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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."
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!
If you aren't suspicious of your government's actions, you aren't doing your job as a responsible citizen.
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.
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."
"Going to war without the French is like going deer hunting without your accordion." ~General Norman Schwarzkopf
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.
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.
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...
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
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.
Native brasilian here. Your translation is correct. Unfortunately this doesn't change the fact that what he said is obviously bullshit.
Cosplayers.net - The Cosplayers Network
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.
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.
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...)
"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.
"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?)
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.
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.
Rethinking email
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.