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Microsoft's Steve Ballmer and Red Hat's Matthew Szulik met for more than an hour at a McCormick & Schmick's restaurant in New York in late March, sources familiar with the situation said. Microsoft initiated the meeting, one source indicated.
Red Hat declined to comment for this story. But Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates, although not commenting on the Ballmer-Szulik get-together, said in an interview Monday that Microsoft is interested in meeting with open-source companies.
"There are some of those (open source) players that are looking at commercial-type revenues. We'll certainly spend time with those people to see what we have in common and what we can do for customers together," Gates said. However, he added, "I wouldn't say that there is some big, new development."
Microsoft generally favors proprietary software whose underlying source code is a closely controlled secret. Red Hat, on the other hand, supports open-source programming, in which source code may be freely seen, modified and redistributed by anyone. The company's chief product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, is arguably the most successful example of an open-source project being packaged for commercial sale.
Microsoft has shown no signs of losing its aggressive competitiveness, but it has been willing to work with rivals of late. One notable example was a detente with Sun Microsystems in April 2004 that settled Sun's antitrust suit and led to deals to share patents and make sure that the companies' products interoperate.
Microsoft also has settled antitrust matters with software maker Burst.com, Novell and Time Warner's America Online.
Open-source software efforts once were a fringe phenomenon, chiefly of interest to students and technical experts. Now, however, several open-source projects have become forces to be reckoned with, often having a corporation backing them.
Projects that compete directly with Microsoft's products include not just server software such as Apache, MySQL and JBoss, but also include desktop software such as OpenOffice.org.
Meetings between competitors' high-level executives aren't unheard-of. But Microsoft and Red Hat aren't just competitors for selling operating systems--they also are opposed on the issue of software philosophy.
Even though Microsoft has embraced the ideas of having an active developer community, it has long criticized the General Public License that underlies Linux. In some cases, executives have called it "Pac-Man-like" and a "cancer." The license requires that software derived from a GPL program also be covered by the GPL, a provision Microsoft and others have termed "viral."
Despite some attacks on open-source programming, Microsoft has tried to take a more conciliatory stance in recent years. It has tried instead to argue that open-source software is inferior to its own products on the basis of cost, features and legal protections through its "Get the Facts" campaign.
Red Hat hasn't pulled any punches either.
In a 2001 speech, Red Hat's chief technology officer at the time, Michael Tiemann, disparaged Microsoft's shared-source initiative, which aims to emulate some of the principles of the open-source and free-software movements but that often doesn't give programmers as many rights to source code.
"It is not so much a license, I think, as it is a treaty crafted by executives trying to buy time while they quiet the internal rebellion that is Microsoft's own civil war," Tiemann said.
See more CNET content tagged:
Red Hat Inc., antitrust, GPL, open source, Steve Ballmer
:P
***Just an off-the-wall speculation***
Jim
:P
***Just an off-the-wall speculation***
Jim
And for those of you that actually finished reading this... I WAS JOKING!!!
And for those of you that actually finished reading this... I WAS JOKING!!!
What they mean to say is that they are mad that they can not use superior open source code in their own programs without having to give anything back.
What they really mean is that Microsoft wants to be a leach on the open source community.
What they mean to say is that they are mad that they can not use superior open source code in their own programs without having to give anything back.
What they really mean is that Microsoft wants to be a leach on the open source community.
It's tried instead to argue that open-source software is inferior to its own products on the basis of cost, features and legal protections through its "Get the Facts" campaign.
They are refering to the study where Microsft managed to show that the latest and greatest OS is faster than a version of Red Hat that predates the previous version of Redhat.
This is the case at least if you turn off logging on windows but not on Red Hat and and use a slower/better ecryption on Linux.
It's tried instead to argue that open-source software is inferior to its own products on the basis of cost, features and legal protections through its "Get the Facts" campaign.
They are refering to the study where Microsft managed to show that the latest and greatest OS is faster than a version of Red Hat that predates the previous version of Redhat.
This is the case at least if you turn off logging on windows but not on Red Hat and and use a slower/better ecryption on Linux.
Please let me be clear that this is just total speculation on my part, call it a consipracy theory if you want. But the so-called unspeakable forces that are stopping Red Hat from embracing Novell's .NET clone (Mono) has to be Microsoft and it's army of litigation hungry lawyers. This still doesn't explain why Microsoft has yet to attack Novell for shipping Mono. Though it doesn't mean that they won't. Perhaps it's because Novell as a Linux company is still young, they are a small fry compared to Red Hat in that market and don't understand it nearly as well as Red Hat's team of executives. Hell, Red Hat basically invented the "enterprise" Linux market and showed the world how to sell something which is essentially free. Imagine the pie on Microsoft's face if Red Hat were to ship the .NET platform on Enterprise Linux. It would be a disaster for Microsoft. Not only from a developer and public relations stand-point, but also from a purely technical standpoint. An army of open-source developers would quickly make Mono superior in implementation than Microsoft's rag-tag band of devlopers ever could. Furthermore, the foundation of GNU and Linux is far superior to the MS foundation which has only proven to be decent in 2003 when Microsoft released their server product of the same name. The only thing Microsoft has going for themselves these days is their tremendous political and legal clout within the industry and maybe the country at large. Stop drinking the Microsoft kool-aid and you too shall begin to see the light. Oh yeah, and apparently Tom Cruise is gay.
- Red Hat, Microsoft, and Novell (specifically Mono)
- by May 10, 2005 10:41 PM PDT
- The more and more I observe the tech industry the more I realize there is a lot of political wrangling going on behind the scenes. This mainly consists of Microsoft twisting the arms of smaller companies who have the potential to seriously disrupt their core bussiness: Operating Systems. Look at this blog by Red Hat's chief desktop computing guy and tell me not this "secret" meeting between the CEO of Red Hat and Microsoft is not all about discussing how Red Hat can get around being sued for shipping a .NET clone in their far superior OS of the name Red Hat Enterprise Linux. Here's the link to said blog entry by Havoc Pennington: http://log.ometer.com/2005-05.html#10.
- Like this Reply to this comment
-
(16 Comments)Please let me be clear that this is just total speculation on my part, call it a consipracy theory if you want. But the so-called unspeakable forces that are stopping Red Hat from embracing Novell's .NET clone (Mono) has to be Microsoft and it's army of litigation hungry lawyers. This still doesn't explain why Microsoft has yet to attack Novell for shipping Mono. Though it doesn't mean that they won't. Perhaps it's because Novell as a Linux company is still young, they are a small fry compared to Red Hat in that market and don't understand it nearly as well as Red Hat's team of executives. Hell, Red Hat basically invented the "enterprise" Linux market and showed the world how to sell something which is essentially free. Imagine the pie on Microsoft's face if Red Hat were to ship the .NET platform on Enterprise Linux. It would be a disaster for Microsoft. Not only from a developer and public relations stand-point, but also from a purely technical standpoint. An army of open-source developers would quickly make Mono superior in implementation than Microsoft's rag-tag band of devlopers ever could. Furthermore, the foundation of GNU and Linux is far superior to the MS foundation which has only proven to be decent in 2003 when Microsoft released their server product of the same name. The only thing Microsoft has going for themselves these days is their tremendous political and legal clout within the industry and maybe the country at large. Stop drinking the Microsoft kool-aid and you too shall begin to see the light. Oh yeah, and apparently Tom Cruise is gay.