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

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.