- Sunday, 22 November 2009
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Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy - Benjamin Franklin
Microsoft mulls open source for mobile
THE WORDS 'Danger' and 'Microsoft' seem to fit together a lot better than ‘Microsoft' and 'Open Source' but, believe it or not, the former seems to be causing the latter to occur.
Danger, a mobile software and services outfit snapped up by the Vole last year, is purportedly looking for NetBSD developers to work on its Sidekick mobile phone. NetBSD is an open sauce OS which works on a plethora of devices from computers to mobiles. Danger's current OS and apps work with back-end servers to offer services like Internet access, Instant Messaging and games.
But just because Microsoft may be getting saucy and flirting with Danger, doesn't mean anything will actually change. The BSD license which governs NetBSD wouldn't require the Vole to share back developments based on the code or even open its software to other developers. In fact, Mighty-Soft could very well just build a hermetically-sealed closed system, even with open source tools.
This is hardly surprising considering the unbridled animosity the Redmond Giant has shown towards open source in the past, only taking a spittle-flecked pause in its anti-sauce rhetoric to snap up semantic search engine Powerset in June 2008.
The only real interest Microsoft probably has in NetBSD is that it's free for the firm to use and abuse, whilst also giving the Vole all the tools it needs to improve user experience.
Documents doing the rounds on the bogosphere also seem to point to the fact Danger was already in the process of porting its software to NetBSD before Mighty-Soft swooped to peck it up, adding credence to the rumour with the likelihood that the firm may be finishing work already started. µ
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Riiiiiiiight. So people are supposed to GIVE their time to Microsoft, who will define "open source" in typical Microsoft terms - to whit, it's open so long as others contribute, but it's theirs, and proprietary, as soon as there is money to be made.
I wouldn't trust this particular Microsoft project further than I can throw Microsoft headquarters. They have a nasty habit of screwing partners, and we of course all know their continuing "embrace, extend, extinguish" policy.
You know, I get the sneaky suspicion they are up to something bigger than their kind hearts seem to show with the sudden open source lean. I think it's partially related to Microsoft having failed thus far on the web search front to Google and can't seem to get Yahoo to sell out thus far. Their own search tool is not doing so well either. So why not try a different strategy since mobiles are the hottest things since the ___ (choose your own adventure: iPod, iMac, iPhone, sliced bread, iD10t)? How about making an open source OS for phones in which we can somehow manipulate in order to glean user behavior, stats and such only to somehow use it for targeted advertising and eventually make money off of it. (Sorry for the run on sentence, too lazy to fix it now).
The one thing we all know about Billy Bob Gates is that he's one rich dude. So he's not doing this out of the goodness of his heart no matter what people say...there are dollar signs hidden somewhere.
as soon as bsd gets to go to a gpl license, the better!
otherwise, yes they are free labour for m$.
Microsoft love BSD licensed software and use it extensively, internally, for it's lack of license restrictions. Just about the whole TCP/IP stack in Windows 95SE was lifted straight out of BSD Unix (in fact, the reason it was always so flakey and used up system resources was that it was spitting out 'Segmentation Falut: Parachute deployed' style messages into a hidden debug window all the time, in the background, owing to all the permissions failures going on). Mind you, saying that, the same TCP/IP stack was dumped straight into Linux implementations: why write it yourself, after all? It just worked better, there, that's all.