On dealing with Microsoft

On dealing with Microsoft

Posted Jun 24, 2004 11:59 UTC (Thu) by rakoch (guest, #4666)
Parent article: On dealing with Microsoft

Jonathan seems to disagree with Helloween XI but I can't see where exactly the dissence is. Both Raymond and Jonathan agree that Microsoft is a (currently big) part of the problem. Jonathan acknowledges (elsewhere) that Microsoft is buying legislation against OSS. Eric is not reducing the issue to a MS vs OSS battle:
<QUOTE>For Microsoft (or at least its present business model) to survive, open source must die.</QUOTE>

There is the abstraction Jonathan is missing - everyone with a business model building mainly on vendor lock in and monopolistic power on the market must be fundamentally opposed an approach like OSS. Now MS happens to be the entity with the deepest pockets and the most to loose. Of course they have allies when it comes to particular actions which happen to be bad for OSS: Patent lawyers, the content industry and to an extend even companies like HP, Oracle and IBM. But of all these, only for MS the destruction of OSS is a value as such. Only MS is committed to destroy OSS whatever it takes.

The only controversy I can see is whether or not the document fits into the Helloween series. If you think of the Helloween series as a publication of leaked scandal memos it doesn't. But I guess it's up to Eric to decide what a Helloween document is.

-Rudiger

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