Open or Closed?

Megavendors make overtures to the open source community; plus, Microsoft gets "egged", ODF faces credibility issues, open source is in the driver’s seat, and more software news of the week.

Open-source technologies were the source of opinionated debates as well as announcements of initiatives this week.

Microsoft announced it will enable users to open, edit and save documents in the open-source Open Document Format (ODF) to make it easier to work with Microsoft Office. Not everyone is a believer in the Redmond firm’s promises to play nice with the open-source community. The EU will investigate whether ODF really improves interoperability with other software products.

Google, however, is truly taking an open-source path to one of its objectives—building a cooperative community to ensure there are alternatives to Microsoft. Proof is in the pudding, as they say, and the majority of the 11 million lines of code in its Android phone are open source. Red Hat, however, disagrees with Google’s method of initially developing Android in a closed approach internally before it involves open-source developers.

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