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Dave Stutz's Parting Advice To Microsoft

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the lose-the-toupee dept.

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.)

1 of 283 comments (clear)

  1. Is OS so good ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Troll

    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.