fud

It's increasingly difficult to separate "open-source vendors" from "proprietary vendors," but Demandware, a proprietary software-as-a-service (SaaS) vendor, is attempting to do so in an effort to stem the rising tide of Magento, an open-source e-commerce project. Demandware's criticism of Magento largely falls flat, however, because it uses outdated descriptions of open source.

Demandware walks through a litany of complaints about open source--requires too many developers! forces you to upgrade your software all by yourself! forking and fragmentation!--but none hit the mark. Why? Because each is only somewhat accurate of the state of open … Read more

Correction at 6:35 a.m. PDT: This article was initially written on the assumption that the study was new. It was actually published in 2005.

For those waiting for a grand cataclysmic battle between Gog (Linux) and Magog (Windows), with one supreme victor, don't hold your breath.

I was reading through a 2005 study by Harvard Business School professors Pankaj Ghemawat and Ramon Casadesus-Masanell, and was surprised by how little has changed in the past four years, despite Linux and Windows duking it out in ever-increasing intensity.

Since that study was released, Linux has continued to swipe at … Read more

Watching Andrew Keen mercilessly beat up the strawman he creates for open source, I was tempted to leave the flame-bait post alone. But then I realized that Keen doesn't mean to beat up on open source - he actually agrees with it. He simply doesn't understand how it works. He is about a decade behind the times in terms of understanding open source, so consider this a Primer on 21st Century Open-source Economics.

Keen writes:

Mass unemployment and a deep economic recession comprise the most effective antidote to the utopian ideals of open-source radicals. The altruistic ideal of … Read more

If we were going to award a proprietary software vendor for the "Worst Open Source FUD of 2008," TeleSoft International, not Microsoft, would take the prize. Indeed, in a year that has seen Microsoft embrace open source to an increased degree, TeleSoft has gone on a full-frontal assault, claiming in a video that open source is poorly tailored to customer needs, ruins their profitability, and delays their time to market.

In other words, TeleSoft is claiming that open source will do precisely the opposite of what companies normally find that it delivers.

Perhaps recognizing that not everyone will buy into its FUD, TeleSoft claims to support the popular Linux operating system, but with a kernel-loadable module approach that keeps its IP safe from that voracious appetite of IP-stealing Linux. Nice. TeleSoft wants to have its cake ("open source is terrible!") and eat it, too ("but our open source is not so terrible!").… Read more

That didn't take long. Nokia announced just last week that it would be open sourcing Symbian, the world's top mobile operating system by market share, and a few days later Microsoft has started a FUD war against the move.

The ironic thing in this Microsoft FUD offensive is that it's using precisely the wrong example from open source to wage the war: Linux. While it could have found some examples of open source that fragments, is more costly than proprietary software, etc., it chose Linux, which isn't:

[Microsoft's] Rockfeld sums up those challenges with what some might call the "F word": fragmentation. Fragmentation is bad, he says, because application software developers have to create multiple versions of their code for different operating systems, or different versions of the "same" operating systems. "There are more Linux consortiums that come and go than there are Linux phones," he says....… Read more

The blogosphere and Twitter have been abuzz with talk about this article by Shari Thurow, published Thursday on Search Engine Land. The article warns of supposed dangers against the SEO tactic of "PageRank sculpting." Readers are coming away feeling reticent to employ the tactic, fearing retribution from the engines in the form of penalties. The article paints PageRank sculpting as poor usability and black hat. I can't be any more adamant about this: neither is the case.

No disrespect intended to the article's author, but this article is classic FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt). "Nobody … Read more

I will admit it: I think Microsoft and other proprietary companies are often guilty of spreading FUD (Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt) about open source. Microsoft did it recently with its "number-crunching" on Firefox security and on Linux security. To me it's clear: proprietary software companies feel threatened by open source and react with FUD.

But is the inverse also true? Do open-source companies/projects/developers do the same thing about Microsoft and other proprietary companies? Of course they/we do. Some of it may well be based on good information and given for good reasons, but I'm … Read more

Paul McDougall at InformationWeek may be reading too much into Microsoft's recent patent deal with Kyocera, but he does ask an interesting question. Does the agreement reveal Microsoft's patent position, at least as it relates to embedded Linux? (Or does it simply reveal that Japanese companies would rather settle with Microsoft than stand up for themselves, since they seem to be falling like flies before Microsoft's patent FUD?)

McDougall writes:

Under the deal, Microsoft gets to add patented Kyocera Mita technology to its Windows and Office products.

What does Kyocera get? The right to use patented Microsoft technology in its printers, copiers and "certain Linux-based embedded devices."… Read more