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Welcome to virtuallinux.org. You are currently reading the article "Is Microsoft really any more trustworthy?". All articles on virtuallinux.org pertain to the ongoing assult on the worlds greatest Operating system. Continue on reading about "Is Microsoft really any more trustworthy?"
Is Microsoft really any more trustworthy?
Posted on Tuesday, April 01 2008 @ 08:19:37 EDT by linuxwiz |
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Lately, Microsoft has been trying
really, really hard to appear as open source's best friend. All I can
say is: "With friends like these, who needs enemies?"
If someone stole from you, and
the courts ordered them to pay you back, how would you feel about them
holding a self-serving press conference to tell you how generous they
are? Or, as Michael Tiemann, head of the Open Source Initiative and a
Red Hat executive, put it in an OSI blog posting on March 30th, Microsoft's new weapon against open source: stupidity.
You
see some people still believe that Microsoft offering patented
protocols under "reasonable and non-discriminatory terms," or "for free
for noncommercial use without fear of lawsuits" is somehow some kind of
olive branch to the open-source community.
As Tiemann put it: "A free-of-cost license that prohibits commercial use is useless
to open-source developers. And therefore I cannot understand why
anybody would think that Microsoft is doing the open-source community
any favors."
He's got that right.
When Microsoft's general counsel, Brad Smith, talked about a bridge between Microsoft and open source
at the recent Open Source Business Conference in San Francisco, it
sounded good. The line that engineers could more done with these issues
than lawyers ever could was one calculated to warm the hearts of the
open-source community.
There's just one problem. Microsoft
still holds the threat of patents over any commercial use of its
intellectual property. Microsoft still won't say what patents it claims
are used in Linux. Microsoft still tries to fog up the fact that it's
been required to open up, for example, its network file protocols to Samba.
Microsoft seems to have pulled every dirty trick in its book to get Open XML turned into an OSI standard. To sum up, Microsoft is still not trustworthy.
I know some people, such as Jason Perlow at ZDNet, believe that you can trust Microsoft,
at least as long as you keep a close eye on them, and that Microsoft is
beginning to see the advantages of working with, rather than against,
open source.
I don't buy it. I'm certain there are some
engineers at Microsoft who would have no problem working together with
open-source developers. But I also believe that, so long as Steve
Ballmer heads the company, Microsoft will never be a real partner for
open source. Or, for that matter, that Microsoft would prove a
trustworthy partner to any company not under its thumb.
Perlow
compares Microsoft's relationship to open source with the Soviet
Union's Glasnost period when it was opening up to the West for the
first time. It's a good analogy, but I don't think it's an accurate
one. Come the day when, say, Mark Shuttleworth cribs from Reagan and
demands, "Mr. Ballmer, tear down these patent walls" and Microsoft does
so, then I'll believe that the Evil Empire has changed its ways. Until
then, I'm going to trust Microsoft about as far as I can throw Ballmer.
Source
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