Microsoft hits new ethical low point?

[ccb at valinux.com (ccb at valinux.com)]

> They expect people have forgotten that they're in deep
> with the government already for stifling competition
> and then say with a straight face that competition
> from Linux is stifling innovation. What innovation
> they're referring to, I have no idea.

"Innovation" is Microsoft-speak for "Planned Obsolescence".

"Innovation" means that Microsoft knows the true interfaces to their
technologies but all other application developers do not.

"Innovation" means that every 9-12 months you will be forced to recode
substantial parts of your application to keep up with the latest
bucketload of "innovative" API's published by Microsoft or risk being
overrun by the pseudo-technical hyper-babble of the Microsoft
advertising machine.


One thing that concerns be about the Microsoft comments is the
language about Open Source undermining intellectual property.

This is FALSE.  FALSE FALSE FALSE.

Every Open Source license I've had the pleasure to read was written in
the language of intellectual property law.  When I give you code under
the GPL or similar OSS compliant license I am still the copyright
holder and you are still a licensee.  If you violate the terms of the
license your forfeit the right to use the software.  If you fail to
comply I have certain rights which I will enforce in a court of law.

Lest we have difficulty defending the GPL when it gets it's day in
court, nobody working with Open Source software should hesitate to
state this fact clearly and often.  Open Source software is owned by
its developers and they can and will enforce violations of their
license.

The most serious threat to intellectual property (speaking as a fan of
Civil Society here) is an amazing willingness to ignore the common
good as corporate lobbyists for large media companies secure
increasingly egregious extensions to intellectual property "rights".
The Sonny Bono (aka Mickey Mouse) law, the Digital Millenium Copyright
Act and UCITA are cases in point.

As these laws continue to get more and more onerous, clever people
will continue to find ways to work within this legal context to be
able to continue to share their property while simultaneously
protecting themselves from being run out of business using their own
code.

But I'll say it again - the GPL and the Open Source phenomenon are not
here to destroy intellectual property.  They protect the intellectual
property of people that want to collaborate publicly and they are
rooted in the intellectual property traditions.  They can be used by
Capitalist Tools and Communist Dupes alike ;-).

As an aside, fans of the Estate Tax might consider taxing intellectual
property under the same terms.  If you had copyright in a work with a
term of 40 years remaining, perhaps only 45% of that term should acrue
to heirs with no right of renewal.



The attacks along the lines of "you get what you pay for" are of
course absurd.  You get a whole lot more.  You get an army of highly
skilled code ninjas willing to come to your house to make it work for
free.  See "In the Beginning was the Command Line" by Neal Stephenson
if you haven't already.

We're seeing the major downside of using the word Free to describe
Sharable Software.  It's a ready-made footfold for the Fudmeister.

For the first time in a decade we have an industry that is thriving
outside of the iron platform dictatorship set by Microsoft.  For the
first time companies are making money without having to share some of
it with Microsoft.  No wonder they've got a load in their pants!

The time is coming for Microsoft to come to learn that it must lie in
the bed that it has made.  For a while in the mid-90's a new software
company was faced with an impossible situation: you had to develop on
a platform where the platform and development tools provider was
large, strong and arrogant enough to enter your market at will and
become your fiercest competitor.  Once they were in your market you
could agree to be bought for pennies on the dollar or be crushed by
Microsoft using technology they'd appropriate from your competitor on
a similar basis.

They built a software industry where anyone who was not Microsoft
could only survive by working with technologies that were not
controlled by Microsoft.  To me it always seemed that you've have to
be out of your mind to attempt to build a software business on the
Microsoft platform using the Microsoft development tools.  During this
entire period I, and you, and thousands like us held this
contradiction up to our corporate managers and clients.  For many of
us the rewards in meaningful work on solid, useful, non-MS-centric
projects has been great.

Look, by 1997 Microsoft was holding conferences with Venture
Capital firms and providing a spin which basically said "If you back a
company that is not towing the line with these technologies, you will
loose."  The only way to maintain a vibrant and competitive software
development industry was to find a way to make money using a business
model that Microsoft would find utterly repugnant.

It looks like we're well on the way to succeeding.


Last thing I'm going to comment on is the insinuation that our
legislators ought to do something about this "threat".  We need a
Lawmaker's Guide to Software Development Technology.  Something that
could be inexpensively reproduced and made available to all state and
federal legislators and their staffs.  It needs to call attention to
the history and nature of the Open Source phenomenon.  It needs to
call attention to the fact that code developed under the open source
model is the only way out of the technology obsolesence and technology
risk traps set by companies like Microsoft.  It needs to argue
persuasively that public institutions should not be using software
technology based on source code to which the public does not have
access.

ccb


 ---  This is my opinion, not necessarily that of VA Linux Systems  ---



--
Charles C. Bennett, Jr.			VA Linux Systems
Systems Engineer,			25 Burlington Mall Rd., Suite 300
US Northeast Region			Burlington, MA 01803-4145
+1 617 543-6513				+1 888-LINUX-4U
ccb at valinux.com				www.valinux.com
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