Microsoft redefines Open Source

DaBuzz sent us a fascinating little article where you can read that Microsoft is exempt from trademark law. Talks about Open Source having a variety of meanings, and how MSs definition differs from Linux.

Comments

Dangerous Times

[Ross C. Brackett]

Food for thought:

1. However, [Steve] Ballmer said the company was coming to realize that giving source code to users creates a "certain level of comfort" for many of them.
   --IDG.Net article 'Microsoft open to open source for Windows?'
   
   
   At present, we have plenty of ``keep quiet'', but not enough freedom talk. Most people involved with free software say little about freedom--usually because they seek to be ``more acceptable to business.'' Software distributors especially show this pattern. Some GNU/Linux operating system distributions add proprietary packages to the basic free system, and they invite users to consider this an advantage, rather than a step backwards from freedom.
   
   We are failing to keep up with the influx of free software users, failing to teach people about freedom and our community as fast as they enter it. This is why non-free software such as Qt, and partially non-free operating system distributions, find such fertile ground. To stop using the word ``free'' now would be a mistake; we need more, not less, talk about freedom.
   
   Let's hope that those using the term ``open source'' will indeed draw more users into our community; but if they do, the rest of us will have to work even harder to bring the issue of freedom to those users' attention. We have to say, ``It's free software and it gives you freedom!''--more and louder than ever before.
   --Richard Stallman
   

This is a dangerous time for our community. Microsoft is going to try to blur the line between what's good for them and what's good for us. In fact, I believe that this is Open Source's main pitfall - it implies that allowing people to look at the source will expand profits by making the software better, and people happier. This kind of makes sense for a company who *needs* open development to stay alive (like Netscape), but this is not the case for Microsoft. All the wishing in the world won't take away the fact that Microsoft is not genuinely interested in improving their product in any meaningful way. They are interested in making money - an improved software package would be merely a pleasant side effect. By making their product Open Source, they are interested in making those who are intolerant of Microsoft change their minds and at the very least stop working against them. They are interested in sucking mindshare and synergy away from us. That is all. There is a reason why Bill Gates is the richest man in the world - it's because he is a cutthroat businessman. If we forget that, even for an instant, we are doomed.

RMS isn't an idiot, he's seen this scenario coming from a mile away. I sincerely hope that recent events are making it more apparent that, for all the downsides there are to Free Software, it at least provides a good method to keep Microsoft, and others like them, from subverting everything we've worked for.

I am laughing at you??

[Cowards Anonymous]

Can anyone tell me of a time a off the shelf product for Windows didn't work on Windows?

Let us make a list, then, from personal experience:

1. Windows itself; it usually takes 4 or 5 tries to install, not to mention the hours necessary for debugging the driver situation.
2. Microsoft Office 97 Service Release 2. Maybe a third of installations result in measurable brokenness.
3. Microsoft Internet Explorer. 65% of installs fail. Half of successful installs break the machine. Nuff said.
4. Microsoft Internet Information Server 4.0 and Active Server Pages. If it installs, which it doesn't often do properly, there is inevitably something or other wrong, often the scripting engines. Want to see a sample broken site? Microsoft has one.
5. Microsoft Java Virtual Machine. Can anyone get this to work?
6. Games. They have about a 50% failure rate on average because of varying driver requirements.
7. Drivers of all kinds, especially video drivers. In fact, the drivers that ship with Windows are usually broken!

That's quite a few just off the top of my head. With effort I'm sure I could find more applications that don't work out of the box. I think nearly everyone has a story about them!

For example, Muth made the statement about any shrink wrapped software running on any computer running Windows, and that it is due to a central hold on the Windows source tree.

Note that a majority of my list is comprised of Microsoft products? Given that they have central hold of the OS source, wouldn't you expect that they could do better?

But I can tell any of you countless stories of how a rpm package may or may not run on any Linux installation.

I can think of maybe three or four times I've installed the wrong RPM. rpmfind has a way of coming up with TurboLinux or SuSE packages that don't work well with Red Hat, but they're easy enough to back out. In every case, I simply located the RPM for the distribution I was using (in these cases, Red Hat) and had no trouble at all using them.

Compare and contrast with two weeks of wrestling with Microsoft Option Pack 4.0 to get IIS installed on an NT server. Nothing shy of a reinstallation of NT would convince OP4 to install, since it seemed to fail to correctly register its DLLs during installation.

I don't know enough about Debian packaging to speak with any authority towards it, but I can't imagine it is much worse than RPM, and I've had nearly no problems at all with RPM, and certainly none that compare to the troubles I have when building and configuring Windows boxes (except for how badly rpm segfaults when you build it under pgcc. Maybe it's time to upgrade the compiler on the buildbox, eh?)