developers already have exceptional development tools available under open-source licenses. They also have market-leading ECM, CRM, application server, operating system, etc. software that they can fiddle with and extend so that they can graduate from the kiddie laboratory you want to foist on them.
DreamSpark would have been cool...20 years ago. Today it's an admission, as Glyn Moody writes, in "the plainest possible terms that its business model has failed." Sorry. Maybe you'll catch up next century.
These days, dear Mr. Gates, you must give away the core. No one is interested in mere complements anymore. Those are the tools necessary to drive revenue around the core being open sourced. Look around. Everyone (Google, Yahoo, MySQL, Red Hat, etc.) is doing it.
Matt Asay brings a decade of in-the-trenches open-source business and legal experience to The Open Road, with an emphasis on emerging open-source business strategies and opportunities. Matt is vice president of business development at Alfresco, a company that develops open-source software for content management. He is a member of the CNET Blog Network and is not an employee of CNET. Disclosure. You can follow Matt on Twitter @mjasay. 
Jeez in your blind hatred for all proprietary software you have lost all sight of objectivity. Stop using a review and news sight for pushing your agenda. You are disgusting for a person who is supposed to review and provide news. Before you try to squirm away saying this is a blog please realize where you are posting it (CNET.com). If you like Open Source good for you but please try to sell your point on something not by pointing out problems but show off your strenghts in your model. All your posts, you bash I am good they are evil. Jeez man they are making a living for themselves, nothing evil about it. Get off your moral high horse because you have no right to sit on one. Just because you work on Open Source doesnt make you a good person but abusing your power as a blogger to blatantly pushing your own agenda makes you a sicko. You need a break man, heck go make some software or something because I dont think you do considering the frequency of your blogs.
I (sort of) see your point, but I don't see MS open-sourcing Office or Windows any time soon. You see, my dear friend, Microsoft would not be in the position to make any money from its software if the full source were available for free.
I think the industry will become a mix of FOSS and for-sale software will be our future and I think that is good. This future mirrors other creative industries - cinema, publishing, music, etc. where people can give what they produce away for free and they can sell what they produce for income. CNET is an ad-supported business - that's fine. I don't think it is rationale or insightful for me to say to CNET, Wall St. Journal, etc. should just give away everything they produce for free. CNET does that because they have chosen an ad-supported business model. Other publishers, are just as free to say that they want to charge for their content as oppposed to splash ads everywhere. In my mind one viable business model (ad-supported) does not make any other busines model null and void and the history of the publishing world backs that conjecture up.
I think this is a appropriate move, but whenever MS gives something away they seem to get hammered by goverments. Seems like they are taken to court if they give stuff away and critized in the community if the don't.
Lastly, there are still many more successful companies selling software than giving it away - Apple, Adobe, Oracle, IBM. Both approaches are viable.
I disagree completely. I've been digging into Linux IDE's and other toolsets for the past month or so for a project I'm working on and what a nightmare it is. The mismash of half completed and flat out buggy programming tools, abandoned projects, competing libraries, and general lack of organized documentation is enough to drive a person insane. Having used Visual Studio for years and dabbled in XCode, it's obvious to me that the open source community has failed to produce the same level of quality product that for profit companies have.
I don't expect CNET bloggers to always think like I do, but I expect them to be objective, free of zealotry. This article is a new low in CNET. Please go blog on slashdot, I am sure they will love you. Free thinkers do not want to see you here.
"These days, dear Mr. Gates, you must give away the core. No one is interested in mere complements anymore. " Sorry but what I want is a working environment that is feature rich, allowing me the ability to the the job at hand. I don't give a flip on the owners religion nor on the environment of the infrastructure. Somebody is responsible for those decisions and all I am asked to do is make it so #1.
Why don't you tell the world they are going to hell for NOT USING OPEN SOURCE. You come across as declaring that we are all sinners.
Get a grip.
The market leader for app servers is WebLogic, then Websphere, and much later down the line JBoss/Tomcat. It's not open source.
The market leader for OS is Windows, not Linux.
The market leader for etc is not open-sourced, either: databases, document management, financial management software like SAP, email servers, et cetera.
There's Apache and then... nothing. Extol the virtues of GiMP while I stifle a yawn, spin a yarn about how great Linux is while not connecting to the corporate message server, meanwhile, I'm getting work done.
-R
It will come, I have zero doubt. But being triumphalist is premature. Even IE still commands a majority; Word is still far and away market leader, and even now, Windows shows no real signs of surrendering to Linux (despite the pathos that is Vista).
"To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under heaven". ... and for Open Source, Spring is in the air. But that's all.
And not to sound as much of an apologist as other commenters here, but:
A) Having more than a passing knowledge of the XCode IDE ( and Objective-C )
B) Having more than a passing knowledge of a various open source frameworks ( wxWidgets, Qt, to name the two most well known ones ), as well as associated IDE's ( In the case of Qt, KDevelop principally )
C) Having 20 years in the business of developing software commercially.
I have to say that you're misguided. I understand every argument Linus ( and Richard Stallman ) have/has made, and the fact is that for the most part, most open source products are left wanting.
I pity your pea sized brain! *******!
-Mithun Dhar
Microsoft doesn't matter anymore and those of us who are "real" developers know it. Just because guys like 42isthe answer needs a point and click solution, doesn't mean those of us who know how computers really work need anything else.
"Real" developers don't need good tools? What planet are you from? Great developers care about getting things done quickly & efficiently. If a commercial tool helps a Great dev be more productive, then I could care less if they meet your standards of "Real". And if a dev on my team refused to use such a tool on the principle that "real" developers don't need tools, they would be fired!
I'll admit that Eclipse is great Java IDE. But for a multi-language IDE targeting the windows, Visual Studio is a great, mature product.
CNet - why does this Matt Asay have space on your website? This rant was the dubmest thing I've read in a long time (modulo cnet comment sections of course).
- by jharrop2 February 20, 2008 5:28 PM PST
- My little project uses an open source stack on the server, and a Word 2007 add-in as its client (developed using Visual Studio + VSTO).
- Like this Reply to this comment
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(18 Comments)The server stuff I can deliver as a free virtual appliance to any developer who wants it. Not so, unfortunately, at the client end. See my blog post http://dev.plutext.org/blog/2008/02/21/vmware-appliance-lands/ for the full rant.
Matt has a point.