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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?"
If GPL is as bad as Microsoft says it is, why do they keep drawing attention to it?
I mean, come on, when you continue to talk about something, the idea survives, where as if you ignore it, most of the time, it will just go away.
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Unix is very user friendly, it's just picky about who its friends are.
The gov't still gets its cut.
It gets it from all the companies that have higher profits because they aren't paying the Microsoft tax.
The article is pretty short, and I can't help but wondering if any of his statements were taken at all out of context. For example, the "should be offered an alternative" statement seems pretty silly for MS to take - after all the monopoly allegation problems, why complain that there is a movement to have a Passport alternative? One would think that the presence of other central authentication database standards would allow them to continue to tout the "we are not dominating" stance.
It's especially disengenuous for MS to complain as Passport is/will be included with every MS OS, whereas the Liberty Alliance one will have a hard time making it in the Windows world.
GPL knock is classic MS though - "free software cannot make money" is their normal approach and is almost hardly newsworthy.
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Because the general public expect such things from what is essentially a marketting droid. Granted he has a technical title, and can speak the speak, so he *must* know what he's talking about? Dah?
And the general public also expects someone just as zealously over the top to say similarly ludicrous things about Microsoft. They will offset one another, and in the end, people don't care. They just want to have fun, and get what they want when they want it.
They'd like the internet to be nice and easy, and they do not want to enter passwords to things. They do not understand, and do not care about security. They only care about not getting things stolen from them, or being cheated.
In the real world, who takes care of thievery and fraud? Yes, the police and the government. So why can't the police and the government *do their jobs* and keep the normal people safe and secure online too?
Well, sure you and I know why, because we generally know how things work. Normal people do not. And they don't care.
Now I'm no MS Basher. I'll take them to task when it needs to be done, but I'll also praise them when they deserve it. Still, with quotes like the following, it's getting harder and harder to find something to praise about them:
"Rather than form a federation with Microsoft and work with what we had already created, there was this notion that the world should be offered an alternative," Mundie said.
Oh no!!!! An alternative! How horrible that consumers be offered a choice!
My sci-fi novel, Ghost Thief, is now available from Amazon.com.
We really should take MS to task over not providing the source code to their products - after all, when IBM first started shipping software for their mainframes, the source code came with it so that the user could customize it to their needs. Where does MS get off thinking it should be any different?
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Did you tell him that Microsoft will soon be out of business because they hire salesmen that insult their customers? Did you ask him if his boss knew that he insulted customers by telling them they will be out of business.
Good salesmen are helpful people that can help you solve a problem. Salesmen that just try to sell you something are idiots.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
For those of you who don't have the dubious privilege of paying taxes on your business, let me provide a slightly oversimplified explanation. Unlike personal income taxes, businesses pay taxes on their profits, not on the income that ended up going into operating expenses and equipment purchases. (The big exception is payroll, but that's not germane here.) If I use "free" software instead of M$ software, there's nothing for me to deduct. Instead, I have to either invest the money in something else (thereby stimulating the economy, and passing the tax burden to my vendors) or pay taxes on it.
So do your patriotic duty and use free software!
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
Fair enough, but the argument about secondary contributions is so frequently overstated it's nauseating, and usually in the service of public dollars being spent on private moneymaking, like stadiums, corporate relocations, etc.
A partly rhetorical question:
And another one:
To my mind, the obligations on companies, like people go above and beyond the balance sheet of what they consume (raw resources, human resources, physical, social, legal, educational infrastructure) - they are part of society, and have a duty to help others in society, as do the rest of us. So the current climate of heaping accolades on companies because one of the things they happen to need is people to work jobs drives me nuts, as it suggests that having made jobs, companies are off the hook for any more helping out.