Not our own words, but there you go...

In our previous posts about Interop [1, 2, 3], which "is Effectively a Noop", we presented the views of Matt Asay and Joe Wilcox, among others. Not many people are buying this sham and here is some further evidence and interpretations. This new analogy you are probably going to fancy.

After thinking for a bit, I then realize this is the exact same corporate strategy Microsoft has pursued with Active Directory. Release a trojan horse into a corporation by making an inferior, arguably broken, operating system, Windows, that won’t work with anything else, or follow the same standards, and then release a steaming pile of bandages, duck tape, glue, and well…poo, and make everyone authenticate against it while charging an expensive licensing fee.

We have active bot nets that rivel NASA in pure computing power due to boneheaded Operating System design...

How about NAC? We wrote about this before when we mentioned the insightful renarks from Charles Cooper (of CNET). Cisco and Microsoft chose what they call interoperability [sic] (should say "intraoperability") over what Charles referred to as "openness" (standards, not exclusive bridges). Here comes an update on the sad NAC situation.

The Interop Labs test of NAC interoperability showed little participation by vendors that support checking endpoints running Linux and Mac OS X.

This is hardly a surprise given the source of initiation for NAC. How about this little update from Matt Asay?

Microsoft, openness, and oxymorons

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Let's compare this openness pledge to Microsoft's reality with Sharepoint, as but one example. If you want to use Microsoft's Sharepoint, you must use Microsoft's SQL Server, Windows, Office, IIS, Active Directory, etc. It also works much better with Internet Explorer, and is crippled in Firefox, Safari, etc.

Are we to assume that Microsoft has seen the light and is now embracing openness as its salvation? Not likely.

He finally appears to be hitting the right drum. Microsoft is just trying to ensure that "open source" is tied to its cash cows so that even a simple Apache deployment need be accompanied by the purchase of a proprietary Microsoft stack, potentially costing around $1000 over time. To Microsoft, open source is just an ISV and it won't let its bread and butter (cash cows) simply go any time soon, unless harsh reality intrudes. It will just carry on pretending to have OSS affinity because it needs to lure in (read: exploit) innocent developers. ⬆