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Microsoft's Chief Exec For Latin America Says 'Open' Means 'Incompetent'

Posted by timothy on from the deseo-suscribirme-a-su-boletan-de-noticias dept.

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."

5 of 340 comments (clear)

  1. Incompetent? by Bill_the_Engineer · · Score: 5, Funny

    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...
  2. Maybe he's on to something by srh2o · · Score: 5, Funny

    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Office_Open_XML

  3. The key word is "compete" by DontLickJesus · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Not all open source software is written by businesses. Not all open source software is written for profit. As most governments realize they need to tighten their belts, it's important to remember that the the basic idea of public service is a) to support your community and b) to efficiently manage public resources, perhaps this government realizes it is not their job to support companies.
    • Open source can be reviewed for problems, both from technical issues and human (corrupt) issues.
    • When free open source software used by governments, they are accepting as real the public service so many developers have provided
    • When open source software fails to deliver features that users truly need, companies who do stand out and shine for their innovation
    • Open source software is a form of public intellectual property that not only provides a service, but a sort of baseline for what is truly worth paying for.

    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
  4. Suckwear by TiggertheMad · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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!
    1. Re:Suckwear by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      But I can't count how many times I have yanked the code for an "abandoned" project to see how they did something, or rolled an entire module into something else. Just because the shiny distributable package is no longer useful doesn't mean the project "alive and kicking" somewhere, in some other form.

      THAT is one of the key differences for me, open source can be abandoned but it probably won't ever die, closed can easily slip into the night.