Open Sources | Rodrigues & Urlocker » Microsoft gets open source religion with officelabs

February 08, 2007 | Comments: (0)

Microsoft gets open source religion with officelabs

TAGS: Microsoft

In one of its most interesting open source moves to date, Microsoft is forming a new group within the company called officelabs. You can read more about it here, including Mary Jo Foley's commentary and my own analysis of the company's job postings for officelabs development positions.

officelabs may be a cynical recruitment tool: "Why develop open source software elsewhere when you can do it here?" But I don't think so. It strikes me as a sincere attempt to experiment with open source development to improve its products and to get them to market on time (and for less than SAP's $1.4 billion resource sink).

It's when I hear about things like officelabs that I think Microsoft may be the first big proprietary company to actually grok open source and embrace it. Of course, it will also need to find a way to do that and keep hold of its multi-billion dollar Office and Windows businesses. An impossible task? We'll see.

Posted by Matt Asay on February 8, 2007 06:56 PM

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