ESR on his trip to Microsoft

Thanks to Norm J for the pointer over to ESR's post-Microsoft interview. Fairly typical situation, but it's interesting to comments from "the inside".

Comments

A modest counterexample...

[sphealey]

"This is where the code-for-profit model works so well. People know that MS is motivated by the customer's idea of what is best - the profit-model works well for assuring this. Users can "vote" for new features and improvements with their dollars."

Maybe. Unless the market is moving too fast for the customers to control through their dollar votes. Or the customer's need conflicts with the vendor's strategic view. Or any reasonable size group of customers is too small to influence the vendor's actions.

Case in point: customers have been asking, demanding, and begging Microsoft for five years to improve interoperability with Novell products. Customers have been "voting", too, by continuing to buy Novell products. Has Microsoft responded to it's customers' requests? No. In fact, some of us suspect that new dis-interoperability with Netware is included with each version/service pack for Windows. Is Microsoft likely to respond to their _customers'_ requests? Help me understand why not.

sPh

Slipped in

[gfish]

A friend of mine at the Borg was able to sneak me in. Luckily they weren't checking badges. :)

It was interesting to watch the two cultures collide -- though not all of the Microsofties were hostile to ESR. Most just didn't seem to quite get it, though. Kept bringing up Mozilla as proof that Open Source doesn't work.

Best exchange:
Q: But why would someone work for free when they could be getting paid for the same work?
A: Because they want to live in a world where software doesn't suck?

It was very crowded at the presentationl; for some reason it wasn't in an auditorium of any sort, just a largish room. Standing room only, and there were several clots of people in halls watching the 'live' feed. (I don't know what they were using, but it was 15 seconds lagged, the audio wasn't synched with the video and it flashed every other frame.)

In one of the offices across from the presentation I noticed several Linux Journal's and O'Rielly Linux manuals...

Overall it was a good presentation. ESR spent most of the time giving a sociological explanation for why OSS works, or exists at all. Unfortanately he didn't have time to talk too much about what is currently happening. He got bogged down by arguments over his assumption that OSS creates better software instead.

He did make a very good point that 95% of software development is for internal use only -- and an amussing moment when his survey of the audience did not reflect this. He should have emphasized to the money hungry ones that this implies OSS won't put them out of business. I also wish he has empahsized that fact that most profit from software is the support of it, not in the sale. He did mention Zope, but never explicitly made any conclusions.

Hrm. I had been thinking of submiting a review to Slashdot. Well, here it is, I guess.

Anonymous Cowards

[Anonymous Coward]

At last, hard evidence supporting the hypothesis that all those moronic Anonymous Cowards are actually in the pay of Microsoft!

Heh .. come on now, you can't prove that. Your OUTLOOK on the situation is clouded by the fact that you are unwilling to act as a true INTERNET EXPLORER and try somebody else's stuff. Heh .. take my WORD for it and try some commercial software that will really make you EXCEL at everything that you do. CNN and other such prominent MEDIA PLAYERS consistently give good reviews to our software. It lets you ACCESS a whole new world of productivity .. yes, sirree ..

Come on, get your credit card ready and call 1-800-MS-TRASH. Tell 'em BOB sent you.

Having seen the thing, IMHO

[Francis]

Alright, I'll hope I won't reveal anything my NDA covers... :)

This is the first time I've ever watched one of ESR's talks. Pretty interesting, he's pretty quick on his feet, so to speak.

I don't really have anything to say, but someone out there might want to know my impressions.

Some observations:
-He's right, there were some "conflicting views". It was kinda funny watching the 2 sides assert their OS was better. I love Linux as much as the next guy, and I think that both OSs have their relative merits.
-ESR's talk gave you a little something to think about, but a lot of his arguments weren't backed up. I think that if they were, it would've lent more weight to his ideas. (Maybe there wasn't enough time to present them, or maybe there simply weren't good examples behind some of his points)
eg. One of his examples was DOOM. Mentioned how they benifited from open-source. Did not say what exactly was the benifit. (To my knowledge, the only thing that came out of releasing DOOM was glDOOM, which, if kinda neat, is not all that fabulous)
-Microsofties are also pretty quick on their feet, and I think that ESR probably lost a few more arguments than he's used to.
-IMHO, ESR's talk was not extremely convincing - I think there's a lot more money to be made by keeping "private source."
-I don't think he was convincing enough to change anybody's mind. Although I haven't talked to anyone else who also saw the talk.

Ah, before I get massively flamed here, I'd just like to say that I happen to probably like open-source more than most people. (even helped a couple GPL projects) And I find it kinda disgusting that people are releasing unproffesional, unpolished nagware programs, with no real customer support, for a fee. (for instance, a lot of small win32 apps/toys, winCE, Palmpilot programs)
Bottom line, corporations are formed on the premises of making money.

#include "disclaimer.h"
Views are my own, not my employers, yadayadayada...
Incidentally, before someone thinks I'm someone from "high and above", I'm just a MS intern. I don't really know anything about how things are run around here. Just my summer job to keep my busy :)

--

Re:Imagine NT2000 as open source

[remande]

Why shudder?

I don't care if Bill Gates makes one trillion dollars. Let him! I simply mind that he is doing it by polluting us with broken software.

If Windows works well, and you can fix what doesn't work, and add the stuff you need to it, I would count myself lucky and proudly run NT on my system.

My current problem is not that I run NT, but that NT is incapable of working the way I want it to, forces me to go down paths that I don't want to go, and is gratuitously incompatible with the rest of the world. An open source NT would not have these problems.