More Mayhem From MSFT's Mundie

Cally writes "Further embarrasingly lame FUD from Craig Mundie of Microsoft. This time, he claims the GPL is at odds with 'commercialization' of software, without which the government gets a smaller tax take. Looks like he's really talking to legislators there ... He also knocks the Sun-led Liberty Alliance Passport SSO service as 'this notion that the world should be offered an alternative.' An alternative?"

Comments

Re:Well, honestly, for once, he's right....

[sirinek]

Cygnus.

-siri

*this text here to defeat the mean old lameness filter*
*please disregard this text*

Re:Microsoft is concerned about Taxes?

[Bonker]

And this is how they did it.

Re:Microsoft is concerned about Taxes?

[Otter]

In 2001, MS payed *no* income tax because they were able to deduct the value of employee stock options and 401k plans.

Not that the assertion he's making isn't idiotic, but -- Microsoft employees paid huge amounts of income tax, the sale of their products generated huge amounts of sales tax and their business operations are huge tax base (property, licenses, etc.) The revenue generated for the government from MS far exceeds that coming from VA Linux/Software, corporate tax or no.

My point is that "didn't pay corporate tax" is frequently presented as "contributes nothing to society", which is completely untrue.

Re:One cannot help but wonder...

[Mr. Slippery]

Any company that touches GPLd code with a 20 foot pole needs to ferret out the zealots in their midst

Yeah, radical companies like IBM...

Ferret out the zealots! Begin the inquisition! Are you now or have you ever been a user of free software?

Jeez, guy. Relax.

What a joke!

[gamgee5273]

Who is Mundie trying to fool? I read the article and can basically hear him saying: "The government loses a tax base if software isn't for sale." What a smart guy! However, if one follows the logical extension of the argument it just goes to prove that Mundie is a spokespuppet. Let's look at this:

1) Mundie says that the lack of those taxes means the government can't send that money into education. However, if said software was free then universities and the such wouldn't have to spend millions of dollars to keep software updated. Thus ends Mundie's Myth #1.

2) Mundie says companies won't be able to fund research because they won't be getting revenue from the software. However, that's the beauty of the whole GPL thang - people outside of a given company will help R&D for the entire open source community. Thus ends Mundie's Myth #2.

I seriously wonder how much though Mundie puts into the things he says, because they're coming across rather lamebrained from this angle...

Not exactly

[CTho9305]

Not exactly... the bounce message is generated by YOUR SMTP server, not Hotmail's. if you telnet to mx04.hotmail.com on port 25 and use SMTP commands to fake sending a message, all you get is:

550 Requested action not taken:
mailbox unavailable

I only have linux boxes, but I bet if you used an exchange SMTP server, you'd get a different bounce message back. Note who the bounce message was sent from... it was NOT from mailer-daemon@hotmail.com in my test - after using telnet I tested using pine ;).

Re: profits and taxes

[Bobzibub]

You forgot that Microsoft does not pay any federal income taxes:
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/1/138 52.html

So the federal government has a choice of $30 or $0 for corporate income tax.
Of course there are other multipliers like personal income tax paid by employees, etc...