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Jeremy Allison Calls Microsoft Dangerous Elephant
oranghutan writes "At the annual Linux.conf.au event being held in Wellington, NZ, one of the lead developers for the Samba Team (and Google employee) Jeremy Allison described Microsoft as 'an elephant that needs to be turned to stop it trampling the open source community.' Allison has been an outspoken critic of the vendor since he quit Novell over a deal it did with Microsoft that he saw as dangerous to open source intentions. And now he has evolved his argument to incorporate new case studies to explain why Microsoft's use of patents and its general tactics on free software are harmful.
I have no love for Microsoft.
But in the last decade I've seen Linux on the Desktop split between two different competing environments and API's, usability experts not being able to get any meaningful traction early on in FLOSS projects, newbies being flamed on IRC for asking questions, legitimate criticism of user experience issues being written of as FUD, billions of FLOSS company dollars going to enterprise systems buyouts and kernel hacker salaries instead of high quality user testing labs (and then saying FLOSS has no money for such things like evil proprietary companies do), etc.
When I look at Microsoft, I don't see FLOSS's greatest enemy; I see a boogeyman and a scapegoat used to explain FLOSS' lack of success at getting outside of a server room.
I absolutely agree with this person and I wish I had mod points. While I don't love Micro$oft, but just to be fair, can we start to look at Microsoft as "competition" and move on. They have every right to protect their business; if we can produce better, more appealing software, we don't need to worry about all this bullshit. We need to win hearts with great products, not FUD--I hate to say it, like Micro$oft. I think our priorities are out of order here. Whenevr I see a Micro$oft bashing post on slashdot, I just have to roll my eyes over. Grow up, people, please..o.k., pretty please?