On 03 Aug 2010, at 02:30, Steven D'Aprano wrote:
I didn't mean to imply that Microsoft was all lovey-dovey with Linux now (although they've been forced by customer demand to be slightly less hostile to it). All I meant was that Microsoft sees value in the OSS model as it applies to .Net. If that's because they think it will lure people away from Linux to Windows, or stop them switching away from Windows, that just goes to support our point that there are lots of reasons for supporting OSS other than idealism.
It's not really supporting in this case. Microsoft is of the opinion that a lot of open source software infringes on their software patents (which is definitely true, just like it is the case for a lot of closed source software and for every other big company's patent portfolio). They believe that they should be compensated for this. With the .NET platform, they managed to get Novell to pay for a patent license for including Mono (an OSS implementation of the .NET platform) in their Linux distribution (SUSE), thereby validating Microsoft's claim that companies who distributes that software should pay them, and in general creating a precedent for paying patent license fees in return for the privilege of developing/distributing open source software.
So Microsoft is not really contributing to open source, but rather trying to get everyone who works on open source to pay them for infringing on their patents. It's a bit like saying that BP contributes to protecting the environment because they pay lobbyists for talking to politicians who work on environmental laws. Sure, they'll support some token "good points", but there's a significant difference between that and actually supporting the overall goal.
There are of course better examples, such as IBM, Google and even Apple. In those cases, it's more that the companies consider it to be more cost-effective to collaborate on basic infrastructure-level software rather than all privately developing basically the same stuff, rather than that they want everyone in the world to pay them for the privilege of writing and distributing free software.
As Florian mentioned however, the developers paid that way make up only a small fraction of the total open source development (many of them are even regular employees of those companies that used to work in similar, in house versions of such software) and unless your project and skills happen to be crucial to a particular company's business model, there is very little chance of ever making a living out of it.
Jonas