What Does Microsoft Have to Do to Earn FOSSers' Respect?

How about get a f*cking clue when it comes to UEFI.

UEFI secure boot, patent lawsuits, Back room deals with OEMs to make them lock down hardware,... Yes, what more DOES M$ have to do to engender respect from the FOSS community... (rhetorical question, by the way)?

Yes, it's obvious that Microsoft has a new version of Windows coming out. The shills are especially vocal at the moment.

Big time,... Just waiting for a particularly acidic lawsuit, against one FOSS vender or another, in the upcoming months prior to Win8's release...

They certainly knocked ASUS back in line when they started experimenting with products using open source software. No more Linux based netbooks. The ARM based smartbooks shown were "a mistake." That smartbook incident would almost certainly have induced an anti-trust suit if software from a third party company had been involved instead of open source software.

One generally must give respect to get the same.

Grudging acknowledgement and stingy accommodation in those matters where there is no practical alternative doesn't count.

The only respect Microcr@p gets is in the tech press. Everyone else just puts up with it, because... everyone else puts up with it.

The "MS is a top contributer to the kernel" meme is bandied about; what I'd read leads me to believe it's focused mostly on getting Windows guests to run in KVM and little else.

Are there other areas they are contributing to? If not, this mantra needs to be questioned every time it's brought up.

> what I'd read leads me to believe it's focused mostly on getting Windows guests to run in KVM and little else.

Actually, I believe it's mostly focused on getting Linux guests to run well on Windows hosts.

You are correct! Thanks.

And even then, it's not so much that they contributed much, but that they did such a bad job they had to contribute the code over and over, till they got it right.

They were being threatened (twice) with having their code booted out of the kernel, and when they were done, the code in question weighed in at only a third of the original size.

Quoting:http://www.h-online.com/open/features/Kernel-Comment-Taking-a-partial-view-1517272.html

In other words, Microsoft chalked up its first set of changes by merging bad code. This was followed by many further changes, as, in line with the wishes of the kernel development team, Microsoft's programmers improved the staging drivers in small, easily comprehensible increments. Because there was so much that needed fixing, this resulted in 688 changes (one per cent of all commits) between Linux 2.6.36 and 3.2. In the process, the code for the Hyper-V drivers shrank by around sixty per cent. According to the Hyper-V drivers' maintainers, they now also offer better performance, are more stable and represent a solid basis for further improvement.

Yep,... M$ is lucky that the code contributions are counted by lines of code,... After all, they have a culture of code bloat,... You know slave drummers at the front of the the coding galleys, with the other guy with the whip ready to deal with anybody who gets out of line saying they need to go to their kid's play at 8PM or something,...

I personally don't envy any group or individual facing the kernel-dev firing squad when they drop their code in for the first time. I haven't...yet...I've just seen some of the threads from time to time.