Bonum Certa Men Certa

Meet Obama's Pick for Technology Advisory Panel

HERE is what Craig Mundie, whom Obama has just appointed, thinks about Free/open source software:

Never show source code, senior Microsoft man says

Craig Mundie, senior VP at Microsoft, told the conference in São Paulo yesterday, the secret to success in software is "never show the source".

He said that the FSF [Free Software Foundation] wanted to destroy a business model in which industry standard software had benefited everyone for a long time.


Microsoft's code sharing offer draws blank

[Craig Mundie] also said Microsoft is going ahead with the source code sharing programme despite the recent virus attacks targeting Microsoft products.

“When we enter into a source code sharing programme we have strict confidentiality clauses. We do not expect it to be leading to security breaches”


Commercial software, sustainable innovation

"The GPL turns our existing concepts of intellectual property rights on their heads. Some of the tension I see between the GPL and strong business models is by design, and some of it is caused simply because there remains a high level of legal uncertainty around the GPL-- uncertainty that translates into business risk" [ --Craig Mundie]


Microsoft pays court to Washington

"At the height of the US government's antitrust pursuit of Microsoft, Bill Gates and his execs were vigorously denouncing rivals Sun Microsystems and Oracle for using the Feds to try to cripple the world's largest software company [...]

Privately [...] Microsoft lobbyist Paula Boyd met with Jonathan Cody, FCC chairman Michael Powell's special policy advisor [...] Microsoft strategist Pierre De Vries and Microsoft attorney Scott Blake Harris (the FCC's former international bureau chief) met with FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein. Craig Mundie, Microsoft's senior vice president, has met with Powell personally. And those are just a few examples.


Obama promotes the message about transparency, so why is this guy on his panel? Devil's advocate?

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