Microsoft's Chief Exec For Latin America Says 'Open' Means 'Incompetent'

An anonymous reader writes "The President of Microsoft Latin America, in criticizing the Brazilian government for its support of open source software, claimed that declaring something open is how you 'mask incompetence.' That seems especially funny coming from Microsoft, who has used 'closed' to mask incompetence for years. I thought 'open' meant that people could find and fix (or ignore) incompetence, whereas closed meant you were stuck with the incompetence."

Comments

not long for his job

[yagu]

Even microsoft will distance themselves from this thesis. They've come too far "embracing" open. My guess, this guy gets cut loose, and if microsoft can make a PR coup of it at the same time, they will.

Re:not long for his job

[MoonBuggy]

I don't know if it'll lose him his job but yeah, this isn't even within the realms of MS's PR strategy, this is just some exec talking like an idiot.

Re:not long for his job

[click2005]

Open does mean incompetent. Microsoft are trying to hide that by keeping it closed.
I'd rather trust the people saying 'its not perfect so help us make it better'
than the ones saying 'we make perfect software' and being proved wrong time after time.

Re:not long for his job

[mark72005]

Hasn't he heard? OSS is long-term credible, so FUD can't be used to combat it.

Re:not long for his job

[tgatliff]

My guess is that it shows the level of frustration Microsoft is having with OSS.

OSS is never on the edge of innovation. In fact, it is almost universally behind the times. However, it forces the industry to innovate to survive, which is great for technology as a whole.

Re:not long for his job

[homey of my owney]

I am NOT by any means defending this guy, but I think he was probably referring to the somewhat obtuse way that open source projects are documented which can give the appearance of incompetence, which has been a long time complaint of mine.

Everybody hates documentation if you're a coder, but having an attitude of RTFC helps no one if you are looking to compare an OS project to a paid alternative.

I'm not suggesting that this is for all projects, but it is far to common and must change to really enter the mainstream.

Re:not long for his job

[AnonymousClown]

It was code. He talking about the Mask of Incompetence - like the Mask of Zorro!

He's the inside guy for El Incompetentito! The masked one who fights for truth, justice, and the Open Source way!

Re:not long for his job

[clarkkent09]

If you look through all the open source projects, say on sourceforge (all 250,000 of them), a few are great, many are average and by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage. It doesn't mean that open source means incompetent but it doesn't automatically mean competent either, you have to look at the specific project. Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.

Re:not long for his job

[postbigbang]

This *IS* Microsoft with a thesis. It's also a sales guy that's losing ground, just as has happened in many countries of the world. He's losing his grip. There's little way for Microsoft to make a PR coup out of this, which makes me wonder why you'd even bring this up.

IMHO, Microsoft's embrace of 'open' is similar to the other embraces that they've made, called The Black Widow Effect. It goes back to things like SQL Server, OS/2-LAN Manager, and other 'partnered' programs that turned into outrageous divorces with big name organizations.

Microsoft serves Microsoft. Make no mistake about this. If it's not invented here, then it needs to be embraced and squeezed to death.

Re:not long for his job

[0123456]

Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.

I suspect most people developing commercial products get bored with them by the time they're half-way through, but they have to be shipped in order to keep beer and pizza on the table.

Re:not long for his job

[youngone]

In my experience an awful lot of Execs are idiots. Some of the statements made in meetings at the company I work at would cause our shareprice to plummet like a sheep if they were made public.

Re:not long for his job

[lewiscr]

Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.

No, not really. We can't browse a large archive of commercial projects that never shipped, so we can't really compare. I am willing to bet that there are more abandoned open source projects, but I don't think it's as skewed as you suggest.

Re:not long for his job

[HermMunster]

The man's tasked with selling to Latin America. Don't you think all of Latin America knows how to take this guy? I'm sure now he seems more incompetent than Open Source to them, and probably more or less impotent.

Re:not long for his job

[HermMunster]

With all the closed source code we see every day we can judge their competency in documenting their code.

Open source won't advance without others being able to read and modify the code. They must be doing something right if the good packages keep getting better.

Re:not long for his job

[dch24]

We have to be patient with the big dinosaurs. Word travels slowly inside such a large company.

1 June 2001, Ballmer's legendary comment, "Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches. That's the way that the license works."

From the comments in TFA, 8 April 2002 - FUD from Juan Gonzalez, General Manager of Microsoft Peru gets shot down in flames by Congressman Edgar David Villanueva Nuñez

20 February 2003, David Stutz, retiring group program manager, "delivered a kick in the pants to his former employer" saying "Microsoft is in danger of being swept away by open source"

12 May 2004, Windows Template Library (and Windows Installer XML) posted to sourceforge. The blogosphere reels in shock. Even slashdot isn't sure what to think.

I got bored at this point, but there's lots more popcorn-hour fun and games as this large corporation tries to deal with a rapidly changing industry.

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

Incompetent was too strong of a word. I'll bet he meant more along the lines of amateurish, or less serious. The spirit of volunteerism is in general a much weaker motivator of people than money. So the outcomes will tend to be as witnessed.

Re:not long for his job

[DrugCheese]

If it's not invented here, then it needs to be embraced and squeezed to death.

Let me fix it for you:

If it's not invented here, then it needs to be bought out so we can claim we invented it. Or embraced and squeezed to death.

Re:not long for his job

[aintnostranger]

Latin America is pretty strong about free software and open source these days. He's saying it because some governments, like Brazil are adopting free software en masse. Worse, much worse for the company image here in latin america, he stated that "goverments should stay out of the software business and make things better for people" source:http://www.elespectador.com/imagen-224529-hernan-rincon-habla-del-software-libre . We really don't like a representative from a U.S. company telling us which things lie within the scope of our governments. That should be obvious to anyone who has a slight clue about latin american history on the last 50 years. And this man is from a latin american country, and that startles me most.

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

Reportedly 50% of start-ups fail within a year, 95% within 5 years... so is it fair to estimate that software-based startups are failing at the same rate?

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

Let us applaud this Microsoft Executive for being so Open-Minded.

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

In other news, many sourceforge projects are started by high school or college students. Why doesn't this surprise me.

If you want to compare OSS developers, try comparing the devs who stick with their projects for at least as long as commercial developers do. Comparing hobby projects to commercial products developed by full-time programmers doesn't prove incompetence. It may mean lack of development time or lack of experience, but not incompetence.

Re:not long for his job

[exomondo]

Everybody hates documentation if you're a coder, but having an attitude of RTFC helps no one if you are looking to compare an OS project to a paid alternative.

That's absolutely right, of course it's not the case with all OSS projects but the 'you can find and fix problems' argument is useless if you have to sift through a mountain of undocumented, obfuscated, hacked code just to figure out where the problem is.

Re:not long for his job

[DragonWriter]

If you look through all the open source projects, say on sourceforge (all 250,000 of them), a few are great, many are average and by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage. It doesn't mean that open source means incompetent but it doesn't automatically mean competent either, you have to look at the specific project. Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.

You are mistaking "commercial" (and "people have money invested in them") and "open-source" as opposed rather than orthogonal concerns, there are is noncommercial closed-source software and commercial open-source software. If a closed-source project (commercial or otherwise) --is abandoned at an early stage, it doesn't have visibility like an open-source project hosted on Source Forge, github, or any other public system.

Since an "open-source" project doesn't become "open-source" until code is released with an open-source license, I suspect that far more closed-source projects (including ones which might have become open-source if they were ever released by the creator) are abandoned before a production-ready release than open source projects. Its just that far fewer people other than the creators ever have the opportunity to become aware of those projects.

Re:not long for his job

[jtownatpunk.net]

"Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through."

You mean like how Outlook 2003 had half-assed, crippled IMAP support that languished for 4 years until Outlook 2007 came out? Which still left out a few important details that were kinda addressed in Outlook 2010? And you got to pay $$$ for each incremental improvement?

I almost like Outlook 2010 but it took them 7 freakin' years to get IMAP right enough not to suck. Actually, it took MORE than 7 years. I'm pretty sure it was part of LookOut 97.

The whole idea that money must be involved to create a quality product really grinds my gears. Back when OpenOffice hit 2.0, one of our mucky-mucks took up the challenge to do all of his office tasks with OO. Several months later, he declared that he hadn't touched an Office product once, the learning curve wasn't bad, and he was able to do everything he needed with OO and several things that Office couldn't do. So we're sticking with M$ Office because it must be better because we pay for it. Sigh. Before I could even open my mouth, he came right out and said that there was no rational basis for the decision. Free software just doesn't feel right.

That attitude is starting to change but it's sooooo sssssllllloooooowwwww in an industry that moves so fast.

Re:not long for his job

[StayFrosty]

The spirit of volunteerism is in general a much weaker motivator of people than money.

Many open source projects (and arguably most successful ones) have some sort of corporate sponsorship. Some companies who use open-source projects do pay people to work on them full-time. Others provide support services for open-source products and use the money generated to hire programs to improve the product. Open source vs. Closed source isn't about amateur vs. professional anymore and hasn't been for quite some time.

Re:not long for his job

[smellotron]

Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.

I suspect most people developing commercial products get bored with them by the time they're half-way through, but they have to be shipped in order to keep beer and pizza on the table.

Motive doesn't matter: a completed product is more useful than an incomplete product. An incomplete product is only valuable as a collection of good ideas. Sometimes good ideas are better than crappy products, but only because ideas eventually turn into products.

Re:not long for his job

[twidarkling]

Except you can't say that each start-up represents a project. Some may represent more than one. Back during the .com boom, many represented none. And what about projects that were transferred to a new company as part of the selling off of a start-up's assets?

So, while yes, one could assume a similar failure rate of start-up companies in software as other areas, that failure rate has absolutely fuck-all to do with the current conversation of comparing open source project abandonment with commercial.

Personally, I think there's more open-source abandoned projects by a huge amount, but mostly for one reason: amateur coder starts a project on own time, realizes it goes beyond current skills, abandons, starts new project later. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, either. It's a great way to learn and push yourself.

My only problem with projects like that is that often it's never clearly established that it's abandoned, or who is in current stewardship, or anything like that, and so these half-done projects remain around, lowering the average quality of OSS, and making it incredibly hard to find something current and/or decent. That's at least one decent thing about commercial software: it's easy to tell who is in charge of a piece of software, and if they're bothering to maintain it any more.

Re:not long for his job

[jedidiah]

Open Systems encourage modular design and transparency. This allows a finer degree of granularity when fixing things or replacing things. You may be able to tweak an individual component or just data rather than having to "sift through a mountain of code".

Multiple vendors and projects can compete as alternatives on a level playing field.

Access to source code doesn't even have to enter into it.

Re:not long for his job

[viperblades]

I would like to be part of one of these projects you speak of. personally I find working long hours due to crunch time boring among other things.

The reality is bad code / practices / half finished things are everywhere.....

Just in commercial software no one can see your source code and call you on it.

Re:not long for his job

[Greyfox]

If you look at any professional project, it's about the same. Just because you're a professional developer doesn't mean you crap flowers and unicorns. I've heard it said that most corporate Programming/IT projects end in failure. The difference being that there's a lot more to get tripped up on in the corporate world. Even if you DO crap daisies and unicorns, your management or company's business process may still prevent you from getting anything useful done.

Re:not long for his job

[HermMunster]

I agree with you. My point was that you guys know he's a creep. You are certainly aware of how he operates. You'll take that to heart in your judgement of his competence.

Re:not long for his job

[marcosdumay]

He was probably not refering to anything in particular, just making some FUD.

Re:not long for his job

[angloquebecer]

How parent did not get modded funny, I don't know. Maybe the mods are open-minded too.

Re:not long for his job

[node 3]

I don't know if it'll lose him his job but yeah, this isn't even within the realms of MS's PR strategy, this is just some exec talking like an idiot.

Now that I think about it, he may very well lose his job over this. If Microsoft is good at one thing, it's hiding incompetency.

He's giving away trade secrets...

Re:not long for his job

[catmistake]

I don't know if it'll lose him his job but yeah, this isn't even within the realms of MS's PR strategy, this is just some exec talking like an idiot.

I don't know if it'll lose him his job but yeah, this isn't even within the realms of MS's PR strategy, this is just some exec talking like an idiot.

Not necessarily. Latin American Microsoft is much more colorful, musical, and ... what's the word... not 'wacky,' exactly, not 'goofier,'... but... something. Frilly? yes... but that's not th precise word I mean either. Damn this adjective aphasia! Idiotic? Now I forgot what I was talking about... I may have been distracted by a large, heaving, tan and sparkling bust :-/

Re:not long for his job

[Just Some Guy]

by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage.

I have a project on Sourceforge that I haven't updated since March, and the last update before that was in November. It's not abandoned. To the contrary, I use it in an hourly cron job on a production server. The thing is, it works. Unless a user writes to me with a patch or request, I doubt I'll ever have a reason to update it. It does exactly what it's supposed to do, I haven't experienced a bug in several years, and it compiles without warning on every 32- and 64- bit Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X system I have to test it on.

A lot of projects probably have been abandoned, but it's kind of hard to tell. A lack of updates to a project doesn't have to mean to no one cares. It might also mean that it's, well, finished.

Re:not long for his job

[burnin1965]

on sourceforge (all 250,000 of them), a few are great, many are average and by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage. It doesn't mean that open source means incompetent but it doesn't automatically mean competent either, you have to look at the specific project.

It is very easy to start a project on sourceforge and once it has been started it will stick around no matter what. This means that many projects are started on a whim or from what at first seems like a great idea but eventually are abandoned for a wide array of reasons.

While it is possible that the reason a project is abandoned is due to competence there is no way to verify this unless a project reaches the point where some code is uploaded to the version system or released for download there is no means of measuring competence. When you have the code then you can measure competence.

Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.

On the whole commercial products do not provide source code and when they fail you never even hear about the failure. There is no way to compare abandoned or even garbage open source projects on sourceforge directly with the commercial market where failure and incompetence are hidden in the commercial market.

If you really want to know if open source is competent then you need to compare the software that is used with the industry as a whole. There have been a few of these studies over the years and popular open source applications fair very well.

In this report there is a reference to a 2003 study by a company named Reason that analyses software code.

In Table 2 of the report the Linux kernel version 2.4.19 TCP/IP stack had a defects/KLSC of 0.10 while the industry networking code values for the best third of software houses was less than 0.15, the middle third is 0.15 to 0.35 and the worst third are > 0.35.

They also compared Apache 2.1-dev release with a defects/KLSC of 0.53 compared to similar industry software that ranked less than 0.36 for the top third, 0.36 to 0.71 for the middle third and greater than 0.71 for the worst third.

Open source is not incompetent, it easily falls inline with commercial software.

Can you find open source applications with bugs, issues, and bad code, absolutely yes.
Can you find closed source applications with bugs, issues, and bad code, absolutely yes on the bugs and issues, you have no idea on the code.

Re:not long for his job

[pnewhook]

TCP/IP stack and SMTP server were written with department of defense funding.

The first web server and browser were funded as a project by CERN

The first Kerberos implementation was closed source developed at MIT

The first NFS was written by Sun Microsystems.

Do you have any other examples of innovative OSS projects?

Re:not long for his job

[WeatherGod]

This is one reason I like Github. So long as people *fork* a repository, Github can then track and network together the individual forks. Github can show you in a graph which repo is getting which patches (and from who) and see how the forks compare with each other in terms of maintenance.

Re:not long for his job

[arkane1234]

OR like the projects that I created and FINISHED, they are done and there for people to either extend into new things or as a repo for it.

Projects don't keep changing, if the ultimate goal is achieved.
Windows is a prime example of that, or anything Microsoft makes nowadays. If they made horses, it'd have 3 tails, 2 noses and a license for every time you wanted to ride it, after you bought it.

Re:not long for his job

[kimvette]

On that note, let's follow the trail

open source = incompetence
BSD Sockets = open source
Winsock (windows sockets - the TCP/IP stack Microsoft first used in Windows) = BSD Sockets, taken directly from BSD code (Microsoft loves the BSD license)
Winsock = incompetence, ergo Windows networking = the product of incompetence!!

Re:not long for his job

[luis_a_espinal]

I don't know if it'll lose him his job but yeah, this isn't even within the realms of MS's PR strategy, this is just some exec talking like an idiot.

... which is typical of Latin America bizness. Really, I grew up there, left and never looked back. I know people here talk crap about corporate America, but if you really want to see idiocy, just look at corporatiana south of the border.

It is also funny how this Brazilian exec talks crap about open source in Brazil as a sign of mediocrity. Brazilian open sourcers and academics have pulled some interesting and useful (and certainly not mediocre) stuff on their own despite the limitations of not being as industrialized as other countries.

And that makes what this exec says even more disgusting.

Re:not long for his job

[arkane1234]

OSS is a concept more than it is a company/overseer.
It's about releasing ideas and code to the public just as you used what was released to the public to create what you just released.

Get with the program, and remember more than 2003 and forward.

Re:not long for his job

[Sheik Yerbouti]

Yeah this is a totally new concept for people that are used to being on what ever companies upgrade treadmill. I mean in many cases the commercial products been mature for years the only reason THEY come up with updates is they need your money for them to have.

Re:not long for his job

[IICV]

Also, there's no conveniently damning repository of abandoned closed source projects - after all, it's not like there's some major website dedicated to hosting them (and how would that even work? "Give us your code but we promise we won't look at it?").

You just plain can't use Sourceforge or freshmeat as an indicator of how often open source projects are abandoned vs closed - using just that data, we have exactly zero information on how often closed source projects are abandoned. I bet you anything that closed source projects get abandoned more often, if only because they're more likely to be started by some PHB than by a dev with fire in his belly.

Re:not long for his job

[the_womble]

You could have suggested "Oracle Open Office" which is (I think) cheaper than MS Office, works exactly like Open Office, but is not free.

Re:not long for his job

[IICV]

After looking at your (very well written!) documentation, all I can say is that I'm so very sorry you actally has to write that program. Its mere existence hints at a goldmine of WTFery.

Re:not long for his job

[aintnostranger]

yep, I was acknowledging that... basically saying: you don't know how right you are... and yeah a total creep, I wouldn't want my government to buy anything from someone like that

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

How convenient, seeing as the President of Microsoft Latin America knows all about incompetence, you could even say it is his reason for being.

I can see his new ad spot now, titled "A fistful of fail, the Odd, the Cad, and the Buggy."

Re:not long for his job

[Eivind]

I ain't so sure. There's monumental amounts of crap in commercial code too. Atleast the publich nature of open source projects, mean you're aware that anything you put out there, speaks about your abilities (or lack of same) for the rest of your life.

Internal code-review in companies range from excellent to nonexistent, and the latter is definitely the most common, especially in smaller companies.

It's a weird surreal claim anyway: "Doing everything in an open, transparent way that anyone can freely inspect -- is a way of hiding shoddy quality."

That's just absurd. There's lots of incompetence, offcourse. But there's a lot less -hidden- in a open project, compared to a closed one, that is frankly only common sense.

Re:not long for his job

[Kitsune Inari]

If you look through all the open source projects, say on sourceforge (all 250,000 of them), a few are great, many are average and by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage.

If you replace "Free projects on Sourceforge" with "works on Fanfiction.net", "films from Hollywood" or "games on the market", your sentence still stands true. It isn't just Free software that is afflicted with Sturgeon's Law, you know.

Re:not long for his job

[Alien1024]

Open can be an excuse, rather than a mask, for incompetence, but open does not necessarily mean incompetent.

Re:not long for his job

[Darfeld]

I'd would bet he meant exactly what he said, since he was trying to convince the Brazilian gouv that Open Source was bad. Whether he think it or not is irrelevant.

What's odd is that MS is supposed to support Open Source now. I wonder if it's really just a MS guy speaking without thinking of his company's vision or the limit of MS supporting Openness.

Re:not long for his job

[Darfeld]

Also, if your code is obfuscated and undocumented, it's less likely to live very long, because nobody will want to help you with your shit. There can be some counter-examples, for software nobody else want to do anyway but are necessary, so somebody have to do something about it. Those somebody should be sanctified...

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

it's easy to tell who is in charge of a piece of software

With qualifications. The fact that SCO have managed to drag things on for so long indicates that sometimes it's not so easy.

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

Open does mean incompetent

You mean "Human does mean incompetent", right?

Re:not long for his job

[Rexdude]

Everybody hates documentation if you're a coder

I for one absolutely do not understand this attitude. It sounds like a 'hit and run' style of development. From experience, I've seen that it's hard to recollect why even I made a change barely a couple of weeks later - let alone understand changes by someone else long after they've moved on and are unavailable to help. If you work at the same company for 2 years or more, chances are you'll wind up fixing a bug in a piece of code you originally wrote - and then this attitude will bite you in the ass. Documentation doesn't have to be pages long, it can be an inline comment, or in your bug tracking/version control system along with the change. Even a simple 2 line description of what was changed for what purpose will save you and others tons of frustration later. There's another way to look at documentation - if you've put in an easy to understand comment then you won't get a call suddenly from whoever's maintaining the code months after you've moved onto a different piece of work. A minor hassle that can save much pain later since you can royally proclaim "RTFM!" I worked for a US based medical imaging software company - per HIPAA and other regulations, all changes had to be well documented. We were required to add javadoc comments for every new method introduced, or change to a method signature for easy readability in Eclipse, and no change would pass peer review if the accompanying explanation was unclear. Perhaps there's an attitude of 'I'm doing it for free so don't complain if there's no documentation' with open source projects (at least the ones that aren't bankrolled by big companies that employ people to work on them)

Re:not long for his job

[TheRaven64]

That doesn't mean that they weren't open source. Open source does not mean writing stuff for free, it means giving your customers sublicenseable modification and redistribution rights. It means not locking your customers in to you for upgrades and fixes. Pretty much all in-house software (i.e. the stuff that about 90% of software developers are employed writing) is open source, it just only has one customer.

Re:not long for his job

[iamacat]

Hey, document what the code does, not what it used to do. I *really* hate seeing this:

// Rexdude: added a null pointer check
if (s != null)
     out.println(s);
doSomethingElse(otherVariable);

Especially if someone else later deletes the println block but not the comment.

If you document usable APIs well, there is usually little need to comment the code, except maybe to name non-trivial algorithms used. It's likely that two years later we will need to make fundamental enhancements to your product rather than just fixing bugs. In this case we need to know how to write some more code based on your frameworks rather than NullPointerExceptions you fixed long time ago.

Re:not long for his job

[Beezlebub33]

OSS is never on the edge of innovation. In fact, it is almost universally behind the times.

In my field (visual object recognition), open source is the edge of innovation. Everybody in academia puts their software out there. It's mostly poorly written Matlab, but it's there. Does that count as OSS? The commercial interests take it and turn it into commercial products, and sometimes an open source project uses it too.

Re:not long for his job

[Dog-Cow]

Given that most sheep are on solid ground, I am not sure what you mean by that.

Re:not long for his job

[Andy Dodd]

I honestly thought it was a reference to all of the companies who produced "Open Whatever" back before there were formal Open Source definitions, and in 90% of the case said "Open" product wasn't really "Open".

I don't know how many "Open Architectures" I've seen in the defense industry that had VxWorks or even Windows at their core.

And think about "The Open Group" - Not, by any means, open for a VERY long time.

The term "Open" used alone has, unfortunately, been very diluted by incompetent people who were pushing things that were by no means open. Open Source has a more formal definition fortunately.

Re:not long for his job

[Just Some Guy]

Heh! Thanks. The "happily ever after" part is that my company's actively working to replace the aging FoxPro project with a PostgreSQL-native version, so the plan is for my work to be obsolete in the near(-ish) future.

The nice part is the feedback I've gotten from users who want to use it for the same reason I do: to migrate their data out of an old proprietary app into a modern database. Almost every version I've released has been due to someone who wrote to me because they had some new variant of Xbase table I hadn't seen yet, so I tweaked the program to add support for their data. The requests have tapered off over the last year or so, either because no one uses the program anymore, or because it works for the majority of users and they don't need to ask for help now.

Re:not long for his job

[b4dc0d3r]

How many times do you see mountains of undocumented, obfuscated, hacked code? Most of the open code I've seen is not obfuscated and not hacked unless you count compiler-specific #ifdef type workarounds. Using something like Doxygen, you can find where the important bits are fairly easily, and I thoroughly enjoy an IDE that lets you open a project and see where things are defined or referenced. Or just build it and step through for a few minutes to see where things start, and where the code runs.

I learned coding by reading code, so I have no problems with the lack of documentation - it gets in my way and usually gets deleted.

The only problem I have with open code is when it is either hacked, which is rare, or poorly organized. I actually tried to fix a bug in Firefox and gave up, the code was so poorly laid out. Copied code where parts are updated and others are not, with no comment as to the date or reason something changed, so I'd have to dig through code history to figure out what was right. And dig through the overly complicated build to see which files are even used. And the release build system was way too complicated, and mixed in with the rest of the code base. This sort of organization, or lack of really, is not acceptable in any project.

The only consistent issue (not a problem with the code as above) I have had is when the source doesn't build out-of-the-box. If it says the Windows version was compiled with the same compiler I have, I should be able to download and build. I even tolerate "get this version of this library and put it in this folder." But when it says something like "requires libpng" with no version and no info on where to put it, and the build breaks, and I have to figure it out only to find they used an old, incompatible version, that pisses me off. That is incompetence. It is also becoming less common. If you can't build it, it's not open source to me.

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

How lost they are.

Re:not long for his job

[Runaway1956]

I think, sir, that you miss at least part of the equation. I'm sure - in fact, almost certain - that a lot of "proprietary" software never flies. Whether it be a freelancer, a one man shop, or even a small business, some of their ideas just never do pan out. They develop, and develop, and develop, and finally the wife, boss, partner, or whoever asks why they don't just give up. And, they do. I suspect that some rather large shops end up doing the same. Who knows what Google and/or Microsoft have just tossed, because they couldn't figure out how to make it work, or because they couldn't monetize it, or some other project got better sales representation at the decision maker's meetings? Sourceforge at least documents abandoned projects, and provides them to anyone with an interest. Proprietary, on the other hand, are just lost when they are abandoned!

Re:not long for his job

[DrSkwid]

Your counter example

OpenSSL

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

Nope. Well, at least not all of us.... I just ran out of mod points before I read his post. As far as I'm concerned he's a +5 funny.

Re:not long for his job

[nametaken]

Also, there's no conveniently damning repository of abandoned closed source projects

Is tucows still around?

Re:not long for his job

[pnewhook]

Pretty much all in-house software (i.e. the stuff that about 90% of software developers are employed writing) is open source, it just only has one customer.

So you are saying that when I write software for my employer and it's locked up in their IP, then that's open source?? I don't think you know what open source is..

Re:not long for his job

[snadrus]

Agreed! For a steel industry job years ago I wrote & open-sourced a PHP script that produced printable barcodes: barcode.php?b=any_text
Many years later a bookstore on the other side of the planet had some questions & a fix request, so I did those for nostalgia reasons. It changed twice in 8 years and I imagine is well-used as a piece (or example implementation) in other things by now since it's considerably simpler than most implementations before it.

As it was, the steel industry project was abandoned for an insanely expensive replacement that failed and was replaced again, mostly because management wanted shrink-wrap. The steel company went bankrupt because of mismanagement (of other business areas).

Re:not long for his job

[TheRaven64]

Does the person paying for it (i.e. your employer) have the right to modify it? To redistribute it? To grant these rights to other people? If so, then it fits the OSI and FSF's definitions of Open Source and Free Software, respectively. Perhaps you are the one who doesn't understand the term.

Re:not long for his job

[pnewhook]

Then according to that definition EVERYTHING is open source. I doubt you would convince my employer or anyone else that our software (or other corporate stuff like say nVidia's driver software, or the code for Windows) are open source.

Re:not long for his job

[TheRaven64]

Nope, off-the-shelf proprietary software is not open source. Someone who buys a copy of Windows does not buy the rights to see the code, to modify the code, or to redistribute (modified or unmodified) versions. The same is true with nVidia drivers. You do not have the right to modify it, nor the right to redistribute it.

The difference with in-house code is that it is generally not redistributed. The people who receive the code do not choose to access those rights, but that is not because they don't have them.

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm bored with my half-finished commercial products. Why do you think I am reading Slashdot at work?

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

Department of Defense funding? Is it not allowed to have a funded open source project, coders have to volunteer their time? How the hell did you just define 'open' ? I think no one else seems to be confusing that word to mean what you think it means.

Re:not long for his job

[Anonymous Coward]

Monty Python reference.

Re:not long for his job

[pnewhook]

I don't think you know how the business world works, or what open source software is. OSS implies that anyone can go and get the source code to look at it. The definition of OPEN. If a corporation writes software for their internal use and choose not to distribute it, that does not mean it is open source.

Re:not long for his job

[TheRaven64]

That is not the definition that the OSI uses to define Open Source, nor is it the FSF's definition of Free Software. It may be how you personally define 'open source', but you should be aware that you are not using the established definitions. Sources:

Open source definition from the OSI.

Free Software definition from the FSF.

You are free to define 'open source' however you want, but if you define it differently from everyone else then you might end up with some difficulties communicating.

Re:not long for his job

[pnewhook]

Like I said, I highly doubt you will find ANYONE that thinks software written by a corporation for its own internal use and not distributed is called open source. Everything in those definitions you provided implies publicly available source code.

Re:not long for his job

[exomondo]

How many times do you see mountains of undocumented, obfuscated, hacked code?

Plenty, if you stray from the 'popular' projects on sourceforge or googlecode.

I learned coding by reading code, so I have no problems with the lack of documentation - it gets in my way and usually gets deleted.

That's just inefficient though, documentation is a good when you want to get stuff done or understand how something works. Deleting it is not a good idea.

Re:not long for his job

[colinrichardday]

According to Eric S. Raymond (TAOUP), DARPA specifically chose BSD to write the 1980-1983 version of TCP/IP because they wanted the source code. Also, as another poster stated, being sponsored by a government/business does not make code non-OSS.

Open after all

[Stratoukos]

http://www.microsoft.com/opensource/

Wow. I guess Microsoft is open after all.

Re:Open after all

[Ethanol-fueled]

What? Get The Facts(tm), dude.

Oh, wait...

Re:Open after all

[froggymana]

Perhaps they figured that if you go on both sides of an argument you are bound to win atleast 50% of the argument. Or, perhaps it just truly shows their incompetence.

Re:Open after all

[drpimp]

You can't spell incompetent without open, but you can spell open without incompetent. Not sure how that translates into one meaning the other.
Is it merely coincidence or are they simply altering their current status of "Embracing s/Openness/Incompetence/"?

Re:Open after all

[HermMunster]

Damn, that site is lame. They released 20,000 lines of code because if they didn't they'd have been sued.

Re:Open after all

[ChrisMP1]

You can't spell incompetent without open

Uhm. Right. Okay.

Re:Open after all

[arkane1234]

Letters... not the word.
Not sure if you meant uhm right okay in a condescending way or not, just making sure you understand what was meant.

Re:Open after all

[ChrisMP1]

Nah, I was half-joking, anyway. I saw what was meant - just, the overworked, tired me was slightly amused at the unusual wording of the sentence.

Re:Open after all

[rnturn]

Back when the Open Group was a going entity, Bill Gates made some asinine statement to the effect that Windows should be considered an Open system. (He might have even been semi-serious about thinking Microsoft ought to be a member of the group.) Why should it be considered an open system? Well, because you could buy x86-based hardware from just about any vendor that Windows could run on. (I seem to recall it was an article in Digital Review or one of the other DEC-related newsletters of the day in the very early-90s before those rags went all high glossy paper and low content articles.)

I still want to laugh out loud when I think about Microsoft and open systems.

Re:Open after all

[Anonymous Coward]

Normal. This is marketing at it's best.

I could say.

There are lies, there are damn lies, there are statistics and then there is marketing!

Re:Fedora 13

[NiceGeek]

Installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition and my wired and wireless connections worked out of the box. No he doesn't have a point.

Is it opposite day in Latin America?

[node 3]

The way you mask something is to put it out in the open?

/cue Inigo Montoya...

Re:Is it opposite day in Latin America?

[suomynonAyletamitlU]

"Why are you open sourcing your code? Are you incompetent or something?"

"Oh no, it's just very comfortable. I think we'll all be open sourcing code in the future."

Re:Is it opposite day in Latin America?

[10101001 10101001]

The way you mask something is to put it out in the open?

There are actually instances where that can happen. Media rarely covers instances of incompetence until it's brought to their attention. So, while one can certainly deny researchers access to information to mask incompetence, it's also quite possible to simply inundate researchers with so much information that, lacking the resources, it'd take literal decades to find clear instances of incompetence.

But, even with small amounts of information, there's plenty of room to hide incompetence. If you have a certain ideology and expose it as the effective pragmatic view of how the world works (open source means many eyes means fewer bugs), few people are interested in actually challenging your assumptions. Those that do tend to have an agenda, so few (including the media) tend to give them much weight on the fragile evidence that if it were being presented by an independent group might be considered of worth. Meanwhile, stringent evidence of incompetence is generally difficult, if not impossible, to prove. The result is you have ideologies that win out even when it would seem there's clear evidence to disprove the ideology (consider, for example, the US's focus on supporting small businesses for economic growth as being possibly questionable).

Most of all, consider the reverse psychology aspects that allow for all sorts of abuses to occur (Congressional laws that do the exact opposite of their title or say, criticizing the use of children as a political ploy while sitting at a seeming school desk with children in the background as you sign a bill/executive order). The emperor may have no clothes and people may even subconsciously realize it, but too often no one actually steps forward and frankly states it, not because everyone is intelligent adults and realizes the clear falseness of what is presented but because at some level people don't even bother thinking of what they see as much as what they're told.

Re:Is it opposite day in Latin America?

[node 3]

The way you mask something is to put it out in the open?

There are actually instances where that can happen.

I realize there's a notion of "hiding out in the open", but mask is a very different word. Pretty much by definition you can't mask something and still keep it open. Maybe it was poorly translated, who knows. I'm just going by what the story said.

In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

War = Peace

Re:In other news...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

More like War = Tomato

I've seen a lot of competent closed source applications, and a lot of incompetent open source solutions.

Your particular ideology doesn't dictate when, how, or why your executable will crash.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Your particular ideology doesn't dictate when, how, or why your executable will crash.

Run it from the terminal and see the useful output the program returns when it crashes. Now try doing the same on Windows...yeah...can't really use "an error has occured, Cancel/Allow" for much of anything, can you?

Re:In other news...

[RyuuzakiTetsuya]

Well yeah, but, the point here is that this SVP's ideas are beyond "Your OS Sucks" stupid, it's "your interpretation of what open means" is incredibly stupid.

There are tons of competent and incompetent open and closed source applications out there, my point was that one doesn't mean the other.

Re:In other news...

[Anonymous Coward]

Um.. you can only see the log in your terminal if the programmer actually writes to a log. You can do that in any application, closed or open source. Although I suppose arguing with an anti-ms troll is a mistake..

Re:In other news...

[TheRaven64]

I hate defending Windows, but this is pure nonsense. When a Windows program crashes, it invokes the default debugger (set in the registry). It also produces a minidump (a well-documented dump format, published by Microsoft and now also used by Google), and can produce a full memory dump in this format instead of the small stack dump that it produces by default for remote debugging.

Lost in

[NetNed]

Is this why latin is a dead language? Can't even translate right!

Re:Lost in

[$RANDOMLUSER]

"When you can not compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence." (translated)

What the hell kind of "My hovercraft is full of eels" translation is that? Anybody have what he really said?

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't you love how translations get passed along without any verification? I don't speak Portuguese, but the original article is here: www1.folha.uol.com.br/tec/798606-microsoft-critica-posicao-do-governo-brasileiro-sobre-o-software-livre.shtml.
From my own experience with google translate with Japanese, I'm certainly hesitant to trust it without verification.

Re:Lost in

[Haffner]

As someone who speaks competent spanish, "Quando você não pode competir, você se declara aberto. Isso mascara a incompetência". Translates to "When you can't compete, you declare it open. It masks the incompetence."

Re:Lost in

[nigelo]

He said:

"Quando você não pode competir, você se declara aberto. Isso mascara a incompetência".

from:

http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/tec/798606-microsoft-critica-posicao-do-governo-brasileiro-sobre-o-software-livre.shtml

linked from:

http://lazarus.freepascal.org/index.php?topic=10523.0

which was linked from TFA.

Re:Lost in

[apow]

It needs to be put in context. What he meant was: when a company cannot compete (inferior product), they scream at the top of their lungs BUT IT'S OPEN! in order to masquerade their incompetence. He may have a point.

However, and I'd be preaching to the choir, we all know that it doesn't also mean that when a company has an "open" product, it sucks by default. He may have tried to pull this false correlation.
He also said in an earlier paragraph that the Brazillian government is wasting time with open-source, since inovation is in the private industry.

Stupid probably doesn't even know they ripped their sockets implementation from BSD...

Re:Lost in

[hagnat]

but he didnt speak span... ah, i give up

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

"Quando você não pode competir, você se declara aberto. Isso mascara a incompetência".

That is not spanish. I thought you guys were smarter.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who speaks competent spanish, "Quando você não pode competir, você se declara aberto. Isso mascara a incompetência". Translates to "When you can't compete, you declare it open. It masks the incompetence."

From someone who is portuguese. You're translation is correct

Re:Lost in

[aintnostranger]

and as someone who speaks competent french "your comment sucks"

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who speaks competent spanish, "Quando você não pode competir, você se declara aberto. Isso mascara a incompetência". Translates to "When you can't compete, you declare it open. It masks the incompetence."

As someone who understand a little Spanish, that is Portugese. I have no practice in reading Portugesee, but as far I can tell, the translation is as correct as an translation into English from any language can be without using a lot of footnotes.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

But that's Portuguese!

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

I think he was referring to OOXML. I would have to agree.

Re:Lost in

[RemyBR]

Native brasilian here. Your translation is correct. Unfortunately this doesn't change the fact that what he said is obviously bullshit.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

Only it's not Spanish, it's Portuguese, the language they speak in Brazil. But the translation is fairly accurate, word by word it'd be "When you can't compete, you declare yourself open. That masks the incompetence", same thing basically.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

As someone who speaks competent Portuguese, I can confirm this.

Re:Lost in

[allusionist]

Spanish and Portuguese are more similar than English and German, fluency in one is enough to get by understanding the other (though actually speaking/writing it back is another matter.)

Re:Lost in

[selven]

Lingua latina mortua est? Ego hoc nescivi, tibi gratias ago! Nunc debeo eam oblivisci.

Re:Lost in

[Bigjeff5]

What does that mean in English?

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

The language spoken in Brazil is portuguese, not spanish!

Re:Lost in

[Bigjeff5]

It sounds like he is being taken out of context.

For example, I've noticed a common theme lately for old, entrenched products. If they start to fall behind and their market share starts to dip too low, they open source their code. This generates lots of good press and a whole new army of free worker bees improving your product. The down side, of course, is you lose complete control, but if you've been screwing it up this whole time that might not be a bad thing.

Probably the biggest example of this is Mozilla, which came as a direct result of the disaster that was Netscape's "upgrade" (they took a fantastic product and killed it with incompetence).

So he's not necessarily saying open source = incompetent, what he is saying is that often the reason companies open source their code is as a way to mask their own incompetence (i.e. not the open source community's incompetence).

It seems plausible.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

How many times we have to repeat: in Brazil we speak Portuguese.
There's more Spanish being spoken in US than in here.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

Although that's the literal translation, but what I think he's trying to say is:

"When your product can't compete, you declare it to be open. This masks incompetence"

Still seems farly vauge, though. I imagine that the message that he's trying to get across is that an uncomepeditive product will be open sourced in an attempt to either cut costs or generate PR, and doing so shows incompetence in the original managment or design.
Which in a round about way is a sort of compliment to the open source world: "You can make stuff compeditive inspite of incompitence!"

Re:Lost in

[ImprovOmega]

Spanish and Portuguese are substantially similar. Speaking competent Spanish is generally enough to understand the basic idea of written Portuguese. Speaking as one who speaks passable Spanish, his translation looks pretty spot on. In Spanish it would just be:

Cuando no puedes competir, tu lo declaras abierto. Eso mascaras tu incompetencia.

I leave finding the similarities as an exercise to the reader.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

Seems like a swipe at Google and Adobe rather than open source...

Re:Lost in

[Lisias]

Nice translation.

Except that the original quote is portuguese (sounds like brazilian), not spanish. :-)

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

Thats portuguese, not spanish. I'd translate it to "When you can't compete, you declare yourself open. It masks the incompetence." (I'm from Chile, Latin America, my native language is spanish---its very similar to portuguese, we have no much trouble speaking to our brazilians friends :P).

Re:Lost in

[marcosdumay]

As a native portuguese speacker, well, that article is quite funny. Some translations (without much context, since the article is mainly composed of small out of context paragraphs, I stopped reading Folha de São Paulo because it had a very bad journalism...)

"a inovação de softwares não acontece nas mãos de governos e sim do setor privado."

"Innovation in software ins't made by governements, but by the private sector" - From the article, he said that after being questioned about the Brazilian government position about open source.

"Os governos têm que se perguntar: o negocio deles é servir os cidadãos ou desenvolver software? A inovação está no setor privado"

"Governements must question themselves: Are they in the business of developping software or of serving the citizens? Innovation happens at the private sector" - In a meeting of latin american journalists on the US state of Washington. (WTF were the latin american journalists meeting at the US?)

"programas livres demandam mais trabalho e investimento do governo para mantê-los funcionando e atualizados --o que não aconteceria quando empresas cuidam disso para o governo."

That is not a literal citation (at the original article). It is again the old argument, some company can make your software work for you, so why bother doing it yourself.

"Quando você não pode competir, você se declara aberto. Isso mascara a incompetência"

That is the sentence that is on TFA. It is literaly translated there, no error watsoever. He was talking about "an open and gratis solution, like Google". MS people insist on confusing gratis and libre in portuguese, despite the fact that we have different words for them. It must be on their manual, translated from english.

Then he goes saying that Brazil has a good potential for growth, and so does its IT sector, and disclames that the journalist's travel was paid by Microsoft. Except for that confusion about free and libre, I could somewhat agree with the literal meaning of every sentense, yet, they are worded in a way that strongly imply something that is very different from their literal meaning. Well, marketing at its best, I guess.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

That's Portuguese...

Re:Lost in

[turbidostato]

"It needs to be put in context. What he meant was: when a company cannot compete (inferior product), they scream at the top of their lungs BUT IT'S OPEN! in order to masquerade their incompetence. He may have a point."

Yes: like even underperforming products and management get better by using an open source license.

Probably not the kind of argument Microsoft expects from one of its drones (so this one is dumb in a double fashion).

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

From someone who speaks English, you're is not possessive. You're is *only* a contraction for "You are". Your is the possessive one. Yes, it's weird and inconsistent.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

Except this is not spanish at all. It's actually portuguese. And the "aberto" part is kind of ambiguous so it's not really clear what it is about (opensource software).

Re:Lost in

[alonsoac]

What he said is "when you cannot compete, you declare yourself open. This masks incompetence.". And "when it is convenient to them companies declare themeselves as open, they use this to their own benefit." And he was referring specifically to Google and companies that he sees use the "openness" as a marketing strategy because they cannot compete otherwise. He is not saying that open source code in general is incompetent or that the word "open" means incompentent. at least not in the quotes that appear in the article..

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

You speak perfect Spanish and didn't realize the above statement is in Portuguese? Funny...
 

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

Is this why latin is a dead language? Can't even translate right!

Latin spoken in Latin America? WTF?

Re:Lost in

[geminidomino]

What does that mean in English?

"I surrender?"

Re:Lost in

[Darfeld]

Well, it would be that open source is actually very good to the product and that a product opened that way have a fair chance of being a good product in the long run... Somehow I doubt it's what the MS guy want to say. I might be wrong since I don't know the context of the quote, but the context of the situation being MS not happy about Latin America going open source software rather than MS, it seems unlikely that he means Open Source he a way to save a crappy closed product and giving a chance at being better.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

firstly: thanks for the translations.

Innovation in software ins't made by governements, but by the private sector

Innovation arises from need. If the private sector can't (or doesn't) fulfill the need, the government has no choice but to do it themselves. He is also implying that private sector == closed, government sector == open.

Governements must question themselves: Are they in the business of developping software or of serving the citizens?

One does not preclude the other, and in the case of Brazil, see #1. They are serving their citizens by providing a corporate-control-free software environment. In the same way, they're providing their citizens with cheap medicine because they do not want (international) corporations to control the price of healthcare. Sovereignty is a bitch, isn't it?

Innovation happens at the private sector

Yeah right. Firstly, see #1. Secondly, is he claiming that private sector == Microsoft? Thirdly, what recent succesful innovation of Microsoft has not come through the acquisition of a succesful (smaller) company? Is he simply complaining that they can't simply buy the Brazilian government? Lastly, Kerberos, PKI cryptography, TCP stack were not private sector innovations, they arose from publicly-funded research. I'm sure there are more examples.

It is again the old argument, some company can make your software work for you, so why bother doing it yourself

That is a very presumptuous premise. Apparently, some company failed to provide their users with what the users want. See #1 again.

[When you can't compete, you declare it open. It masks the incompetence]. no error watsoever. He was talking about "an open and gratis solution, like Google"

It's always funny to see Microsoft accusing others of incompetence, but in this case it just seems like he really doesn't get it. For a company that excelled at using network effects to grow to the size that they are now, a statement like this is really telling (yes I'm equating MS salesdrone with MS): either he's a really incompetent businessman, or he's FUD'ing out of fear of losing more marketshare.

MS people insist on confusing gratis and libre in portuguese, despite the fact that we have different words for them

Shocking. I would never have expected that kind of disingenuity from a well-respected company like Microsoft.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

and brazilians speak portuguese.

Re:Lost in

[Anonymous Coward]

Except Netscape wasn't a fantastic product. It was a piece of shit. You had to fiddle with settings to get it to support any mime type. Guess what, with Internet Explorer at the start, everything just worked without you (you being a normal end-user who has a sex-life and doesn't give a fuck about Dr. Dobbs journal or whatever the fuck it is called) having to fuck around with settings.

Netscape was a complete piece of shit for the average end-user.

I remember when IE first came out and I remember that it was a piece of cake to use and simply more intuitive than Netscape.

Microsoft do some blatantly simple things so well. Anyone remember what key combination you needed to copy and paste with the Borland c++ compiler? It was "shift and Insert" and something else that you couldn't do without looking down at the keyboard and using two hands. Contrast that with Ctrl C and Ctrl V.

The reason people use Microsoft products is that they just work better in general. They are not perfect but we don't give a fuck as we have sex from time to time unlike your average open-source lover.

Re:Lost in

[19061969]

I could have sworn that those key conventions came from Apple's Macintosh (and maybe Xerox before them) with the Windows control key substituting for Apple's command key. MS simply adapted it from Apple when they released Windows. You can examine the key combinations for Word for DOS - it's a free download somewhere, and they aren't the Ctrl-X/C/V combinations that we all know.

And I do agree that it is a great combination. Is Emacs listening?

Re:Lost in

[pdangel]

What does that mean in English?

"I surrender?"

Incorrect, that would be in French.

Re:Lost in

[marcosdumay]

"He is also implying that private sector == closed, government sector == open."

On the case of Brazil, that is somewhat true.

"Innovation arises from need. If the private sector can't (or doesn't) fulfill the need, the government has no choice but to do it themselves."

It has a chioce, the governement can quite well left the need not fulfilled. It does so most of the time, and I say that being part of a governemnt (more specificaly, part of the Brazilian Government). You wouldn't belive how hard it is to fulfill some basic and obvious need when you have an entire bureocracy to stop you. Innovation comes mainly from the private sector (and universities, ok, but not direct government). Now, he is implying several things with this sentence that are wrong. The worst offender is that he is equating support and all kinds of software development with innovation; that is very wrong.

"Firstly, see #1. Secondly, is he claiming that private sector == Microsoft?"

Yep, but he didn't say anything like that anywhere. The guy is good at it...

Incompetent?

[Bill_the_Engineer]

Open means Incompetent?

That can't be right. I thought it meant not quite finished and don't expect documentation.

Put the flame throwers down... it's a joke.

Re:Incompetent?

[LifesABeach]

It could be a translation error, in Brazil, Portuguese is the main language. Maybe he meant to say "In Compliance", which is something of a challenge for the arrogant among us.

Re:Incompetent?

[AnonymousClown]

Open means Incompetent?

That can't be right. I thought it meant not quite finished and don't expect documentation.

Put the flame throwers down... it's a joke.

*swinging noose*

You ain't said nut'in 'bout nooses and we don't take kindly to that kind'a talk, boy!

Re:Incompetent?

[Anonymous Coward]

No they got it right. He said those things.

Re:Incompetent?

[ZaphDingbat]

That's it! He meant "open means incomplete"!

Re:Incompetent?

[Anonymous Coward]

No, he said ``incompetência''

Re:Incompetent?

[Anonymous Coward]

It seems that he's coming from the point of view that if something is open/free, then that means it's crap because otherwise why wouldn't you sell it if it's so good? He can't seem to get his head around the fact that you can make money off software even when there's no up front cost to the customer.

I think he's hurting a bit because he just saw a big enterprise licensing deal (and his bonus) go down the toilet.

Re:Incompetent?

[Bruce Perens]

I am very sorry that when this Microsoft executive opens something, he faces incompetence. Perhaps he can get a pill from his doctor.

Re:Incompetent?

[jobdrb]

I am Brazilian, and "Incompetência" means "Incompetence" inability to do something successfully; ineptitude. Latin Word.

Re:Incompetent?

[Jaxoreth]

I am very sorry that when this Microsoft executive opens something, he faces incompetence.

Maybe 'open' means 'incontinent'.

Yep, they sure love open source

[vadim_t]

It didn't take very long after their recent proclamation

"open" means MS sends an incompetent

[swschrad]

so, theoretically, the dimbulb exec is partially correct. and MS will fix the problem by shifting this incompetent exec to someplace where he can't do any damage. like maybe mobile, or Vista phone support.

Re:"open" means MS sends an incompetent

[mark72005]

Mobile would certainly be a place where he could get a good look at incompetence.

Re:"open" means MS sends an incompetent

[Haffner]

Is that really the more incompetent of the two examples given?

Re:Fedora 13

[armanox]

Guess you didn't try to see if your device was set to activate on boot.

Re:Fedora 13

[Anonymous Coward]

I bought a pair of open-toed sandals but only one of them fell apart so you're both wrong!

Marketing

[nurb432]

One step above attorneys.

Don't feed the troll

[Anonymous Coward]

This article is only feeding this troll.

It's idiotic to make any kind of religious argument about open vs closed.

There are scores of terrible closed projects as well as terrible open projects. I would argue that there is very little (or no) correlation between open/closed status and quality.

Instead, the correlation that really matters is the ability, ingenuity, experience, and team dynamics of the developers working on the project, whether it be open or closed.
Beyond that, for closed projects, you also have to factor in all sorts of additional overhead correlation, such as project managers, customer requirements, marketing, and more.

In short, nothing to see here. Move along.

That's the pot calling the kettle black

[kawabago]

That the pot calling the kettle black if ever I've heard it!

Re:That's the pot calling the kettle black

[Anonymous Coward]

The pot is racist...

Re:That's the pot calling the kettle black

[sco08y]

That the pot calling the kettle black if ever I've heard it!

Thank God. I don't know what we would have done if you hadn't shown up, Captain Obvious.

Re:That's the pot calling the kettle black

[Anonymous Coward]

Snap!

Re:That's the pot calling the kettle black

[Anonymous Coward]

We'd all be wondering what the colour the pot is.

Why editorialize the article?

[immakiku]

I thought the summary is supposed to just be a preview of the article. Why not separate news from opinion? A bit of light joking is fine here and there, since after all Slashdot is not a formal news site, but about half the summary was just MS bashing.

Re:Why editorialize the article?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

...but about half the summary was just MS bashing.

1) You say that like it's a bad thing.
2) Well yeah, what's your point?
3) You must be new here.

Re:Why editorialize the article?

[immakiku]

1. Yes summaries containing the opinions of some AC is bad. 2. My point is readers should have the brains to decide for themselves that the MS statement is disingenuous. 3. Compare your user ID with mine.

Re:Why editorialize the article?

[$RANDOMLUSER]

Sorry, I should have close-captioned my post for the humor-impaired.

Re:Why editorialize the article?

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Bashing MS is soooo easy and fun!

Maybe he's on to something

[srh2o]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

Re:Maybe he's on to something

[Anonymous Coward]

I laughed so hard milk came out all my pores.

Re:Maybe he's on to something

[mahadiga]

Ballmer said open source is cancer. Now it is incompetent.

Re:Maybe he's on to something

[Anonymous Coward]

So we can now rename the MOOXML formats to something more meaningful:
Microsoft Office Incompetent XML
or MOIXML?

Agite

[14erCleaner]

It's Portuguese for "troll".

Re:Agite

[Anonymous Coward]

No, it's not (unless you're joking and I'm being obtuse).

"agite" is the imperative mood of the verb "agitar" (== to shake). It's used on beverages as a recommendation to ensure proper mixing before drinking -- "Agite antes de beber" -- or e.g. shampoos -- "Agite antes de usar".

In Brazil, "agitar" also is a slang for creating interest -- much in the same way "stir" or "stir something up" is used. It's often associated with creating a positive, youthful, fast-paced climate to fight stagnation.

That said, there's no use of the word "agite" anywhere... why did you post about that?

Re:Agite

[marcosdumay]

"In Brazil, "agitar" also is a slang for creating interest -- much in the same way "stir" or "stir something up" is used. It's often associated with creating a positive, youthful, fast-paced climate to fight stagnation."

A concept that, in english is expressed by the verb "to troll" (except by that "positive" part, that isn't really needed, it can very well be negative). Oh, and woosh.

Re:Agite

[Anonymous Coward]

> A concept that, in english is expressed by the verb "to troll" (except by that "positive" part, that isn't really needed, it can very well be negative).

Really? I didn't know it.

See this: http://onlineslangdictionary.com/definition+of/troll

It says "troll" refers to a post. I always had the mental image of someone fishing trying to catch something -- anything -- by using a proper bait.

I used a lot of my own mental resources (yeah, right) and figured this is like Engrish: the OP wanted a translation for the noun "troll" and used an automatic translator (like Google's). But the translator "thought" he/she meant "troll" as an imperative (like in "don't troll") and gave the tentative translation "agite" (an imperative form).

In this case, "agitar" would mean "agitate" in English; "agite" is more like "agitate!".

Now, the word "agitador" ("agitator") hasn't been used a lot in real life in these last 20 years (at least, compared to how it was used in the '80s). "Agite" definitely wouldn't make me remember of "agitador" -- which would resemble the meaning of "troll".

In the future, I recommend the use of "provocador" (provocateur) or, if one does not mind using a not so classy word, "pentelho" (that's "pubic hair" and means something between annoying and obnoxious, definitely a "troll" for me).

> Oh, and woosh.

You mean "whoosh": http://onlineslangdictionary.com/definition+of/whoosh# ?

8-P

Re:Fedora 13

[Anonymous Coward]

And meanwhile every single piece of closed source software I've ever used has worked perfectly right out of the box.

Finally

[farlukar]

Nobody believes me when I say I have an "open mind" on pretty much any subject.

well he has a point... but wrong choice of wording

[Anonymous Coward]

Even though the comments in the article is funny and somewhat true. truth to be told. open source software is almost always low quality and most of (if not all) MS products can beat their open source counterparts in quality. The most obvious two examples would be in OS (Windows vs GNU/Linux) arena and Office (MS Office vs OpenOffice) arena. If you disagree on which one is higher quality, you are a linux fanboy.

Cheers.

Well...

[brit74]

Yeah, I know I won't be beloved by slashdot commenters for this. It's true that "open" doesn't necessarily mean incompetent (e.g. Firefox is still better than IE), but there's plenty of cases where open-source is the strategy used when a company doesn't have the money to property develop a product. I sometimes use open-source software not because it's better, but because it's cheaper. I'm under no illusion that it's often not as good as paid, closed software that does the same thing.

Re:Well...

[Yvanhoe]

Yes quality vary, but opening its code is clearly not how you "mask incompetence". Quite the contrary.
But I'm alright with MS making nonsensical claims to keep users. OSS is gaining users every day and if microsoft is willing to act as a fools magnet, it will mean that we will only get the most competent users, that usually helps development.

Re:Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I am of the same opinion. Some proprietary software is brilliant and without parallel in the FOSS world. No one in their right mind would want to use Gimp because it's 'better' than Photoshop or Illustrator. I just came from a month-long vacation: I was glued to Adobe Lightroom for two days, having even fun cataloging my photos. No open source program comes close, it gives me a complete workflow for raw photos and if you have two monitors the use of the second one is well thought out too.

That said, I'm an IT manager and my company runs entirely on FOSS software, but the users have Windows(TM) in their desktops. That's where the equilibrium lies here. Linux and BSD excel in the server room, which is my responsibility. But we didn't start like that. If management is normal (read: ignorant) you have to have good credit with them to switch to Open Source and stay employed. That's what I did. But getting a job without Oracle or MS certifications is impossible at some pretty interesting places, which is a shame (sorry, digressing a bit now... taking medication...)

He followed up with...

[thewebsiteisdown]

And by 'mask incompetence' I mean 'severly undercut's our ability to sell you stuff. And that makes me scared and confused, and I say shit like this when I'm scared and confused. I hope Joran Van der Sloot asks you out for a drink, Linus Torvalds'.

Why you question el Jefe?

[WillAffleckUW]

El Jefe does not like for you to question him.

He has said that Open Source is not good, and yet you question him?

No mas.

The giant writhes

[Dystopian Rebel]

Declaring FOSS "unAmerican" is how Monoposoft used to mask its own incompetence.

Re:The giant writhes

[Infonaut]

Where "unAmerican" is shorthand for "unLatinAmerican". ;-)

If you ever want to get into an argument with someone from South America, use the word "America" when you mean "the United States".

Re:The giant writhes

[Dracos]

They've since moved on to other ways of masking their incompetence, which are mostly the old ways wrapped in a new super-secure API.

Anyway, there are a few ways to read this statement:

• MS doesn't understand the Brazilian market
• MS is bitter about missing out on monopolizing Brazil
• MS is trying to goad somebody down there
• This guy is an idiot who shot his mouth off

I dare MS to show their competence by releasing all their source code.

Re:The giant writhes

[Anonymous Coward]

> If you ever want to get into an argument with someone from South America, use the word "America" when you mean "the United States".

1. Since this continent was discovered by Columbus -- I suppose you didn't get the email -- when you mean "the United States" you now must say "Colombia".

2. For instance, Barrack Obama is Colombia's President.

3. Also, GM, Ford and Chrysler are Colombian car makers.

There you have it: instead of being idiot in all countries of America (including Canada), you'll just be an a-h in one country. Much better, huh?

Re:The giant writhes

[n3bulous]

Do South Americans actually identify themselves with being "South American"? If you ask a Brazilian their nationality do they say South American or American?

How should Mexicans refer to themselves? "Mexico, officially known as the United Mexican States (Spanish: Estados Unidos Mexicanos)" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexico So calling us the United States could be equally confusing.

The fact remains that America is the defining part of our name.

Sorry, this started off being a serious question about identity and I got carried away.

Re:The giant writhes

[Anonymous Coward]

> Do South Americans actually identify themselves with being "South American"? If you ask a Brazilian their nationality do they say South American or American?

I'm Brazilian. I'm a South American, too. And I'm an American (because, duh, I'm from America, the continent). I'm also a Paulista, for I was born in the state of São Paulo. And I'm a Paulistano, because I'm form the city of São Paulo, the capital of said state.

US people are United Statians or whatever they choose to be named. And they are Americans, of course, but this is not a "nationality" -- it's a "continentality".

> The fact remains that America is the defining part of our name.

Our? It's the defining part for everyone in an entire continent also known as "New World". Sorry, but from Canadians to Argentinians (in Patagonia), all we are Americans.

> Sorry, this started off being a serious question about identity and I got carried away.

I'm not that worried about identity; OTOH, I'm kind of a grammar nazi and naming the US "America' simply is not correct, just liek the Amish calling other Americans "English".

The key word is "compete"

[DontLickJesus]

Not all open source software is written by businesses. Not all open source software is written for profit. As most governments realize they need to tighten their belts, it's important to remember that the the basic idea of public service is a) to support your community and b) to efficiently manage public resources, perhaps this government realizes it is not their job to support companies.

• Open source can be reviewed for problems, both from technical issues and human (corrupt) issues.
• When free open source software used by governments, they are accepting as real the public service so many developers have provided
• When open source software fails to deliver features that users truly need, companies who do stand out and shine for their innovation
• Open source software is a form of public intellectual property that not only provides a service, but a sort of baseline for what is truly worth paying for.

The basic truth is when companies are forced to provide superior products instead of costly attempts, citizens win. Neither the government nor it's people are here to compete with you, that's a business game.

Re:The key word is "compete"

[Anonymous Coward]

To be clear. Open means you can be sure the code integrity meets your requirements. You can make sure there are no known conditions (that you are capable of testing, or observing) that will cause availability concerns. What you cannot presume is there is any confidentiality of your processes or code.

When the code is closed, you cannot make sure it meets your integrity requirements easily you cannot make sure that the code is developed to a level of stability your environment requires and you still cannot presume there is any confidentiality of your processes or code.

If you believe compiled means secure you are not an IT professional.

Re:The key word is "compete"

[instagib]

Not all open source software is written by businesses.

Shouldn't that be "Open source software is almost never written by businesses"? Most (all?) OSS projects start out by someone programming a tool for himself, and sharing it in case someone else finds it interesting.

Re:The key word is "compete"

[jedidiah]

Open also means that the data and formats that you aren't using aren't going to TRAP you into a single vendor solution.

Openness isn't just about being able to see the code but also knowing that you can always use your data.

Open tools means that all software is a commodity regardless of whether or not you can access the sourcecode.

Re:Fedora 13

[Anonymous Coward]

Just tried installing Fedora 13 and got no network connection until I disabled NetworkManager. Then DHCP worked fine. This is the same result I've had with previous versions of Fedora. The guy has a point.

Assuming this isn't yet another screwed up /. news summary and that this guy wasn't quoted out of context. I'm sure that there are incompetent people in the FOSS community but a phrase like: "When you can not compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence." coming from a major Microsoft PHB, and remember that these are the people who thought it was a good idea for users be given admin rights by default, is like the pot calling the kettle black.

Re:Fedora 13

[Anonymous Coward]

I did. It was. Using DHCP. Died with error in org.freedesktop.networkManager. Commented out the UUID in network-scripts/ifcfg-eth0, disabled notworkManager and rebooted. Network came up fine.

wow

[jschmitz]

Well that's one of the dumber comments I have heard lately - especially since MS has been platinum sponsors of most OSS conferences I have been to in the last few years -

Re:Fedora 13

[Anonymous Coward]

What network adapter is in your machine? Is it possible that either the driver or the firmware for it is closed? If so, I hope the irony in context of your statement here isn't lost on you.

Maybe...

[EnsilZah]

They've instituted an In Soviet Russia Day or something over there?
I mean this is some Orwellian "War is peace, freedom is slavery" shit right there.

Re:Maybe...

[Darfeld]

Wait... does that means...

In Soviet Russia, source code opens you?

Re:Fedora 13

[Anonymous Coward]

Oh, so no hunting down elusive network drivers on your Windows box? That amazes me. Troll fail.

Re:Fedora 13

[calskin]

Exactly. I loaded Ubuntu Desktop and same thing. No drivers needed. Haven't had a crash yet which is much more than I can say about Vista or 7 which kept giving me blue screens.

Re:well he has a point... but wrong choice of word

[mldi]

Windows servers vs. Linux servers, Apache vs. IIS, XBMC vs. Windows Media Center, etc. Welp, I guess your argument just went straight out the Window!

Re:well he has a point... but wrong choice of word

[Anonymous Coward]

If you disagree on which one is higher quality, you are a linux fanboy.

Heh, I have no need to argue with you about what my needs for an OS are and how some specific operating systems fill those requirements... I'll just point out that if you cannot imagine people having different requirements, you are a tool.

all parties 'masking' stock markup FraUD

[Anonymous Coward]

so now it's 'free', (open) as in billions of disappeared dollars. many of them are rich as nazis now. as for competence; as we ?know? there's one born every minute, & if one can get them to buy their invention back from you, or invest in your phony stock payper, issued on future impossibilities, one being that the supply of suckers is endless. now that's fauxking novell. ahhaha

Re:Fedora 13

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly. This.

"I bought X closed-source product and it was a complete POS. Therefore all closed source is crap!"

I'm going to appeal to the Oswald Effect and call the gp a Nazi.

"A person who is did something horrible to me. Therefore all 's are horrible!"

Open or closed makes no difference. Good software is good. Bad software is bad. Period.

Everybody now!

[AnonymousClown]

'Troll'in.

Troll'in.

Troll'in down the river...

Now the ladies!

Troll'in ...

Linux on the desktop FTW!

[elsurexiste]

I'll translate you these lines from the original, because the one from that link sucks: "95% of computers run Windows in Latin America. Apple has 1.3%, and Linux from 2% to 3%" And THAT is from a Microsoft's executive. Linux-on-the-desktop is more than wishful thinking in LA. Cool!

Re:Fedora 13

[similar_name]

Yeah because Windows always works right out of the box.

Let's see, did a factory restore of a Dell with Windows XP and it wouldn't boot with the Nvidia card that came with it. Had to take the card out, do the restore, then install the latest drivers and then put the card back in. Considering that everything is made and tested for Windows that's just sad.

Recently did the same with an Acer. Acer drivers wouldn't detect the broadcom wireless, because it has to be initialized by the driver, but the drivers won't install if they don't detect. Had to install the drivers from Dell's site.

So no, the guy doesn't have a point and neither does your anecdote.

You could make the argument that many hardware companies do not support OSS but you can hardly make the argument that OSS is incompetent.

Now if you consider that almost all hardware is specifically designed for proprietary software and it still doesn't work all of the time, one could make the argument that proprietary software is incompetent.

Re:Fedora 13

[cynyr]

same here, especially that adobe flash stuff... ohh and some sort of window manager made by some small company based in Washington state.

Re:Fedora 13

[Anonymous Coward]

This box has an ancient D-Link RTL8139 Ethernet card. The driver is fine. It originally had Win98 installed on it and I switched it to Linux around Fedora Core 4. I've had to disable NetworkManager on every release. No idea why.

Open Can Be Last Refuge Of The Incompetant

[Ukab the Great]

Open doesn't necessarily mean incompetent and closed doesn't necessarily mean competant. But "open" can sometimes be a last refuge for the incompetent. As if no one who has ever banged into a serious, irrefutable FLOSS usability problem has been told "quit whining, learn how to code and fix it yourself. It's open!"

You remember all those PDA's that the Taiwanese/Japanese couldn't sell because they sucked so much and their last ditch strategy was to bill them as open source PDA's and create FLOSS projects around them (e.g. Zaurus)? Open sourcing of Symbian after it got its ass handed to it by iOS? That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about.

Re:Open Can Be Last Refuge Of The Incompetant

[Idiomatick]

I read it like this. If you are building something. And run into problems and can't make it work properly or can't ship something good for w/e reason. Perhaps you are having lots of bugs you can't work out. That is incompetent.

But releasing the shitty software as OSS could potentially solve those problems for you. Bug hunting is easier for sure. You don't have to deal with minor patches really. And if the software is valuable the group can figure it out for you

Re:Open Can Be Last Refuge Of The Incompetant

[Kjella]

Seriously, if the company who made it and has most of the original developers can't figure the clusterfuck out, what's to believe that the community will fix it? If you can't run a sustainable business of it yourself, what's to think a third party will? I don't think it should be hidden under a chair that sometimes open sourcing it just a much nicer exit strategy than to stop selling the binary and leave your customers hanging. By giving away a code base (that was otherwise soon left unsellable) and dropping the price to $0 (technically not a requirement, but implied) you manage to make your product stay relevant a little longer, if you have other products to sell it gives brand and goodwill and you probably get some free maintenance done by the community. That doesn't really change that it failed in the market in the first place or that it's really being abandoned. I'm not saying the majority of open source projects are like that, but I can think of a few examples off the top of my hat that fit that description. I won't mention names due to the inevitable "I'm not dead yet" from both OSS developers who still care about it.

Re:Open Can Be Last Refuge Of The Incompetant

[Anonymous Coward]

While I think you are absolutely correct about 'handing off' projects that have exceeded the competence level of the original devs, in the article he was referring to competition in a business sense - essentially the same thing as an artist staying that the public just doesn't "get" an album that fails commercially:

Original Text:
Rincón também alfinetou a concorrência que apostam em modelos abertos e sem custo, como o Google. "Quando você não pode competir, você se declara aberto. Isso mascara a incompetência".

Human Translation:
Rincon also needled the competition which bets on (chooses?) open and free models, like Google. "When you cannot compete, you go open source. This masks your incompetence".

I don't think anyone in their right mind would claim that Google doesn't know how to compete.

It appears that his brain is masking

[Anonymous Coward]

the brain cells he doesnt have. well. a lot of things mask a lot of things, in this world.

Lost in Translation

[Keith111]

Considering this is translated and considering it is an exec talking, I think it is far more likely to mean: If your company cannot provide an end to end solution, you declare it open source to make yourselves look not so lazy.

Amazing... and a reminder

[jejones]

Guess he didn't hear the current party line.... and I think nossos amigos portuguêses would appreciate the appropriate choice of language for the department.

Re:Amazing... and a reminder

[lehphyro]

nossos amigos portugueses

Fixed that for you.

Re:Fedora 13

[daem0n1x]

I used to use Fedora on my home PC. It worked almost as bad as my Windows Mobile PDA. Now I use Ubuntu in the PC and I'm fine. The PDA still sucks, though.

Causation or Correlation

[sugarmotor]

Getting confused here. Is it causation or correlation? Does incompetent imply open?

Stephan

Re:Causation or Correlation

[Bigjeff5]

Correlation.

As incompetence grows, the likelihood that it will be open sourced increases.

If you were going to make a cause-effect case it would have to be that incompetence caused the openness, not the other way around. Opening your source masks your incompetence, so it's definitely a strategy in use today.

I don't see why people are harping on the guy, he's absolutely right. People just misunderstand what he is saying, that's all.

Re:Causation or Correlation

[Anonymous Coward]

I don't see why people are harping on the guy, he's absolutely right. People just misunderstand what he is saying, that's all

That's probably because we're not used to giving Microsoft any benefit of the doubt. It could also be because the statement about "open" was made in reference to open standards and free-for-use apps, such as Google Apps.

That there also is a favourable, non-incompetent interpretation of an out-of-context quote, does not mean the original was not incompetent (or malevolent, but we're adhering to Occam).

Incompetence

[u-235-sentinel]

You keep on using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means....

Can you give some examples?

[Anonymous Coward]

>I'm under no illusion that it's often not as good as paid, closed software that does the same thing.

As a linux user for 13 years, I'm really curious to know what closed software do you use that does the same thing as open source software, but does it better? I'm trying to get from where you're coming from. I don't use Free(dom) software just because it's $0, I use it because it doesn't bite me on the ass like proprietary software has (Nvidia's binary blobs being my #1 suspect. I hate them for the kernel panics they caused me. I gave up on OpenGL for 3 years until Nouveau was good enough that I could use it with the remaining Nvidia cards I have left. I had 5 nvidia cards. Now I'm down to 3 machines with Nvidia cards, and when each dies, I'll switch them over to AMD.)

It's been my experience that with proprietary products I had flakey binary products (Nvidia) that chained me to a particular linux kernel or glibc (wordperfect 8). I hate the eula crap that treats me like criminal scum (you may not use this product. please type in this random 40 digit crap to activate. Please install our spyware, etc.).

So what I would like to know is what kind of proprietary software have you used that is either barely better (?) or does something so much better that you're willing to put up with the headaches of eulas/flakey behavior/etc.?

Re:Can you give some examples?

[jedidiah]

Beating Microsoft is a pretty low bar.

Microsoft is very much bottom of the barrel when it comes to closed source software.

Try doing anything interesting with it and you will likely find yourself not just
developing a greater appreciation for Linux but for any relevant closed source
competitors.

Using MCE gives you a renewed appreciation for MythTV, XBMC and Front Row.

Not only is Linux better but annoyingly closed source Apple is better too (more sane multi-media architecture).

Perfect!!

[Anonymous Coward]

It's hard to imagine a more flamebait title for a post on Slashdot than that!!

Excellent news

[aBaldrich]

“First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.”
This was exactly what latin american free software needed. FSF - LA successfully "converted" many Brazilian trade unions to Free Software. Uruguay adopted Linux for OLPC, Argentina was going to adopt Linux but then Ballmer paid a visit to the president and now they use dual-boot. Ubuntu is already more popular than Mac, and Microsoft is the paradigm of "colonialist foreign corporation" that all the leftists despise. (See this article (spanish) from Venezuela: "Free Software vs. Privative Software: freedom vs. slavery")
I recall the last time Stallman visited Argentina, he spent more time with politicians than with programmers. I really hope this is our chance. OLPC is like Gramsci: if the kids learn linux there's no way to bring them to Windows once they grow up.

Re:Excellent news

[Blakey Rat]

I recall the last time Stallman visited Argentina, he spent more time with politicians than with programmers.

Wow. We've had some bad diplomats in the past but... wow. The cake has been taken.

Re:Excellent news

[FoolishOwl]

One thing I find frustrating in much of the Microsoft-bashing from FLOSS advocates is that I think they're not clearly thinking about what the goal really is, and what success looks like. Victory isn't the destruction of Microsoft; victory is the dominance of the FLOSS model over the proprietary model of software development. Somewhere in the middle, there's going to be a period in which the big players in proprietary software realize they're either going to have to move to an open source model, or their businesses will fail. That's going to be a transition; they won't leap into it all at once, and they won't make public appearances, weeping and begging for forgiveness for having advocated closed-source software.

And, since we're talking about big institutions, during a transition, there's going to be some executives who didn't get the memo. I think that's what this is about.

EULA

[Guppy06]

If closed-source is so competent, why does every EULA I ever read disclaim any warranty?

Re:EULA

[Anonymous Coward]

Because users are often incompetent, and are quick to blame software that is not at fault. Because there's little market for selling software that *does* come with a warranty. Because there's no generally accepted software development methodology that allows software to be inexpensive, reliable, and featureful, all at the same time.

And because they can. FOSS licenses often state that no warranty comes with the software. Surely you aren't implying that they aren't competent?

Re:EULA

[Anonymous Coward]

There may be no warranty on free software, but that doesn't matter as the user can verify the functions for themselves. With non-free software, the user places their faith onto it and hopes it performs according to their imagination.

Re:EULA

[Anonymous Coward]

Because independent developers who work for free cannot risk the chance of having to defend against lawsuits.

Re:Fedora 13

[HermMunster]

Amazingly quick fix. Sounds like those guys were doing a good job. Tiny change and it worked.

My last two wireless issues on Windows based laptops took me hours to fix. My job is to repair computers and I have done so for 25 years or so.

I think your solution is fantastic. I can't imagine what you would have done if you had to figure out those types of issues by yourself.

And, this isn't the first time in the past week that someone's said that Fedora 13 was not to their liking.

Re:Fedora 13

[calskin]

I'm going to appeal to the Oswald Effect and call the gp a Nazi.

I think you mean Godwin's law? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Godwin's_law

That's not what the guy said

[shutdown -p now]

I don't know Spanish, so I had to go with the translation (which, by the way, is 2 links away from TFS - why not link to it directly?). Here's what the guy actually said:

The executive, however, said that the two models - open source and closed - will continue to coexist.

...

Rincon also needled competition betting on open standards and free of charge, such as Google. "When you do not can compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence."

The executive added: "When convenient, the companies say they are open. They use it for your own benefit."

It's fairly clear from this that he is not saying that "open means incompetent" here, but rather than some "incompetent" companies that shall remain un-named *cough* are playing the "openness" card to mask their deficiencies in other departments. Which is quite a different thing.

There are other things in that (translated) speech that could be picked apart in typical /. fashion, which might even make a decent article. But, it seems, the chase for flamebaiting headlines stimulates editors' imagination yet again...

Re:That's not what the guy said

[aintnostranger]

btw, the guy also said that if you use free software for development you are condemned not to sell your products (source: http://www.elespectador.com/tecnologia/articulo-224528-microsoft-tilda-de-propaganda-promocion-del-software-libre)

Re:That's not what the guy said

[shutdown -p now]

Can you give a sane translation of this? I used Google Translate, and was rewarded with this semi-incoherent thing:

"The only problem is that when you develop basándote only 'free software' you have to free products and it is very difficult to run a business that way," Rincon said

which, insofar as I can parse it, seems to say that "if you're developing free software, you'll have to give it out for free" - which, while a gross oversimplification that is provably untrue for several known cases (e.g. RedHat), at least makes certain sense.

Re:That's not what the guy said

[aintnostranger]

"El único problema es que cuando desarrollas basándote sólo en 'software libre' tienes que hacer productos gratuitos y es muy difícil gestionar una empresa de esa forma"

translates as:

The only problem is that when you develop only based on free software your products have to be free (as in beer) and it is very difficult to manage a company that way

Re:That's not what the guy said

[shutdown -p now]

I think he means "develop based on free software" in a sense of "take free software codebase and extend that", not in a sense of "use free software development tools".

The second interpretation would be pretty funny, actually, as Microsoft has a bunch of its own tools and languages released under licenses classified as Open Source by OSI, and as Free Software by FSF - such as ASP.NET MVC, IronPython and IronRuby, to name a few.

Re:That's not what the guy said

[aintnostranger]

no, in spanish that reads like "develop using free software tools" ridiculous as it is. And in the context that's the only meaning that makes sense as he's talking about why a company wouldn't want to use free software when developing. (btw, I'm from Argentina, and spanish is my native language.)

Re:That's not what the guy said

[shutdown -p now]

Thanks for clarifying. Well, the guy doesn't even know his own business then. That's truly sad.

Re:That's not what the guy said

[stvmty]

I don't know Spanish

Is portuguese.

Re:That's not what the guy said

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, it is what he said. Here is the original text in Portuguese, because, you know, that's the official language of Brazil:

Rincón também alfinetou a concorrência que apostam em modelos abertos e sem custo, como o Google. "Quando você não pode competir, você se declara aberto. Isso mascara a incompetência".

Here's the google translate version:

Rincon also needled competition betting on open standards and free of charge, such as Google. "When you can not compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence."

Re:Fedora 13

[Roblimo]

I'm running Ubuntu these days, but I'm *still* out of bourbon.

Mindless MS bashing misses translation, news at 11

[omni123]

It looks as though some mindless MS hating monkey submitted another summary with the actual article being 2 links away from the "source". The sentence finished with:

The executive added: "When convenient, the companies say they are open. They use it for your own benefit. "

I think that's a pretty fair statement. The article headline appears to be badly translated; it looks as though he is saying that the company is incompetent when they are declaring themselves open in an effort to explain why they are not completing in the market (i.e. 'our product may not be better than yours, but its open'). In the interest of accuracy the article linked in the summary also modified the bad translation to make it seem more coherent, the direct translation (from the article TFA links) is:

Rincon also needled competition betting on open standards and free of charge, such as Google. "When you do not can compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence. "

I'm sure if they hadn't of edited it the bad translation would of been more obvious.

The guy is an idiot, full stop.

[pandrijeczko]

If the Brazilian government was not using FOSS then the chances are it would be using unlicensed copies of Windows and Office, rather than paying MS for proper licenses - so Microsoft would not benefit anyway.

People who use cracks to run licensed software free of charge are probably the worst offenders when it comes to the spread of viruses, in turn Microsoft (possibly) gets a worse security and malware reputation than it deserves.

So Microsoft actually reaps some *BENEFITS* from FOSS because at least those people who would never pay for a Microsoft product can run a legally free alternative.

Re:Fedora 13

[daem0n1x]

Still have some Jack Daniels left. Want some?

Suckwear

[TiggertheMad]

by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage.

This seems like a good sign to me. If the project isn't interesting or important enough to warrant being finished, abandon it. You can't really do this if you are writing a commercial product. Usually it just ends up sucking, and clogging up the retail channel with cruddy software. Better to die a deserved early death, then waste people's time and money.

Re:Suckwear

[Anonymous Coward]

But I can't count how many times I have yanked the code for an "abandoned" project to see how they did something, or rolled an entire module into something else. Just because the shiny distributable package is no longer useful doesn't mean the project "alive and kicking" somewhere, in some other form.

THAT is one of the key differences for me, open source can be abandoned but it probably won't ever die, closed can easily slip into the night.

Re:Suckwear

[internettoughguy]

by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage.

This seems like a good sign to me. If the project isn't interesting or important enough to warrant being finished, abandon it. You can't really do this if you are writing a commercial product. Usually it just ends up sucking, and clogging up the retail channel with cruddy software. Better to die a deserved early death, then waste people's time and money.

It's also beneficial in the sense that if it were closed source and you ran out of energy halfway through, that code/time would be wasted. On the other hand a partially completed open source project can be picked up by someone else, or even just used as a reference.

Re:Suckwear

[westlake]

If the project isn't interesting or important enough to warrant being finished, abandon it.

Someone has to clean house.

SourceForge is the Island of the Damned.

You can waste an ungodly amount of time there trying to find something alive among the corpses.

Re:Suckwear

[Anonymous Coward]

by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage.

This seems like a good sign to me. If the project isn't interesting or important enough to warrant being finished, abandon it. You can't really do this if you are writing a commercial product. Usually it just ends up sucking, and clogging up the retail channel with cruddy software. Better to die a deserved early death, then waste people's time and money.

I agree too. Open source is somewhat like evolution, in that strong and successful projects take off, while unsuccessful, doomed, poorly designed or poorly managed project die off. What we are left with is the best of the bunch.

Re:Suckwear

[Anonymous Coward]

Some unmaintained projects get forked also. They aren't all dead ends.

Re:Suckwear

[Concerned Onlooker]

That would be suckware. Suckwear is something else entirely.

Re:Suckwear

[epine]

Better to die a deserved early death, then waste people's time and money.

I swear I've worked for that company more than once. In economic theory, failure is considered a virtue. Lack of failure is considered the hallmark of central planning.

It makes no sense to count moribund projects at SF. Many of those projects were started as larks or trial balloons or elliptical treadmills to develop a lusty cranial sixpack.

The serious failures tend to go hand in hand with significant success: Perl, GCC, and PHP have all managed to steer their code bases into heavy water.

In the case Perl and GCC, it's doubtful whether more foresight at the outset would have changed anything. People simply didn't know what would become important that far down the road, or it wasn't feasible to tackle with resources available at the time.

PHP strikes me as a foresight-not-appreciated zone, at least initially. Who knew that security would someday matter? On the internet? I will give PHP some credit for innovating around culture rather than elegance, but sheesh, did they have to dial it up to eleven to prove their point?

On the other side of the ledger we have the legacy of IE6 which matured into an emphysemaic wearing a black cape after running amok in a kindergarten. Some kinds of damage are worse than others.

Re:Suckwear

[Anonymous Coward]

but that is what bad commercial software does - "die a deserved early death, then waste people's time and money"

oh wait, you meant "...THAN waste people's time and money"

Re:Suckwear

[TheRaven64]

GCC's current problems are entirely their own fault. They are the result of the FSF mindset that facilitating proprietary software is bad, rather than that creating Free Software is good. They intentionally avoided sane layering because someone might be able to create a proprietary IDE using the GCC front ends for things like code completion and syntax highlighting. As a side-effect, proprietary IDEs got these features using EDG or something else expensive, while Free Software ones didn't get them at all, or got fairly primitive lexical highlighting.

Several other problems were caused in a similar way. For example, they used legal threats to make NeXT release the Objective-C front end. Then, once they'd done this, they felt obliged to merge it (having gone to the effort of acquiring it), in spite of the fact that it is absolutely terrible-quality code. Given that they got under 10KLoC, rewriting it from scratch would have probably been less effort than attacking NeXT with lawyers, and they'd have got better code, but they decided that enforcing the GPL was more important than improving the code quality.

Some of the ObjC code in clang was me reminding myself how C++ worked after not using the language for 7 years, and even then it's hard to find something as bad as GCC's objc-act.c (although I do need to tidy some of it up before 2.9).

Re:Suckwear

[xtracto]

If the project isn't interesting or important enough to warrant being finished, abandon it.

Someone has to clean house.

SourceForge is the Island of the Damned.

You can waste an ungodly amount of time there trying to find something alive among the corpses.

you mean like Zombieware??

Anyway, some time ago I found a really neat Java/mySQL whiteboard app which allowed several people to write in a virtual-whiteboard (and saved the data in a mySQL table). I used it into a Dokeos webpage and it was excellent.

THus, I have to agree that a lot of those corpses still have a *lot* of yummy flesh.

Re:well he has a point... but wrong choice of word

[pandrijeczko]

Your sweeping statements clearly indicate that you have little or no knowledge of Linux because intelligent criticism would be able to show very specific examples of why you believe FOSS to be inferior.

You also fail to realise that there is as vast amount of FOSS software on Windows as there is on Linux so everybody has the opportunity to try some of it out, free of charge. If you try it and don't like it, fair enough - go buy some closed commercial software and enjoy it with my blessing.

But commenting when you clearly have no knowledge just ends up making you look like an idiot.

Re:Mindless MS bashing misses translation, news at

[aintnostranger]

How is this mindless bashing? He said ""El único problema es que cuando desarrollas basándote sólo en 'software libre' tienes que hacer productos gratuitos y es muy difícil gestionar una empresa de esa forma" translation: "The only problem is that when you develop based only on free software you have to make free (as in beer "gratuitos") products and it's pretty hard to manage a company in that way" and he said too: El directivo colombiano aseguró que, aunque "respeta" las decisiones de los gobiernos, éstos "deberían dedicarse a mejorar la vida del ciudadano" translated: "The colombian executive asserted that, even though he "respects" the decisions made by governments, they "should dedicate to improve the life of citizens" (as opposed to make software) this second statement, coming from an executive of a U.S. company, is pretty inflamatory for a lot of people in Latin America. btw, I'm from Argentina (we speak spanish)

Anyone remember?

[__aagmrb7289]

Anyone remember the following slashdot article?

http://news.slashdot.org/story/10/09/01/0019238/Why-Microsoft-Is-Being-Nicer-To-Open-Source

Why do we take this stuff seriously? It's not a strategy or plan until it's coherent and on purpose. That's why I disliked the above story in the first place. It would behoove a great many of us (including myself, in many circumstances) to remember to look twice before jumping in with our opinion on this kind of thing.

Re:Anyone remember?

[Anonymous Coward]

That's the first thing I thought of. Sounds like a bad case of foot-in-mouth disease.

Re:Anyone remember?

[Anonymous Coward]

Exactly, this is a (old-style) world class corporation: this guy is fired if he doesn't do this number regularly.

Re:Anyone remember?

[omni123]

You couldn't be more right with your advice.

In this case he isn't actually making any comment about open source, but rather open companies, and TFS is an edit of an already bad translation that entirely changes what he said.

But don't worry, you'll get modded +5 insightful because nobody bothered to read the actual article, that is 3 links away from TFS.

Re:Fedora 13

[T-Bone-T]

You should know this if you're here but I should remind you that bluescreens are usually a sign of hardware problems.

OOXML

[Barefoot Monkey]

I guess this explains the naming convention that Microsoft were using when they decided upon Office Open XML.

Re:well he has a point... but wrong choice of word

[Anonymous Coward]

you clearly nerver used windows advanced server 2003 or any edition of windows server 2008
they are clearly superior to linux in performance, scalability and ease of administration.

If you configure you server to only execute signed binaries, you dont need antivirus and it is as solid as a bsd... sadly almost no one configure it that way

Re:Fedora 13

[Bigjeff5]

Or at the very least a rogue driver of some sort (doesn't have to be attached to any hardware).

Vista was pretty rough on vendors, and broke a lot of drivers that used to work, which is not cool in my mind. 7 is much, much better about this, and I've never experienced a problem in windows like the one I had trying to get audio to work in two separate media packages that decided they each wanted to use their own scheme. Ugh. I'll take a bluescreen once every six months over that any day.

Re:well he has a point... but wrong choice of word

[jedidiah]

> you clearly nerver used windows advanced server 2003 or any edition of windows server 2008

You clearly are a clueless poser that's never been anywhere near a real server.

Go back to dabbling in your mother's basement.

Re:well he has a point... but wrong choice of word

[Bigjeff5]

I don't see where you've proved your point. Except for XBMC, which I haven't used, I'd take the Windows product over Linux any day. Apache is especially bad, it's old and tired, just let it die already.

You just do not understand him.

[houghi]

War is peace, Freedom is slavery, Ignorance is strength. Open is incompetent.

Yeah sounds about right.

Re:well he has a point... but wrong choice of word

[Anonymous Coward]

did you ever tried them ? (By them I mean windows advanced server and windows server 2008 )

Re:Fedora 13

[westlake]

Let's see, did a factory restore of a Dell with Windows XP and it wouldn't boot with the Nvidia card that came with it.

The first time I saw that problem I solved it by simply cleaning the contacts and resetting the card.

The real meanings.

[GarryFre]

Open means the incompetence is shared at the cost of time and frustration. Closed means the results of the incompetence is offered at a monetary cost plus time and frustration.

Re:The real meanings.

[jd]

I'd have said that "Open" and "Closed" don't - in and of themselves - alter anything. They change the scope of the source, but if you have N developers looking at the code, it should not make any difference. What makes the difference is that "Open" means that N can (not will, but can) increase up to the total number of users of the software, whereas "Closed" means that N is strictly bounded by the number of developers the company is willing to hire.

Well, almost. QA is also important, but again if you have N QA guys looking at the program, it should make no difference whether the code is visible to the rest of the world or not. Again, for "Open" code, N is bounded only by the number of users for both unit tests and integrated tests, whereas for "Closed" code, N is strictly bounded by the number of QA guys the company is willing to hire for unit tests and is strictly bounded by their policy on handling user bug reports and crash dumps for integrated testing.

This chief exec would either have to be incompetent OR (more likely) playing to the local media. The Latin America countries are far more open to Open software than North America, and that is a serious threat to Microsoft. My guess is that this is FUD aimed at terrorizing the locals into buying Microsoft products. I strongly suspect that if these countries did switch from Open Source to some vendor other than Microsoft, the same exec would be wheeled out with complaints about the competence of that vendor as well. It's not about the method, it's all about who is counting the cash afterwards.

that's not talking *like* an idiot

[Anonymous Coward]

He proves his idiocy. Why are there so many people on both sides, who want to show the whole world, that they just have a spacer between their ears?

cb

Re:Mindless MS bashing misses translation, news at

[omni123]

Thank you for the amazing accurate translations.

It is mindless MS bashing because the translations you included are not included in TFS or TFA which is not conducive to an accurate discussion.

I would welcome a discussion on the points you mentioned with the accurate translations to go along with them and not the sensationalism of "MS says open source is shit".

two words...

[Anonymous Coward]

I've got two words for him...
Microsoft Bob or in his language... Microsoft Roberto.

So how's that next version of NetHack coming along

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, THAT NetHack. Wow, it being open source sure does give it a lot of frequent upd--oh wait, no it hasn't. 3.4.3 was released in December of 2003 and it hasn't been updated since.

Come on, open source advocates, don't just talk the talk -- walk the walk and update this game.

Hah!

[Anonymous Coward]

From the original article (in Portuguese):

> Em encontro com jornalistas da América Latina em Bellevue, Estado de Washington, ele disse na manhã desta terça: "Os governos têm que se perguntar: o negócio deles é servir os cidadãos ou desenvolver software? A inovação está no setor privado".

Translation: "In a meeting with South American journalists in Bellevue, Washington State, he said this Tuesday morning: "Governments have to ask themselves: is their business to serve the citizens or develop software? Innovation is in the private sector."

> Segundo Rincón, programas livres demandam mais trabalho e investimento do governo para mantê-los funcionando e atualizados --o que não aconteceria quando empresas cuidam disso para o governo.

Translation: "According to Rincón, F/OSS demand extra work and government investment to keep them working and updated -- which would not happen when corporations take care of this for the government."

Now the reason this guy is really saying this can be better understod by watching this video (translation provided ahead):

In this video http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lFRNKytkyCs :

At 0:33:

Lula> "... e eu lembro da primeira reunião que nós fizemos na Granja do Torto, em que eu não entendia absolutamente nada da linguagem que este pessoal discutia... sabe, e houve uma tensão imensa entre aqueles que defendiam a adoção no Brasil do software livre e aqueles que achavam que nós deveríamos fazer a mesmice de sempre, né, ficar do mesmo jeito, sempre comprando e pagando a inteligência dos outros... e, graças a Deus, prevaleceu no nosso país a questão e a decisão do software livre."

Translation: "... and I remember the first meeting we did at "Granja do Torto" , in which I didn't understand absolutely anything of the language these folks were discussing... you know, and there was a huge tension between those who defended the adoption in Brazil of F/OSS and those who thought we should do that sameness of always, you know, stay the same way, always buying and paying for the expertise of others... and, thank God, prevailed in our country the issue and the decision for F/OSS."

Then afterwards at 1:20:

Lula> "Porque nós tínhamos que escolher: ou nós íamos para a cozinha preparar o prato que nós queríamos comer, com os temperos que nós queríamos colocar e dar um gosto brasileiro na comida, ou nós íriamos comer aquilo que a Microsoft queria vender pra gente."

Translation: "Because we had to choose: either we went into the kitchen to prepare the dish we wanted to eat, with the spices we wanted to add and give the food a Brazilian taste, or we would eat that which Microsoft wanted to sell us."

End of translation.

See, we had to choose. It's not like we didn't think about Microsoft products. We simply found the taste not to our liking.

I think this is clarifying on many levels.

Maybe, but...

[blind monkey 3]

He was open with his criticism but it didn't seem mask his incompetence.....

Open = incompetent?

[skaimauve]

Wait a minute, he just meant he would have been more competent if he had kept his mouth shut!

False. Incompleter projects are valuable.

[tomhudson]

An incomplete product is only valuable as a collection of good ideas.

An incomplete project also serves as prior art. Many of those incomplete projects have value, if only to show that some patent troll has been anticipated.

Re:Fedora 13

[tombeard]

Peasant. Try some Blantons.

OSS means better security..

[nanospook]

Governments are very concerned about security. Recall the heavy role that cryptology played in WWII. When a gov't like Brazil get's closed source software, they don't know what's inside of that black box. They have to "trust" that there isn't anything naughty.. With OSS that is not true.. they can look at it all they want. Or write their own.. Why would Close source software have a naughty naughty elf hidden away in it (ok I'm just looking forward to Christmas)... isn't M$ an American company? Could the NSA have it's thumb in a few distributed pies? If I was worried about gov't security, this is the one thing I would really be concerned about..

Lack of resources does not mean incompetent either

[Anonymous Coward]

"is the strategy used when a company doesn't have the money to property develop a product".
  Such a strategy in no way means the company is incompetent. In Fact - leveraging the wider community is a competent strategy. In addition, such a strategy isnt going to work if the product and code really suck. However - if people see potential - it can work. I think Windows Vista or the iOS 4 update for Iphone 3G's show that having lots of money (and other resources) doesnt mean competence.

Closed vs. Open software

[mikein08]

It is rather amusing for micro$oft to be attacking open source software as masking incompetence when their own software is less than, shall we say, robust. However, I remain a non-fan of open source software, simply because I do not want dozens/hundreds/thousands of programmers of unknown ability/experience/sophistication swarming over a software bug, and trying to fix it, without any supervision, especially if the software in question is crucial to my operations. I want software that is tested, secure, and reliable, and is patched or upgraded, and tested, by highly competent software engineers who are intimately familiar with the software and have worked with it for years or even decades (that's why I like VMS so much). And I'm willing to pay for such software. Unfortunately, businesses in this country seem to think that open source software is the way to go, because it's FREE! Well, guess what people: you get what you pay for. MK

Re:Closed vs. Open software

[unapersson]

What makes you think open source projects accept random patches from random people? Especially software which is actually used. With most open source projects there is a small group of people who own the code and decide which patches get merged in. They're not that different to properly managed closed source projects, just with a larger possible contribution base for those low hanging fruit patches that fix minor annoyances, and the ability to bring decent contributors into the core team based on the quality of their work rather than their interview skills.

If what you said was true there would be no way that open source code that has been reviewed with automated defect detection tools would come out with fewer defects than closed source code, but it does.

Re:Closed vs. Open software

[mikein08]

I must admit to a certain amount of ignorance about the way open source software updates are handled. If they are in fact handled in the manner that you describe, then that is good. I still prefer proprietary software. It's USUALLY better engineered, there is a set procedure for reporting problems, and the vendor usually is fairly responsive to problem reports. Except in the case of micro$oft. I've yet to encounter any open source OS which is as robust, secure, and reliable as VMS or IBM's mainframe OS. MK

Life Liberyt and the pursuit of Open Source

[VirtualJWN]

See the problem with open source from Microsofts perspective is that they (Microsofto) have spent millions and millions (not billions) of the dollars bilked from customers on securing a business model where the masses Ad infinitum continue this process. Microsoft has effectively barred competition a variety of ways from price wars to more nefarious schemes like targeting the entire development staff of a company and hiring ALL of them. Open source doesn't require a committee, or a company, or a CEO, or a board of directors, or even a supervisor. Good ideas can and do come from individuals, perhaps in the most basic form of liberty know in this country. Open Source is the embodiment of creativity and freedom to innovate, not stifle like Microsoft REALLY does with their solutions. It is also free and can be fixed by anyone, yet thus far viruses are somewhat rare on Linux based systems for example.

that executive has not had Steve's class

[Locutus]

Steve teaches a great class on anger management and it revolves around releasing energy by directing it at physical object. Mostly office furniture. But I do love it when highly paid Microsoft executives start spouting off about open source. They are always wrong and it just lends credibility to that which they are all pissed off about.

More Apple, Linux, and open source bashing please. Thank you sir, may I have another?

LoB

Re:Fedora 13

[Anonymous Coward]

First of all, cocksucker, no one mentioned Windows, you did. Also, try not using WIndows XP, which is old as shit.

Re:Fedora 13

[oiron]

I hate to say it, but comprehension fail... GP was almost certainly being sarcastic...

Re:Fedora 13

[dbIII]

Dunno if it was NT4 or Win2k, but we had to keep a paticular model of network card around for installs that was the only thing that could get the new machines on the network before updates.
I like Win7 but hardly anything is 64 bit on the platform and the one thing my users need to run on it won't - virtualbox of XP just to run MS Windows software on MS Windows!

Look who's talking.

[leereyno]

Last time I checked the entire region of the earth known as "Latin America" was famous for incompetence, and corruption, and oppression, and poverty.

Who knows, maybe he as a point about the incompetence bit. Lord knows the world he comes from is steeped in it. But I think it is more likely that this simply makes him blind to what actual competence looks like.

Re:Fedora 13

[BancBoy]

Still have some Jack Daniels left. Want some?

In fairness, he did say Bourbon.
Jack is Tennessee Whiskey, it is not bourbon. Per Title 27 of the Code of Federal Regulations, Chapter 1, Part 5, Section 5.22
http://www.distill.com/specs/USA10.html

Microsoft Latin America?

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you serious? Is this a joke? So we care what some third-world branch of MS says, just because it has the MS name attached?

Guess people grasp at anything to bash MS over nowadays...what's next, some janitor at MS says that Linux is donkey balls and it makes /. front page?

Hmm...

[Anonymous Coward]

That would explain the ridiculous legacy EMULATE_ANCIENT_WP_BEHAVIOR flags it contains...

A company of contradictions

[Anonymous Coward]

Just about a month ago, wasn't Microsoft loving open source?

That's not it

[ewe2]

His problem really is "we can't compete with free, so let's claim free can't compete with us" and uses a classic fallacy of deductive logic to make his case. Other than that it's a classic private enterprise whine that the government ain't fair. It's also doubtful what open standards he can point to as incompetent given the OOXML mess. Then he throws in a bunch of stats to prove he's winning. Drone drone drone.

Give me the windows manual

[SmallFurryCreature]

Made by MS itself, free with the OS, that documents EVERY single aspect of the OS. Or even AN aspect of the OS.

Thank you.

Point me to a MS run wiki for Windows 7 that even comes close to the support you get for Ubuntu.

People always clame opensource lacks documentation, but MS documents nothing, they had to be ordered by courts to do it and came close to contempt of court because of their poor attempts at it.

SHOW me the documentation of .NET/ASP that comes close to the PHP site? RUN by MS, not some third party.

Re:Give me the windows manual

[IainCartwright]

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-gb/library/ms123401.aspx/ ... any good?

Re:Give me the windows manual

[TheRaven64]

SHOW me the documentation of .NET/ASP that comes close to the PHP site? RUN by MS, not some third party.

The other poster has already sent you the link. One thing that MS does exceptionally well is write developer documentation. I haven't had a Windows system for a few years, but I've been able to write a few bits of code for making my stuff work on Windows based on that documentation and have it work the first time someone tries it. The Apple documentation is almost as good. The PHP documentation is a joke - often the only way to find out what you actually need to know is to go through several contradictory comments, trying each suggestion until you find the one that is actually correct.

Re:Give me the windows manual

[Mysticalfruit]

Well the interesting thing with msdn is that they give you as much documentation as they want you to see and they show you the functions they want you to use.

It's no secret that for certain API's in windows, what Microsoft shows and wants others to use is not the same as what they're using.

Re:Give me the windows manual

[b4dc0d3r]

When it first came out, the .NET 1.0, 1.1, and 2.0 documentation was little more than the output of the Doxygen knock-off Sandcastle. Probably a little souped-up internally. But it was a vague definition of each function, and the parameters.

There was nothing describing when you might want to use each of the 5 or more different ways to accomplish the same thing. There were no instructions on how to properly ensure a database connection was closed. They came out with DAAB http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff649538.aspx to solve that - basically instead of best-practive and education, it's copy and paste this.

It took about 8 years for the documentation to catch up, and now it's fairly decent. But when I'm writing code and have a question, Google gets me to a programming site first, second option is a social.microfot.com website where the question is asked but notsatisfactorily answered, third option is random abandoned blog postings. If I know what I'm looking for, I can use google with "site:microsoft.com" or "site:msdn.microsoft.com" because the MSDN search is terrible (even after having improved, it's still terrible).

Most of the truly useful information that should be in the documentation/reference is posted on the product team blog. It's by design, because they want you to buy the book, published by Microsoft Press.

PHP is/was a templating language

[SmallFurryCreature]

And PHP is perfectly safe outside of bugs.

Just that the default USED to allow you to easily to do stuff that was not secure. Just accepting user input straight into your code as trusted is NOT a failure of PHP but of the developer. Sure, you could write an architecture that holds your hand, but PHP was meant as a template language, to get things done simply and cheaply. That people started to use it for heavy coding without learning basic security first is NOT the fault of the language. I can make the same basic mistakes in any language (yes, I am aware that this is not something to boast about).

PHP gets a lot of its bad rep from A: packages written in it that ignored basic security and B: upset Java .NET [flavor of the day language] that are upset their languages don't get the same love and attention.

It seems odd to me that despite all the supposed hate for PHP, a lot of software still gets written in it. Sounds like the detractors are suffering from a case of sour grapes. Show me the Ruby on Rails Wiki, the .NET forum, the perl webshop that is actually being used by anybody.

There are plenty of good sites that tell you how to code a secure web site. In any language. Don't complain about PHP if you can't handle it. Is it the languages fault you forget to check user input? Or don't understand variable scope?

I have come to the conclusion that those who can't handle straight PHP or Javascript just aren't that good at coding. Because a good coder can use any language AND make full use of its unique features. If you try to turn javascript into a java like language for instance, you are NOT using the full power of javascript. Why not?

Re:Fedora 13

[TheRaven64]

Jack is Tennessee Whiskey

Is Tennessee a native American word for 'almost, but not quite, totally unlike'?

Office Open XML

[gedhrel]

would be a case in point.

bump the version up

[DrYak]

if the software is as stable as you mention (and I trust you, if you've been flawlessly using it inproduction),
maybe you should consider bumping the version up to 1.00 and post last update explaining what you said above.

Re:bump the version up

[Just Some Guy]

I guess I could, and maybe I'll do that if/when I release another update. I don't want to make a special release just to bump the version number, though. I guess, to me, the "0" is just another digit. I have so many "0.x" programs installed on my desktop and on production servers that it doesn't really mean anything to me:

• cacti-0.8.7g
• clamav-0.96.2_3
• ffmpeg-0.6_3,1
• gettext-0.18.1.1
• gstreamer-0.10.30
• [a huge number of libraries and Perl packages]
• x264-0.0.20100624
• etc., etc., etc.

It's also a double-edged sword. After using it in production for years, the last thing I want is for people to say, "oh, I'd never use a 1.0 version. I'll wait for the first bugfix to come out." I guess I could jump straight to 1.0.1, but then I'm spending way more thought on marketing my little project than I'm really interested in.

Or sell your boss Open Office...

[Anonymous Coward]

Or sell your boss Open Office... $1500 a seat a year. THAT will show how good Open Office is!

So, to sum up your argument

[Anonymous Coward]

So, to sum up your argument:

a) It's bad to say that Open Source stuff is competent because some of it is and ignoring others

b) Closed Source is fine because Some of it is competent (in your opinion)

(note: Apple use WebKit, open source from KHTML and CUPS, open source, so you still need examples. However you're still cherry-picking the closed source and refuting someone doing the same for open source. Lets count the faces, shall we..?)

Re:So, to sum up your argument

[jedidiah]

> So, to sum up your argument:

+...Microsoft sucks and they are in no position to throw stones at anyone.

When it comes to quality, how open the code is really doesn't matter.

Although open standards can help you avoid crappy monopoly-ware.

Ultimately, your data is far more important than your programs.

that's the opposite of my opinion

[Anonymous Coward]

I realize there are pockets that are the exception, but for years I've had the opinion that Microsoft = incompetence.

troll warning?

[jsepeta]

who cares what some jerk at microsoft thinks. you linux guys are going to hate his guts and mock him anyway.

And rubbishing your competitors

[Anonymous Coward]

And rubbishing your competitors is something a poor product will do to mask their own incompetence.

And since, Open Source is a competitor to Microsoft products, and MS is here rubbishing Open Source, what does that tell you about Microsoft?

NOT a programmer!

[hesaigo999ca]

>The President of Microsoft Latin America
Definitely without a programmer background to make such a claim,
based on absolute ignorance, and nothing more then a bad loser if you ask me!

closed != incompetent

[juanhf]

just because something is closed source does not mean that the developers are incompetent. you are forgetting that the people working at microsoft are no different that you and me. the only difference is that the corporation has decided that it would like to have absolute control over the development direction of the product.

everything has its pros and cons; the open source community although having a more socialistic approach to software development will see its followers splintered and separate much like the church did over a difference of opinion - in computer software terms i think that's called a fork.

Got it all wrong...

[jvkjvk]

When he said:

Rincon also needled competition betting on open standards and free of charge, such as Google. "When you do not can compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence."

The executive added: "When convenient, the companies say they are open. They use it for your own benefit."

He was really only talking about MS strategies.

It may be funny, but it's also right on the mark. MS has been trying (in the past few years) to do exactly this.

Just seems to be another case of ascribing your own faults to your perceived enemies.

Maybe he doesn't realize he's been describing MS failings, but we do!

Regards.

Re:Fedora 13

[armanox]

For the record I disable NetworkManager anyway.

lillypond effect

[MrKaos]

That attitude is starting to change but it's sooooo sssssllllloooooowwwww in an industry that moves so fast.

You are right, slowly open source is changing attitudes in the Information Technology industry, but even so, it's mainstream now. We've observed the demise of the big computing shops that people thought would never die and I think the perception that OSS is moving so slowly is due to Geometric progression, or the lilly pond effect.

Simply put, the progression is 99% complete when the pond is 50% saturated. When it comes to IT no one knows where the saturation point actually is.

Re:well he has a point... but wrong choice of word

[mldi]

I don't see where you've proved your point. Except for XBMC, which I haven't used, I'd take the Windows product over Linux any day. Apache is especially bad, it's old and tired, just let it die already.

You have any frame of reference for that? How is it "old and tired"? You clearly have no clue what you are talking about. Apache isn't even restricted to Linux. And it doesn't even stop at Apache, as there are at least half a dozen high quality OSS web servers out there that IIS can't possibly compare to.

But back to Apache. Apache is deployed on far more servers as the web server of choice. You can find these statistics anywhere. Not only is it faster, it's far more reliable, especially when deployed in a Linux server.

It doesn't even stop there. In the area of media players, Microsoft can't seem to beat anybody, closed OR open source. Their mobile OS is utterly pathetic, and I think it's safe to say Android is far batter. If desktop eye candy is your thing, OSS wins again (compiz). Hell, even menu and navigation systems win. OS choice on embedded systems? OSS wins. Graphics suite? OSS (Photoshop is NOT Microsoft). The only things Microsoft seems to have going for them is the fact that their Office suite is still unparalleled, and they're so big that they have all the big vendors producing software for them (such as Adobe).

Go home, troll.

Huge market share lost

[perles]

The problem is that Brazil is 2/3 of USA population and it is still unexplored. It is a huge market never conquered because of the high license prices and now it seems to be lost. Hope other countries do the same.

versionning

[DrYak]

I guess, to me, the "0" is just another digit. I have so many "0.x" programs installed on my desktop and on production servers that it doesn't really mean anything to me

Well of course. It's all dependent on your numbering scheme.
- For some software "0" means unstable/uncompleted (most widespread numbering system)
- For other odd/even alternate to mark unstable cycles (linux kernel up to some recent time)
- Other are asymptomatically approaching a constant to indicate that they are mostly considered perfect by they author (TeX and friends)
- Some just go for dates "catalyst drivers, Ubuntu" or just release numbers and completely ignore the "display stability status".

I just thought you followed the most wide spread usage of :
0.x - still in development and incomplete.
1.x - does its job well, is considered complete.

Nonetheless, it's still important for you to write down an update note that, so far, the project hasn't had any need for an update and works in production (whatever is the numbering scheme you use).

the last thing I want is for people to say, "oh, I'd never use a 1.0 version. I'll wait for the first bugfix to come out."

Well some people have been burnt by the "We have a dead-line to keep, so release whatever piece of shit we have" tendency. Where version number don't mean anything beside "Please, come buy our piece of crap". You can't do much for them.

I wasn't aiming for the psychological effect of having a version beginning with 1 or 0. Just flagging the stuff as "stable" however you choose to.

Wow

[ifiwereasculptor]

This guy seems really open, making statements like that.

Well...

[Anonymous Coward]

I think we must believe in his words..., I mean, he works in MIcrosoft, he must know about incompetence

Well, in all honesty

[oranGoo]

he is giving MS perspective. For MS, opening their source would show how competent they are. Hence the sentiment.