Slashdot Mirror
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."
Installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition and my wired and wireless connections worked out of the box. No he doesn't have a point.
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.
"To prevent this day from getting any worse, I'll just read ERROR as GOOD THING" 1GJU8xLuDKDxEs4KLf8fAGyptoDsqvEsBT
"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.
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.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
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.
Security is mostly a superstition... Avoiding danger is no safer in the long run than outright exposure. - Helen Keller
He was probably not refering to anything in particular, just making some FUD.
Rethinking email
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.
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.
Dewey, what part of this looks like authorities should be involved?