In a major turnaround for Microsoft, the company Thursday promised "greater transparency" in its development and business practices, outlining a new strategy to provide more access to APIs and previously proprietary protocols for some of its major software products, including Windows and Office.
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Anybody up to writing good directory software?
Tue, 2007-02-20 11:17 — David JonathanSince the very beginning, directories (of any kind) have had a very central role in the internet. (I have recently grown fond of Free Web Directory. Even Slashdot can be considered a directory: a collection of great news and invaluable user-generated comments. As far as software is concerned, doing a quick search on Google about software directories will return the free (as in freedom) software directories like Savannah, SourceForge, Freshmeat and so on, followed by shareware and freeware sites such as FileBuzz, PCWin Download Center and All Freeware (great if you're looking for shareware and freeware, but definitely less comprehensive than their free-as-in-freedom counterparts).
Is better education the key to finding better software?
Sat, 2007-03-03 03:25 — Edward RusselI read David Jonathon's article Anybody Up To Writing Good Directory Software? the other day, which got me thinking about software directories in general. As David mentioned, many of the software directories one finds when doing a quick google search are free as in beer, not as in freedom. But what interests me is the software directories that already exist, providing a combination of both free as in beer software, and open source software. Sites such as Freeware Downloads and Shareware Download don't advertise themselves as providing free as in liberty software, but each of them have a good selection of open source software available... if you know where to look.
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charlesgoodwin
4 years 13 weeks 3 days 15 hours ago
How is this embracing open source?
Surely embracing open source would be releasing some of or all their major software franchises under an open source license so users can support themselves (e.g. NT4 users could maintain NT4 now Microsoft no longer supports it).
No, this is not embracing open source. This is pandering to a market that enjoys the benefits brought by open source, threatening to marginalize Microsoft if it doesn't cooperate with developers of open source developer applications. This is just Microsoft simply trying to maintain its monopoly by throwing us crumbs off of it's plate. Microsoft would kill open source if it could.
Don't be fooled.
aboutblank
4 years 13 weeks 2 days 22 hours ago
I disagree. The rhetoric of
I disagree. The rhetoric of open source is that the open source development method uses the power of the community to create better programs. This move by MS allows open source developers to create better programs. Microsoft are merely publishing their APIs and file formats. This action isn't really "embracing open source" but it does help anybody that works with these APIs which would include Open Source Developers.
This action is not particularly relevant to those of us that believe proprietary software subjugates users (to the proprietor) and is therefore evil. Pretty much everything of Microsoft is proprietary software and this action doesn't improve the liberty of any program to any user. MS software remains proprietary and should be avoided.