Microsoft Hones Strategy to Compete with Open Source

Once known as the vendor of the lowest-priced operating systems (OSs), Microsoft has had to concede that title to Linux, an open-source OS that has steadily gained adherents even among enterprise customers. Microsoft’s initial attacks on open-source software had little impact, but the company has refined its response, taking on perceived open-source benefits-lower cost, transparency, and an active developer community-with better arguments and changes that directly address these perceived advantages. However, Microsoft cannot take its dominance for granted; it must maintain its technical leadership and deliver superior support and product integration.

What Open Source Means

Definitions of open source are numerous and frequently political. This article will focus primarily on a technical definition: open-source software is software for which source code is available to customers and users.

Source code is the code that developers or programmers write, typically in a “high-level” programming language, such as C or C++. Computers, on the other hand, use only binary code, made up entirely of numeric sequences, for instructions and data. When a programmer wants to run code on a computer, the human-readable source code is usually “compiled”: converted into a computer-readable binary file that the computer can load and execute, but that is unreadable by people.