On Fri, 9 Apr 2004, Andy Sy wrote: > I'm not privy to the terms of any deals between Microsoft and > InstallShield and have no idea if there was any breach of good faith, > but from a end-user's point of view, I can't see what's so bad about > this.
Seems to be part of an embrace, extend, takeover strategy. See below. God bless! ------------------------ MS Open-Source Move is Straight from Playbook By Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols April 6, 2004 (http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1562330,00.asp) I confess that Microsoft has been surprising me a lot in the past few days. First, Microsoft paid Sun off, and then it released Windows Installer XML (WiX), a command line toolkit for building Windows installation packages from XML source code and vice-versa under the Common Public License (CPL) of the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Although no programmer's household name, WiX isn't a toy program. It's being used in upcoming versions of brand-name Microsoft products such as Office and Exchange. And in case you're wondering, CPL is a real, no-BS, open-source license. So, what's going on here? Is Microsoft converting to the open-source religion? Hardly. I think they're continuing to implement plans for battling open source that Microsoft staffers first outlined back in 1998's Halloween memo. In that strategy memo, Microsoft staffers suggested that by embracing and extending open protocols, Microsoft could freeze open source out of the marketplace. Jason Matusow, manager of Microsoft's shared-source initiative, may say to my colleague Mary Jo Foley, "We've been learning from open source about the importance of sharing code with developers," and that's true, but that's only part of the story. Long before Microsoft learned the "importance of sharing code," it learned that to beat any competitor, it should "embrace and extend" that competitor's technology. Want to take over the Internet? Embrace Web browsing technology with a free browser, Internet Explorer, that's incorporated into the operating system, and extend it with proprietary "enhancements" that make other browsers look bad. It worked. So, although some people rave about how great Mozilla, Opera and Firefox are, according to OneStat.com, Internet Explorer this January had a total global-usage share of 94.8 percent. Second place went to Mozilla with an almost insignificant 1.8 percent, and Opera 7 came in with a global usage of 0.8 percent. Embrace and extend works, and Microsoft's first dabbling of releasing its own, formerly proprietary code under a real open-source license is just another example of this business philosophy in operation. Indeed, it's part of the Halloween plan, where one of the suggestions to derail open source is to "put out parts of the source code [to] try to generate hacker interest in adding value to MS-sponsored code bases." The WiX release does more than just that, though. Looking more closely, WiX enables developers to translate programs from Windows Installer Databases (.msi/.msm) formats to a text-based, XML-file format. XML is an open standard, but to work with MSI/MSM, those XML files have a very specific format. Now, what company has already sought patent protection for specific expressions of XML code? The answer is, of course, Microsoft, with its Office XML formats. Has Microsoft done this with WiX's XML formats yet? I don't know. But if the pros from Redmond haven't yet, they will. They did it for Office XML document formats; they'll do it for this. Thus, Microsoft's open-source code will work only on Microsoft-proprietary XML to produce Microsoft-proprietary installation programs. With open source like this, who needs proprietary programs? This is also right out of the Halloween playbook. In it, Microsoft cites merging open protocols such as Directory Name Services (DNS) with Active Directory and changing "the rules of the game in the file-serving space" (aka Microsoft's Longhorn WinFS) as examples of beating open source by extending commodity protocols. Microsoft is now in the process of doing this to XML, and WiX is just one more step along the way. Now, while it may look like Microsoft is doing something new, or perhaps even something helpful to the open-source community, it's not. What Microsoft is really doing is putting more of the Halloween memo's plans into action. Why shouldn't it? The Halloween plans are just an elaboration of Microsoft's time-tested embrace-and-extend technique The only embrace Microsoft is really giving the open-source community is a stranglehold. -- Please sign the petition against Senator Panfilo Lacson http://www.petitiononline.con/no2ping/ --[Manny [EMAIL PROTECTED] Philippine League for Democratic Telecommunications, Inc. "Affordable Access for All" --[Open Minds Philippines]-----------[http://openminds.linux.org.ph]-- -- Philippine Linux Users' Group (PLUG) Mailing List [EMAIL PROTECTED] (#PLUG @ irc.free.net.ph) Official Website: http://plug.linux.org.ph Searchable Archives: http://marc.free.net.ph . To leave, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/plug . Are you a Linux newbie? To join the newbie list, go to http://lists.q-linux.com/mailman/listinfo/ph-linux-newbie
