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Dave Stutz's Parting Advice To Microsoft
thasmudyan writes "Like probably many others I followed the recent link to Heise only to get a much more interesting story than the one about Mozilla/OpenOffice: Dave Stutz, an influencial guy at Microsoft, is resigning his position. He posted an open letter to his ex-employer and this rest of the world, explaining what MS is doing wrong in his opinion. I thought it made an interesting read, maybe Open Source projects should consider some of the key points (as MS seems to be too slow to adapt, it may be good time to move faster than 'the industry')." (Read this Slashdot post from 2001 to see an interesting interview with Stutz about "shared source" and .NET.)
Well there IS also a big problem with OpenSource. The problem of no one is responsible for problems, damage and other stuff.
I like to give you a good example of problems that I found with OpenSource and which are hard to track down because the developer doesn't feel to follow rules.
Example:
GNOME 2.2 there are a lot of inconsistences in the UI as you can read here. People tried to contact the developers, wrote patches but everything seems to be a waste of time since you can't convince the developer of the customer needs. The reply is usually 'go fix it yourself' or 'create a patch and sent it to bugzilla' or similar stuff. OpenSource will never be able to program the way the customer needs the software. OpenSource mostly program the way the developer likes it. If you look at commercial Companies such as Apple for example. Most of their applications look equal, feel equal and behave equal because they spent a lot of money into their design, their usability and their programmers. All this is missing on OpenSource. If we talk about little applications then no one bothers but as soon as it starts to get complex where many people need to work together as a team in a big project then things start to suck. OpenSource is definately a good idea but on the long run I don't see it to stay successful. Specially if you as developer work freely on your program and realize how other companies such as RedHat, Sun, SuSE and many others outsource your hard work and sell it for cash to other people.
I don't know if you people understand what I'm upto but I like to encourage you to think about this stuff for some minutes.
- Developers seriously like to get money for their work.
- OpenSource is a free ticket for companies to have your shit outsourced for cash.
- You work hard on your own project trying to reach some big stuff with other community members such as in a GNOME project but you always fail to convince them because everyone plays as an individual instead in a team.
Don't think and belive blindly that OpenSource is the best thing that happens for you. There are also big disadvantages in OpenSource.
Are you a trained musician yourself?
"Nothing like good old pressure of 'I bought 10k in copies of this damn thing and it doesnt do X' 'I was sold X, Ill sue' Will light a fire under ANY manager."
Your CIO is dumb enough to think he can sue MS? He is stupid enough to think he can prevail?
Please tell me the name of your company I want to make sure I don't have any stock in a company whose CIO is that stupid.
War is necrophilia.
" C# and .NET are indirectly a result of Microsoft Research. Before .NET came out, C# was on their list of projects."
.NET is. It's apparently some sort of a marketing term. Hardly what I would call innovative and certainly not a product of research. What part of .NET required research? It looks like most of it ripped off straight from Java.
C# is nothing but a rewrite of java by the guy who wrote delphi. MS hired the guy from borland. What kind of research is that?
I still don't really know what
War is necrophilia.
" Try SQL Server. The way that the SQL Server engine parses a statement into a query execution plan is another example of Microsoft Research putting resources into production software products."
Huh? Every database does query plans. The postgres guys post their query plan logic on their web site and it's under a BSD like license. I wouldn't doubt it if the SQL server guys ripped it off line by line.
War is necrophilia.
To MS and MS employees all open source developers are cancerous communists. He was just being polite calling you a wannabe.
War is necrophilia.