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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."
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.
The way you mask something is to put it out in the open?
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 the pot calling the kettle black if ever I've heard it!
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.
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.
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.
Where genius and insanity become confused true wisdom is found
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.
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.
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.
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...
Rio de Janeiro's dwellers are stupid. No, really.
“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.
In soviet russia the government regulates the companies.
If closed-source is so competent, why does every EULA I ever read disclaim any warranty?
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".
Read the EFF's Fair Use FAQ
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.
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.
HA! I just wasted some of your bandwidth with a frivolous sig!
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.
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.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]