08.25.10
Microsoft Tactic: We Love Open Source, But Those ‘Zealots’ Don’t Love Us Back
Summary: One last response to the provocation from Microsoft (charm offensive), which IDG’s fauxpen source blog is still spinning (third time now)
IT WAS ONLY a matter of time until IDG trolled yet again for Microsoft. For those who missed the “OOXML Paoli” series, here are prior posts from this week:
- IDG Spin: Microsoft a Victim in Patent Racketeering, Loves Open Source
- “Microsoft Hates the Term “Free Software” or “Freedom”, They Prefer to Use Open Source”
- Microsoft is ‘Openwashing’ Azure
- Microsoft: ‘We love [subverting the definition of] open source’
So now it’s the turn of Julie Bort’s colleague to use the same old tricks. He is a Microsoft partner (through his employer) yet he writes a lot about “open source” and from IDG he spins the latest debacle as “Open Source” being intolerant of Microsoft (like calling people who are on the receiving end of an abusive relationship “zealots” or “intolerant”). One has got to love this part:
Anyway, the real shame is that Microsoft is much more embracing of open source and they will probably never get credit for it.
Microsoft is trying so hard to make it proprietary-reliant, more reliant on Windows for example. What credit does it deserve for that? Shockingly I agree with Adrian Kingsley-Hughes, for a change. He says that Microsoft needs to take a crown jewel like Windows into the GPL’s domain in order to prove “love” for Free/Open Source software (the “freedom” part matters). It will never happen of course, not in the foreseeable future. Here is another important point:
Put an end to the whole “open source infringes on our patents” rhetoric/FUD/nonsense. If not put an end to it, come clean as to what these infringements are so that the it can work with the open source community to rectify outstanding issues. As CEO, this job should fall to Ballmer, and the open source community should expect a statement shortly (although I wouldn’t hold my breath).
[...]
Without taking measurable actions to prove that it supports open source, Microsoft’s love of it as it stands could be little more than a return to the old ways of embrace, extend and extinguish.
Adrian’s colleague Dana Blankenhorn has been writing some reasonable posts recently and this too is one of them:
Of course just because Microsoft loves open source that doesn’t mean it does what the open source movement wants it to do as opposed to what Microsoft wants to do. Microsoft loves open source because it has found a way to twist it in the direction of its own self-interest.
Yes, that’s exactly it. Microsoft is trying to change and redefine Open Source to the point where it can relate to this bogus, twisted, and subverted definition, wherein even Windows-only software for Fog Computing can be labeled “Open” and proprietary Office formats can be called “Open” too. That’s Paoli’s expertise. Here is a funny new cartoon about what Microsoft is trying to achieve. █
“More Open Than Open [...] I am constantly amazed at the flexibility of this single word.”
–Microsoft’s Jason Matusow, integral part of the ‘Open’ XML corruptions (further background in [1, 2, 3])
Needs Sunlight said,
August 26, 2010 at 8:47 am
Sorry Bill and minions, it’s not about liking or not liking. It’s about evaluation the right tool for the job. Microsoft and its tools, including the fools that are tools, fail across the board:
1. licensing
2. quality
3. goals
The sooner the US can rid its schools of the Microsoft way of thinking the greater likelihood the country can recover. It’s not just the bad quality of the Microsoft people and products. It’s not just the poor licensing and price-gouging. It is also that Microsoft attitude that empirical facts have less weight than opinions compounded with an apparent desire to make or accept only bad quality.