It's a convenient fiction that Microsoft is the source of all evil in the technology world, particularly for a vocal minority within the open-source community.
For such people, Microsoft hate is an excuse for a distinct lack of introspection, and credits Microsoft with far better execution and strategy than it actually possesses.
Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer has a goofy laugh. I'm not sure it's an evil one.
I mention Microsoft because some within the open-source community quickly pounced on the company's inadvertent violation of the GPL in its Windows 7 USB/DVD Download Tool. Microsoft's Peter Galli was quick to acknowledge it:
[The license violation] was not intentional on our part. While we had contracted with a third party to create the tool, we share responsibility as we did not catch it as part of our code review process.
As conspiracies against open source go, it sounds pretty harmless--because it probably is. Open-source licensing is complex enough and the process for acquiring open-source software is loose enough, that there is room for all sorts of error, both nefarious and benign.
Guess what? People--and corporations filled with people--make mistakes. Even Microsoft. If it was as evil as some suspect, the devil himself would be out of a job.
As open-source adoption dramatically increases, we should expect to see errors of this kind increase, and not out of any sinister plan to pilfer open-source code. Errors are natural and are evidence that adoption is spreading beyond the inner sanctum of open sourcerors.
We shouldn't expect open-source adoption to be flawless or painless.
Consider Symbian. The foundation decided to aggressively embrace open source as a way to guide it to an optimistic future, but the process of open-sourcing its code is taking time. A lot of time. As Rich Sands suggests, Symbian may actually be taking too much time, frustrating its community and allowing Google Android to assume the leadership position in open-source mobile platforms.
Who knew that giving away things for free could be so hard?
It's tempting to think that open source should be an automatic reflex for companies and individuals alike. It's not. It takes time to learn how to do it properly, and even then mistakes are possible. Perhaps likely.
In the case of its Windows 7 tool, Microsoft screwed up. It's not the first time, and it's not the last.
But error is not evil.
Silly season is upon us.
The Free Software Foundation is on the warpath against Microsoft's launch of Windows 7, as CNET's Ina Fried reports, denouncing Microsoft for "poisoning education," "invading privacy," and other evils.
The irony is that the Web site used to promote this latest rant uses a license that prohibits derivative works, a cardinal sin in Free Software Foundation theology.
The site uses the Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 3.0 License, which allows people to copy and distribute a page, but not to actually modify and improve upon it ("No Derivative Works--You may not alter, transform, or build upon this work.")
This sounds reasonable to me, but has traditionally not sounded reasonable to the Free Software Foundation.
For example, foundation founder Richard Stallman was in Argentina on Wednesday and when mentioning Wikipedia, he suggested that the open-source ethos depends upon freedom of text/code:
Wikipedia's text is free. It is released under a free license. That is the aspect to me that makes it ethical.
The freedom to modify that text is an essential freedom for which the Free Software Foundation has spent decades fighting. It's the first freedom listed at the top of its site:
Freedom...as defined by the Free Software Foundation
(Credit: Free Software Foundation)But apparently it's not an essential freedom for its anti-Microsoft screeds.
I'm not a fan of Microsoft, but the Free Software Foundation's hypocrisy on this is galling. Its logic is also a bit wearing, as Download Squad notes. The Free Software Foundation wants to make lack of freedom the source for all ills. It's not. It's just a good start.
Against this sort of dogmatism is a much more rational response to competition with proprietary software: the Processing project's FAQ. Processing has been positioned by some as an open-source competitor to Flash, but Processing's developers refuse to be drawn in and respond:
We're not targeting the same audience Flash. If we wanted to make a Flash killer, we'd have set out to do that and our stated purpose would have been more specific (and we'd have more on the site about "Processing vs. Flash" in the competitive shootout sense... right now we just have information about how the syntax differs so that people can make the transition).
We could have saved a lot of time if we just wanted to build a better Flash. But as two people, do you really think we can or should bother competing with a company as large as Macromedia? Macrodobe? Does anyone really want a "better" Flash? We certainly don't, so that's not an interesting goal for us.
There are things that are always going to be better in Flash, and other types of work that will always be better in Processing. But fundamentally (and this cannot be emphasized enough), this is not an all-or-nothing game... We're talking about tools. Do people refuse to use pencils because pens exist? No, you just use them for different things, and for specific reasons. If Processing works for you, then use it. If not, don't. It's easy! It's free! You're not being forced to do anything.
How refreshing--that "reason" thing. It would be nice if the Free Software Foundation spent more time coding the changes it would like to see in the world, rather than writing to Fortune 500 companies to advocate they switch to Microsoft alternatives.
Put your code where your mouth is, Free Software Foundation. And make sure it's truly open to derivative works, while you're at it.
Follow me on Twitter @mjasay.
Glyn Moody hits the nail on the head with his critique of Microsoft's proposed approach to Windows 7: Say little so that the market expects little.
It's not an unreasonable approach, and Microsoft did get burned for actually warning the market about what it would be providing, only to have to endure the consequences of not living up to the expectations it set, but I'm not sure it can afford to go back. Stating that it will be "more careful" with Windows 7, Microsoft's representative noted:
"We know that when we talk about our plans for the next release of Windows, people take action," [Microsoft] said. "As a result, we can significantly impact our partners and our customers if we broadly share information that later changes."
Well, yes. But that's the whole point behind transparency. As Glyn notes, it's not that easy to do in practice, but it's increasingly critical in the opening 21st Century.
Microsoft must spend some days gazing around in a stupor. The company continues to print money yet its most recent product launch of Vista fell on deaf ears. Microsoft of course wants money, but it also wants to be thought of as a leader in the software world, and with Vista it is definitely following...but who it's following, nobody knows.
Now Bill Gates has declared that Windows 7, the next release of the operating system, won't be nearly as bad as Vista:
We're hard at work, I would say, on the next version, which we call Windows 7. I'm very excited about the work being done there...[which will require] lower power, take less memory [and] be more efficient.
Great! So...why buy Vista in the interim, which is by all accounts a memory and power hog, and is grossly inefficient? Customers seem to get Gates' logic, however, and have been buying Macs in droves which requires less power, less memory, is more efficient, and is a heck of a lot nicer to use. Thanks for the advice, Bill!
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