The big FOSS vendors don't eat their own dogfood – they pay for proprietary groupware
- Reference: 1770895809
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2026/02/12/suse_runs_ms/
- Source link:
For this vulture, the single most amusing revelation from any of the industry speakers at this year's [1]Open Source Policy Summit was from SUSE's [2]Dominic Laurie , who moderated the final panel discussion of [3]the day , "Sovereignty and Procurement."
The panel ended a few minutes before the scheduled time, and he closed it with a surprising comment:
We'll give you three minutes back, as they say on Teams meetings!
The other panelists looked surprised, and one, Polish MEP [4]Michał Kobosko , immediately picked up on it:
That was a bit of a giveaway!
It most certainly was. SUSE is one of the Policy Summit's Gold-level sponsors, alongside Red Hat. The tagline for the event is "Digital Sovereignty Runs on Open Source" – but apparently SUSE does not run entirely on open source. This leading European vendor of enterprise FOSS runs on Microsoft, or at least it uses Redmond's collaboration services.
Amusingly, the day before, The Reg sat in the audience at the [5]CentOS Connect event and watched with interest as a Red Hat staffer in the row in front of us opened their laptop, signed into their Red Hat corporate Gmail account, and started going through their work email – occasionally pausing to get the Gemini LLM to emit some custom slop for them to paste into an email.
[6]
We've long suspected this based on comments from friends at the company, but sadly nothing that we could quote or attribute. This time, though, we saw it for ourselves. We've also had reports that Canonical uses Gmail and Google Apps inside the company – indeed, [7]former staffer Till Kamppeter mentioned this in a [8]Mastodon reply to us earlier this year. In the same thread, we also [9]asked Red Hat's Jan Wildeboer, but he [10]declined to answer .
[11]
[12]
That thread was prompted by another ancient Microsoft document, " [13]Converting a UNIX .COM Site to Windows ," resurfacing on tech social media, as [14]such things occasionally do . The document described the pains that Microsoft experienced as it migrated HoTMaiL from Unix to Windows. (The original capitalization is a sort of pun: Hotmail let you access your email via HTML.)
Microsoft acquired Hotmail in late 1997, and as The Register [15]reported just two years later , Hotmail ran on FreeBSD and Apache, with some Solaris for the back end. It took multiple efforts to transfer this to Windows, but it did it, with great effort and thus at considerable expense – and the result guided the future development of Windows Server.
[16]
Microsoft calls this "eating its own dogfood," and it still does it. Two years ago, we reported that the company had [17]moved LinkedIn from the end-of-life CentOS Linux to Azure Linux . As with Hotmail 25 years earlier, its first migration effort failed – so it tried harder, and got there.
Hotmail and LinkedIn are largely free-to-use services. These are not profit centers for Microsoft, and the migration exercises must have involved a lot of people and effort. This was difficult and expensive, with no direct impact on the bottom line. It doesn't sell Azure Linux, and when it migrated it, it didn't sell Hotmail either. This was a cost with no associated profit or direct gain to be made.
The thing is that Microsoft's management is smart enough to take a long-term view, and realize that the company will benefit. Such migrations reduce the vendor's dependence on third-party products, tools, and services, even if those tools are free. The knowledge gained improves the skills of the company's staff – especially relevant for consultancy and services – and indirectly, they force the company's own products to improve to cope with new unfamiliar roles and workloads – which makes them more competitive.
[18]
Email and groupware represent a significant cost for all companies. The arguments for digital sovereignty are strong: if you must spend the money, spend it locally. Regional governments can thus support businesses in their own jurisdictions; national organizations can keep it in their country or nearby allies, not distant and possibly hostile nations.
This applies to Linux vendors too, even if they do not sell FOSS groupware. Large groupware deployments don't come for free, even if they are FOSS. Red Hat has [19]19,000 employees , SUSE's [20]CEO told Fortune it has 2,500, and Canonical's most recent [21]government company filing reported just under 1,200.
This vulture is a former employee of SUSE, and was still employed there when it [22]split from Micro Focus in 2018. Micro Focus got started selling COBOL tools to help companies move apps off expensive mainframes and onto DOS and later Windows PCs. Its later [23]acquisition of Attachmate added tools for linking big iron to PCs and PC networks. Micro Focus is very much a part of the Microsoft ecosystem, and for it, this choice made good sense. The newly independent SUSE stuck with it – also for solid reasons.
That was eight years ago now, though. There's been enough time. It's not as if [24]Office 361.5 is such a compelling option. As we [25]reported last September , one millennial techie's verdict was "don't even consider starting with Microsoft."
There are plenty of such offerings out there. Another of the sponsors of the Open Source Policy Summit was [26]Open-Xchange , another German company based in Cologne. Although owner Kiteworks is based in the US, [27]ownCloud was even closer – its pre-acquisition HQ was in Nuremberg, just like SUSE. [28]Nextcloud is based in Stuttgart, so it's a bit further. [29]Grommunio is elsewhere in the DACH, being based in Vienna.
[30]Matrix is quietly becoming the chat layer for governments chasing digital sovereignty
[31]Containers, cloud, blockchain, AI – it's all the same old BS, says veteran Red Hatter
[32]CentOS is coming to RISC-V soon if you have the kit
[33]'The EU runs on Microsoft' – and Uncle Sam could turn it off, claims MEP
The other two have perhaps less reason to consider options from the Teutonic world. For Canonical, [34]Zentyal has the virtue of being based on Ubuntu, as we [35]reported back in 2010 . However, there is a profusion of Linux-based FOSS groupware tools available now. We mentioned [36]SoGo when looking at [37]Debian's Freedombox blend last month. [38]Kolab has been around since 2003, [39]Zimbra since 2005, but both are newcomers compared to [40]Citadel , which has roots in the early 1980s.
The Reg FOSS desk is no great admirer of Microsoft or its products, but sometimes, we have to concede that it does things right. It has made a long habit of "dogfooding" its own products, and this has served it well.
To spell this out: any FOSS vendor should constantly strive to run their entire business on FOSS. Even if they don't sell a particular function, it's still part of the whole.
FOSS isn't some strange little niche tool, suitable only for server stuff, as if it were some odd little outgrowth of commercial proprietary software. It's not as if it's only suitable for certain functions, like running web servers.
In reality, it is the other way round. Commercial software is an accidental side effect of cooperatively developed software. For as long as software has existed, it's been normal to distribute the source code along with the binary.
There's no mystical inherent difference between source code and compiled binaries. That is a trivial implementation detail which only applies to certain programming languages. Most code is interpreted. That means the user runs the source code directly, forcing companies trying to sell the stuff to find ways to make it unreadable. It's called obfuscation, and even if people [41]occasionally win prizes for it , it's a bad thing.
It's all just software. Anything at all you can do with proprietary code, you can do with FOSS, from invisible system firmware up to fancy games and sophisticated tooling for creating everything from movies to music to multinational corporations.
FOSS OSes, including all Linux distributions and their relatives from FreeDOS to Haiku, are the visible peaks of icebergs. They are built from submerged mountains of FOSS code, invisible only because most people don't care about such stuff and don't look for it.
Vendors selling packaged bundles of it are merely imposing arbitrary boundaries: "We support these specific versions of these named components, and we won't help you with the rest." There's no real difference, though. The upstream so-called "community" versions of those paid-for distros are slightly newer versions of the same programs and packages. The demarcations are nothing more than lines in the sand, and we all know what happens to those as tides flow and ebb.
The upstream projects of RHEL, SUSE SLE, and Ubuntu LTS contain all the component parts to build something like Gmail or Hotmail. As the Microsoft documents about moving Hotmail to Windows reveal, Hotmail was built on FreeBSD and Solaris, while it's public knowledge that Google, Meta, Amazon, and so on run on Linux.
The fact that the enterprise Linux vendors don't sell groupware is just another line in the sand. Those enterprise Linux distro repositories contain the same components of the same apps that those FOSS groupware vendors use.
Microsoft has been successfully building and selling proprietary applications and tooling in an increasingly FOSS-dominated world because it constantly actively studies its many rivals. It imitates what they do, improves on it, and incorporates it – to the remarkable degree that an entire Linux OS is now an optional feature of the Windows desktop. Eating its own dogfood, running the company on the company's own products, is a key part of making this work. Even when those products – such as Linux distributions – are rivals to its own products.
Apple's macOS and iOS (and all its other OSes) are built from FOSS components and tools – most of them from the BSD world. The company focuses its efforts on the visible parts, the graphical layers on top. (It's only the profound technological conservatism of the BSD projects that prevents them from adopting Apple's tools – it has [42]been tried in the past.) This is a key aspect of how Apple, and NeXT before it, became and stayed relevant and competitive: intelligently adopting and adapting FOSS rather than reinventing wheels.
Linux vendors need to do the same. Identify where and why they're using proprietary tools in their organizations. Work out which parts can be done in FOSS, and spend money on doing whatever can be done in FOSS, to make the FOSS world stronger. FOSS groupware is the lowest-hanging fruit of all here.
FOSS is an ecosystem, built by thousands of people and groups and organizations, sometimes cooperating and sometimes competing, but all working together so that the whole thing develops and adapts and improves. Using proprietary communications tools to run companies whose core marketing message is that FOSS is a better solution is a contradiction in terms of epic scale.
To summarize the summary, FOSS vendors should run on FOSS. Using FOSS helps make FOSS better, and helps make better products – and that includes components they may currently happen not to sell.
Digital sovereignty applies to businesses as well. Any management team that thinks it makes better sense to help rival vendors by paying for rival products and services, rather than keeping that money in their own market and thus improve its own competitive position, should return their MBAs.
The Register asked SUSE, Red Hat and Canonical to comment. ®
Get our [43]Tech Resources
[1] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/eu_foss_fears/
[2] https://summit.openforumeurope.org/?speaker=dominic-laurie-2
[3] https://summit.openforumeurope.org/
[4] https://summit.openforumeurope.org/?speaker=michal-kobosko
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/05/centos_coming_to_riscv_soon/
[6] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2aY4HMTZQTyVFmzUcgkzFHQAAAw0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2025/08/04/canonical_drops_openprinting_lead/
[8] https://ubuntu.social/@till/115820259128433106
[9] https://social.vivaldi.net/@lproven/115820185484889182
[10] https://social.wildeboer.net/@jwildeboer/115825643990098693
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aY4HMTZQTyVFmzUcgkzFHQAAAw0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aY4HMTZQTyVFmzUcgkzFHQAAAw0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[13] https://web.archive.org/web/20040401182755/http://www.securityoffice.net/mssecrets/hotmail.html
[14] https://www.theregister.com/2025/01/05/microsoft_os2_flop_future/
[15] https://www.theregister.com/1999/04/19/microsoftowned_email_service_runs/
[16] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44aY4HMTZQTyVFmzUcgkzFHQAAAw0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[17] https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/linkedin_azure_linux/
[18] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_software/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33aY4HMTZQTyVFmzUcgkzFHQAAAw0&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[19] https://www.redhat.com/en/about/company-details
[20] https://fortune.com/2024/07/26/suse-software-ceo-championing-open-source-drives-innovation-purpose/
[21] https://find-and-update.company-information.service.gov.uk/company/06870835/filing-history
[22] https://www.theregister.com/2018/07/02/linux_makes_suse_sold_for_a_cool_2535bn/
[23] https://www.theregister.com/2014/09/16/attachmate_micro_focus_merger/
[24] https://www.theregister.com/2020/10/01/microsoft_exchange_online_outage/
[25] https://www.theregister.com/2025/09/29/dont_even_consider_microsoft/
[26] https://www.open-xchange.com/
[27] https://owncloud.com/
[28] https://nextcloud.com/
[29] https://grommunio.com/
[30] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/09/matrix_element_secure_chat/
[31] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/08/waves_of_tech_bs/
[32] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/05/centos_coming_to_riscv_soon/
[33] https://www.theregister.com/2026/02/04/eu_foss_fears/
[34] https://www.zentyal.com/
[35] https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/18/zentyal_review/
[36] https://www.sogo.nu/
[37] https://www.theregister.com/2026/01/22/debians_freedombox_blend/
[38] https://kolab.org/
[39] https://www.zimbra.com/
[40] https://citadel.org/
[41] https://www.theregister.com/2014/06/05/protecting_codes_secrets_wins_acm_prize/
[42] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NextBSD
[43] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Global lock-in
Of course one reason for being on Teams and similar shitshows is because all your customers are on Windows 365 corporate desktops. Socially, I am on Facebook for the same reason. I even have a gmail account so I can forward selected goodies to my Android.
Let us hope that the thought of a Euro-hose from an awakening EU will help our FOSS vendors to brew up a few more of their own dogfood recipes.
Re: Global lock-in
However, using Teams because corporate customers use it is still no reason not to use FOSS if you're a FOSS company. It's quite possible to use Element and a Teams bridge if you want to integrate Teams users into your system.
Re: Global lock-in
Ut you are still using teams and frankly if you want to guarantee compatibility you are better off just running the software somewhere
Too much ideology makes Liam unproductive
To spell this out: any FOSS vendor should constantly strive to run their entire business on FOSS
Can't agree with this and I don't agree that Microsoft got it right forcing migrations to its own platforms. It has made some terrible and expensive decisions in the past, but has survived because the money keeps coming in: it's a market follower but promises customers that can provide them with whatever else they're looking to use. It then uses questionable, if not downright illegal, licensing practices to force out the competition and keep the money coming.
I don't use Microsoft Office for any of my own stuff but, for example, found the Excel clone in OpenXchange woefully inadequate – I couldn't format dates to include days of the week without using another application to edit the files. In business, as in life, you should use the right tool for the job. Sure, open source has an important role to play, but it won't always have the best option and if you try and force something substandard on users, you're making a mistake. Open source has become successful by focussing on doing things right.
I think Google famously gave its employees the choice of Linux, Windows or Mac for work and most developers went with Mac. A friend of mine working for a bank, recently switched to a MacBook Pro for AI work because it's by far faster than a Windows machine. Developer time is far more expensive than the hardware premiums.
But you have a point when it comes to the products and services that companies sell, then they should be prepared to show their commitment to it. In groupware, that would be finding an acceptable replacement for Outlook + Exchange, but I haven't seen one yet You'll find that to be true in many businesses.
Re: Too much ideology makes Liam unproductive
You make some reasonable points, but I don't agree with your conclusion.
I feel any company should use its own products, whether open source or closed. Sometimes there are not good open source alternatives or alternatives, particularly if interoperability is required. e.g. If you work with a customer that uses Photoshop and Illustrator, Gimp and Inkscape are not replacements. They are just not.
But email, by itself? That's 100% doable in open source, even at huge scale. Striving to do more is how MS migrated from FreeBSD to Windows. Sure, they had the money. But more than that, they had the intent. I think Liam's point is that seems to be lacking in certain OSS quarters.
Re: Too much ideology makes Liam unproductive
Of course, e-mail is doable on unix.
But try selling one of the current alternatives to a setup that uses Exchange with a lot of shared calendars and mailboxes. I've been after something like this for a couple of years. Trying setting up OpenXchange to work with Google Contacts and Calendar…
I think Ballmer was in charge when they screwed Hotmail, and he nearly killed Microsoft by refusing to change. Think of how much money they poured into Skype, Nokia, AQuantive, Internet Explorer. The dogfood stuff pretty much stopped when Nadella took over and started pushing office on mobile and Linux on Azure. I hope that, at some point, they do the decent thing and take Sharepoint out the back… Windows is now the easiest way to get everyone on subscriptions via lock-in.
Re: Too much ideology makes Liam unproductive
> a setup that uses Exchange with a lot of shared calendars and mailboxes
It's been done and I have written about it:
https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/15/schleswig_holstein_open_source/
As the state government said:
«
"more than 40,000 accounts and well over 100 million emails and calendar entries" away from Microsoft Exchange Server and Outlook to Open-Xchange
»
Nobody said it was easy -- but freedom is not easy. Giving in to dictatorships is easier but ends up being much worse.
> The dogfood stuff pretty much stopped when Nadella took over
Not true.
He took over the CEO role in 2014:
https://www.theregister.com/2014/07/11/microsoft_new_ceo_satya_nadella_memo/
A decade later MS tried and failed to move LinkedIn to Azure Linux:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/12/14/linkedin_abandons_migration_to_microsoft/
So it tried again and did it, the following year:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/08/28/linkedin_azure_linux/
A full decade after you said it no longer happens, there is documented evidence of it happening, at considerable effort and expense.
You are wrong.
To channel Chandler Bing, _Could you *be* any more wrong?_
Determinedly and repeatedly wrong, in ways that make me think you do not read my own coverage of this stuff, or anyone else's either, and that you don't know as much about it as you claim.
For instance this business of an "Excel replacement in OpenXchange". Did you confuse OpenXchange (a groupware suite which does not AFAIK have a spreadsheet) with OpenOffice, a now obsolete office suite that was replaced by LibreOffice in 2010?
https://www.theregister.com/2010/11/02/openoffice_org_letter/
16 years ago now. You have had time to learn the new name. I think you're not paying any attention.
If not, and you now say you developed OpenOffice addons, then why not use the better tool, and why not switch to the newer better suite?
I have used LibreOffice Calc while working in all-Microsoft employers, interchanging data with Excel 365 users, and they never even new. Its tools are not so rich, but I don't need the rich stuff, I definitely don't need the bloody Ribbon, but what I do need is reliability.
A common issue for me was copying a multi-row section of a table from a web page and pasting it into a spreadsheet.
If the selection was not rectangular (e.g. omitted the last cell or cells on the last row) then Excel 365 would crash, every single time. It required great care to only copy rectangular blocks.
LibreOfficeCalc? No problem. Press Ctrl+V and it just sorts it out. Not a rectangle? No problem -- it padded the law row with blanks.
Reliability and not losing my work is far more important to me than pivot tables or named ranges. The basics matter more than the fripperies.
I would not be advocating this stuff if it were impossible. It is *not* impossible, merely hard. It's complex and that means expensive -- but so are 20K user accounts on Google Apps, and RH is paying a rival cloud vendor for them.
SUSE is paying for at least 3000 Office 365 subs, and as a former SUSE engineer, I can tell you, a lot of people in the R&D dept are not happy about it. In fact Engineering used to run its own standards-based mail and list server for the people who _use_ Linux, and during my tenure, I _repeatedly_ told management that they were doing the wrong thing and needed to reconsider, to thanks from other engineers.
Canonical is paying for 1500 or so.
The point here is threefold:
1. These vendors could help the FOSS community by dogfooding this stuff, even if it cost them money to transition.
(That probably also means opportunities for co-branding, sponsorship, and as a result, significant discounts on large sales.)
2. These vendors could also improve their _own products_ by hosting their own company-wide services on their own software. This applies even if they do not sell groupware. I would expect Sales and Accounts/Finance to run Windows. I'd expect Marketing, and the executive suite, to run Macs. This is a change to test and improve interop.
3. These vendors would improve their own messaging and their corporate reputations by documenting the transition, *as Microsoft did*.
Re: Too much ideology makes Liam unproductive
Azure Linux runs on Hyper-V.
Anyway Nadella for fear of investments and will to fire as much people as it could - is making MS offering less attractive. Skype and Windows Phone were huge opportunies lost by a CEO who can't develop anything but just look for alternatives elsewhere - like Chrome...
That's what FOSS is about, cut investment, fire developers and testers, exploit free labour (or anyway, labour paid by someone else).
Re: Too much ideology makes Liam unproductive
"found the Excel clone in OpenXchange woefully inadequate – I couldn't format dates to include days of the week"
LibreOffice, however does have a day of week option. I used this to cross-check some corrections to manorial rolls, ensuring the revised dates fell on the correct day of the week. As ever you need to select the right tool for the job.
Re: Too much ideology makes Liam unproductive
Sure – I normally use OpenOffice – but as the developer of a library for OOXML I'm more familiar than most with the details… I was pointing out a limitation of OpenXchange in its browser-based office apps. The sort of thing that will have users screaming if they're forced to use it.
Interoperability?
Does Suse use Teams to connect with customers? That would be a 'good' reason. While Teams is utterly horrible and far more complicated than Skype was, it is something of a 'standard' in the corporate world.
Scott McNealy also used the 'eat our own dogfood' edict. He visited a Sun data centre and found non-Sun equipment installed. It wasn't as though Sun didn't have suitable equipment to replace it.
There is a good point to be made, as b0llchit above suggests. If an open source company doesn't run on open source, why would I try to run my company on it?
Religion vs reason....
If you are making the Evolution email client and are using LookOut in your company, yes you are harming your credibility.
If you are making "Open CV", should your choice of e-mail client be tribal affinity or best-for-me?
Open source has to succeed on a balance merits, not affiliation; though certainly one merit is that it is open source.
Re: Interoperability?
It looks Sun food was doggy enough, since the company choked...
Some extremely fortunate pooches feast on eye fillet :)
" Scott McNealy also used the 'eat our own dogfood' edict. He visited a Sun data centre and found non-Sun equipment installed. It wasn't as though Sun didn't have suitable equipment to replace it. "
Years ago I recall reading that Sun Microsystems in its glory days ran all its financials on a DEC VAXcluster (VMS presumably.)
The story might have been apocryphal but I understand these DEC clusters were formidable in their day.
Re: Some extremely fortunate pooches feast on eye fillet :)
And more to the point they were probably running software that only ran on VMS
Re: Some extremely fortunate pooches feast on eye fillet :)
> Years ago I recall reading that Sun Microsystems in its glory days ran all its financials on a DEC VAXcluste
I never heard that, but I did hear similar about Microsoft running VAXen and IBM AS/400.
But it did buy Great Plains and Navision.
https://www.theregister.com/2002/05/14/microsoft_confirms_navision_acquisition/
I think this may be why. If you are cash rich then one route to dogfooding is to just acquire a suitable app vendor and then once it's part of the company, make it port its apps as needed.
Red Hat, for instance, could simply buy Scalix and get its Exchange-compatible groupware. It hasn't made any new releases in years: it'd be cheap.
Roll it out across IBM and save tens of millions. After all, its parent no longer owns Lotus Notes.
Old problem - I remember Oracle coming to do a presentation to my company many years ago. They presented on MS Powerpoint, yet Oracle owned OpenOffice. It made me think a lot less of them at the time I remember. Where is the pride in your very own product you own.
> They presented on MS Powerpoint
Exactly so. About 25 years ago I was at a Caldera presentation, and at the end, the presenter revealed that he was running OpenOffice on Caldera OpenLinux on his laptop.
That kind of confidence in your own products speaks to me.
I'd be much more impressed by a less-snazzy presentation done on a company's own tools or on FOSS than a fancy all-singing all-dancing one done from yet another MacBook.
ISWYDT
It imitates what they do, improves on it, and incorporates it
Felt a new identi-TLA was needed, didja? (I think I'l stick with E 3 , at least for now.)
Re: ISWYDT
> ISWYDT
Well yes. This was intentional. The point being it's not _always_ a bad thing.
MS has done the old E³ move on Chrome, but it doesn't mean it's taken it over or anything. Embrace and extend, without the extinguish.
It's done an E³ on Linux itself to create WSL2, and Linux is in no danger from that for the foreseeable.
E² rather than E³. The ultimate goal is not always that third E.
And look, in fairness, there are two sides to this argument.
Is the E² move the best thing for the _company_ and/or the _product_, versus is it the best thing for the market or the industry?
Sometimes MS does things that are good for MS and good for its specific products, even if those things are harmful to others.
In this case, I feel by embracing & (if needed) extending FOSS groupware, RH, SUSE and Canonical would be doing something good for themselves, good for their products, and good for the FOSS market.
If it was bad for the proprietary groupware market...
Oh dead. How sad. Never mind.
"Open-Xchange, another German company based in Cologne. Although owner Kiteworks is based in the US"
This is something that will need to be taken into account when looking at sovereignty issues. Another example is Startpage which, although based in the Netherlands, is owned by a US company.
Oops, parsing error:
"Although owner Kiteworks is based in the US, ownCloud was even closer"
The principle remains. Sovereignty depends on where the ultimate ownership resides.
Purisr vs pragmatist
If you live and work in the real world rather than in a FOSS bubble you have to accept that most of the planet uses proprietary software at least at the desktop level. You can use LibreOffice and ProjectLibre on your desktop (and I do) but if you want to exchange files with othe4 people you are going to have to save them in Mcrosoft formats Likewise when it comes to communication half the world runs on Teams and WharsApp,, so you either use gateways and risk compatibility problems or bite the bullet and run the software (maybe in WINE). Or you could install clients on your phone since that is probably Android or Apple.
Re: Purisr vs pragmatist
When it comes to national data sovereignty governments will increasing decide on what software their part of the real world runs on. They will base that on what they consider to be the most pressing needs. If the needs direct that it should be FOSS products then understanding that requires a shift in viewpoint. The compatibility problems would lie on the Microsoft side.
Re: Purisr vs pragmatist
> you have to accept that most of the planet uses proprietary software at least at the desktop level
This the situation _all Linux vendors_ already operate in.
As I said above: I think it's fair enough if the bits of the company that work closely with external suppliers and customers run Windows or macOS where that facilitates data transfer.
(Although any credible vendor should be spending on some R&D to look into replacing them, too!)
But the stuff that all the staff use, which is accessed by Linux and Windows and macOS and mobile clients, and which is the backbone of the company -- that damned well should be FOSS, and if it's not, there should be a team looking into why not and fixing it.
"To spell this out: any FOSS vendor should constantly strive to run their entire business on FOSS"
That may prove to be hard in some/many cases for the financial side of the business, especially where the tax authority in whichever country/countries requires electronic filings and where there may be no FOSS software for do such filings.
For example in the UK HMRC's Making Tax Digital only supports approved/certified applications to do filings. Even if someone writes FOSS software for this each business using self-hosted installations of that software (unless things have changed) would need to arrange for HMRC to sign-off on it before it could be used.
> For example in the UK HMRC's Making Tax Digital only supports approved/certified applications to do filings.
The HMRC that I wrote about offering native Linux tools in 2024, you mean?
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/26/hmrc_linux_paye_tools/
Years ago I worked for a vendor where one of its products was an email server designed/architected for large scale use - the customers were Telcos and ISPs all around the world, basically if such companies needed to host 25m+ mailboxes our company was one of only 2 or 3 solutions.
Despite developing and selling email server software our company used Exchange for its own email. When I queried this the answer was "because we need calendering". The company had done a deal with a major USA telco to give that telco a reduction in license fees for their use of our email server software in return for the telco providing a hosted Exchange service to our company.
So much for eating your own dogfood.
"for as long as software has existed, it's been normal to distribute the source code"
Only when money were made selling the hardware - and users couldn't bring application home and run them on their maniframe or mini. But even when Unix came along, and broke a little the mainframe dominance and allowed the raise of minis - ISV came along too - usually with subscriptions... - and since they made money only selling software, they needed to keep the source code for them - and only let people access it under non-open source licenses. With the PC the process was complete - hardware became almost a commodity, and software became where money were - until data hoarding and behavioural control became the business allowing to ammass a huge wealth - exploiting open source too. Give away something free, get user data in exchange, use them to drive their choices to maximize your own profits.
Because FOSS is an ideology, not a business model - since we're seeing more and more it has no way to pay its own development but by asking money somewhere else. And those comes with strings attached.
That's why Linux is moslty developed to power servers - because it's used by the big internet companies, which are not interested nor in desktop system nor in on-prem groupware systems, which will just become competitors of their "cloud" offerings, and if you make them free, no profits will come from them. Even Microsoft is trying to move people away from on-prem Exchange to Azure.
Sure, something exist under Linux too - but again we hit the bigger pronblem of Linux outside servers - the ugly desktop UI and thereby ugly desktop applications. Groupware power users don't use web applications. That's why Outlook is so widesspread, and killling it Nadella is probably doing one of its biggest mistakes. Still, as long as most Linux groupware is a bunch of applications cobbled together, without proper management tools to simplify it, they won't go far away. In this regard Stalwart Mail is an interesting product, albeit still in development - because it takes everything together in a single application with full remote management capabilities.
Compiled applications have huge advantages over interpreted ones. But the code in your web browser, you're running mostly compiled code. The OS is compiled, the drivers too, the browser too. I'm still waiting for the promised Java and .NET based OS. Android may use a lot of Java for the user space - but that's only because mobe applications do very little.
Compiling is not obfuscation - it's a translation to machine code to get
Re: "for as long as software has existed, it's been normal to distribute the source code"
> But the code in your web browser, you're running mostly compiled code.
*IN* the web browser, no. Javascript is rarely compiled. JITted yes, but it's at heart a dynamic interpreted language. I have written about this at some length:
https://www.theregister.com/2023/03/23/croquet_for_unity/
> Compiling is not obfuscation
You miss the point again.
Someone running Gmail, Google Docs, VS Code, Slack, and so on -- all Electron apps -- is mostly running Javascript, inside wrappers based on Chromium.
When I say "mostly", that means time and space:
* the bulk of the time that their CPU is executing, it's executing Javascript.
* the bulk of the space used by apps in their computer's memory, and on its disk, is Javascript code _and the vast supporting frameworks_ which are replicated multiple times, one for each app.
And that Javascript must by nature be distributed as source code. And that means it's readable, and so it is munged:
https://www.mightybytes.com/insights/minifying-munging-code/
The app may just be a few hundred kB of JS code, but Electron is build on Node.js and Node is huge -- over 12 million lines of code.
https://openhub.net/p/node
All repeated for every app: every Electron app contains its own copy of Chromium, and its own copy of Node.
That is the obfuscation I was writing about -- not compiling to binaries.
Sales argument
Just consider the strength of the sales argument you'd have as a FOSS company when you can show and proof that you run your own business entirely on FOSS alone.