On Mon, 2005-06-20 at 12:21, J. Antas wrote: > Seen on http://distrowatch.com: > > " So how do you feel about the fact that Gentoo's founder Daniel Robbins > now works for Microsoft? (http://www.gentoo.org/news/20050613-drobbins.xml) > > If you don't find anything wrong with the concept, let us re-phrase > the above sentence: Daniel Robbins, one of the best-known and most > talented Linux developers, is now working for a company that is known to > have gone to extreme length to attack and discredit Linux at every > opportunity and whose chairman has been actively lobby foreign > governments for speedy adoption of software patents. > > Now that doesn't sound so innocent any more, does it?" > Well, first of all, everybody needs an income, and Microsoft does have money.
Second, there is apparently a cohort of folks at Redmond who do "get it" on open source; I've seen the phrase "civil war within Microsoft" I think in Linux Journal. And Michael Tiemann of Red Hat was reported to have recently met with Microsoft administration. Everyone has said, all along, that there is in principle room both for open source software and for proprietary software. The software that solves problems common to a diverse group, even of competitors, is most efficiently dealt with collaboratively for a number of reasons, but the business argument is that we compete on the front end, not in the infrastructure. After all, the Mayo Clinic has access to the same medical literature as the St. Louis Park Clinic; we share the knowledge and compete on economics and service. And this is the model that software is fitfully moving towards. There is software that *shouldn't* be shared; there is software that no-one else is *interested* in seeing; and there's software that is truly the heart and soul of a business but is unique and there's every motivation not to open up. And there's the story Tiemann used to tell about preaching open-source to companies and being told, "We can't open our code because so much of it is stolen." But common needs are best addressed with collaboration. And some of the folks in Redmond understand this, I think. It is my frank opinion that MSoft would prosper best in the coming decade if they ported everything to Linux and simply competed on service, customization and reliability. They'd be more difficult to compete with than they are now -- their chief weakness is that terribly designed OS they keep foisting off of folks -- and they'd stop pouring resources into plugging holes in their sieve-like dike.
