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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.
Installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition and my wired and wireless connections worked out of the box. No he doesn't have a point.
The way you mask something is to put it out in the open?
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.
These comments are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views or opinions of my employer or colleagues...
I bought a pair of open-toed sandals but only one of them fell apart so you're both wrong!
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.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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...
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!
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.
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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
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.
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
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 ]