Microsoft's Chief Exec For Latin America Says 'Open' Means 'Incompetent' 340
An anonymous reader writes "The President of Microsoft Latin America, in criticizing the Brazilian government for its support of open source software, claimed that declaring something open is how you 'mask incompetence.' That seems especially funny coming from Microsoft, who has used 'closed' to mask incompetence for years. I thought 'open' meant that people could find and fix (or ignore) incompetence, whereas closed meant you were stuck with the incompetence."
not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
Is it opposite day in Latin America? (Score:5, Insightful)
The way you mask something is to put it out in the open?
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't feed the troll (Score:1, Insightful)
This article is only feeding this troll.
It's idiotic to make any kind of religious argument about open vs closed.
There are scores of terrible closed projects as well as terrible open projects. I would argue that there is very little (or no) correlation between open/closed status and quality.
Instead, the correlation that really matters is the ability, ingenuity, experience, and team dynamics of the developers working on the project, whether it be open or closed.
Beyond that, for closed projects, you also have to factor in all sorts of additional overhead correlation, such as project managers, customer requirements, marketing, and more.
In short, nothing to see here. Move along.
That's the pot calling the kettle black (Score:2, Insightful)
Why editorialize the article? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
Open does mean incompetent. Microsoft are trying to hide that by keeping it closed.
I'd rather trust the people saying 'its not perfect so help us make it better'
than the ones saying 'we make perfect software' and being proved wrong time after time.
Well... (Score:5, Insightful)
The key word is "compete" (Score:5, Insightful)
The basic truth is when companies are forced to provide superior products instead of costly attempts, citizens win. Neither the government nor it's people are here to compete with you, that's a business game.
Re:Fedora 13 (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Fedora 13 (Score:5, Insightful)
Let's see, did a factory restore of a Dell with Windows XP and it wouldn't boot with the Nvidia card that came with it. Had to take the card out, do the restore, then install the latest drivers and then put the card back in. Considering that everything is made and tested for Windows that's just sad.
Recently did the same with an Acer. Acer drivers wouldn't detect the broadcom wireless, because it has to be initialized by the driver, but the drivers won't install if they don't detect. Had to install the drivers from Dell's site.
So no, the guy doesn't have a point and neither does your anecdote.
You could make the argument that many hardware companies do not support OSS but you can hardly make the argument that OSS is incompetent.
Now if you consider that almost all hardware is specifically designed for proprietary software and it still doesn't work all of the time, one could make the argument that proprietary software is incompetent.
Open Can Be Last Refuge Of The Incompetant (Score:5, Insightful)
Open doesn't necessarily mean incompetent and closed doesn't necessarily mean competant. But "open" can sometimes be a last refuge for the incompetent. As if no one who has ever banged into a serious, irrefutable FLOSS usability problem has been told "quit whining, learn how to code and fix it yourself. It's open!"
You remember all those PDA's that the Taiwanese/Japanese couldn't sell because they sucked so much and their last ditch strategy was to bill them as open source PDA's and create FLOSS projects around them (e.g. Zaurus)? Open sourcing of Symbian after it got its ass handed to it by iOS? That's the kind of stuff I'm talking about.
Re:Lost in (Score:3, Insightful)
It needs to be put in context. What he meant was: when a company cannot compete (inferior product), they scream at the top of their lungs BUT IT'S OPEN! in order to masquerade their incompetence. He may have a point.
However, and I'd be preaching to the choir, we all know that it doesn't also mean that when a company has an "open" product, it sucks by default. He may have tried to pull this false correlation.
He also said in an earlier paragraph that the Brazillian government is wasting time with open-source, since inovation is in the private industry.
Stupid probably doesn't even know they ripped their sockets implementation from BSD...
Re:not long for his job (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
This *IS* Microsoft with a thesis. It's also a sales guy that's losing ground, just as has happened in many countries of the world. He's losing his grip. There's little way for Microsoft to make a PR coup out of this, which makes me wonder why you'd even bring this up.
IMHO, Microsoft's embrace of 'open' is similar to the other embraces that they've made, called The Black Widow Effect. It goes back to things like SQL Server, OS/2-LAN Manager, and other 'partnered' programs that turned into outrageous divorces with big name organizations.
Microsoft serves Microsoft. Make no mistake about this. If it's not invented here, then it needs to be embraced and squeezed to death.
Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.
I suspect most people developing commercial products get bored with them by the time they're half-way through, but they have to be shipped in order to keep beer and pizza on the table.
Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
Probably on the whole commercial products are better if only because people have money invested in them and they are less likely to get bored with them half way through.
No, not really. We can't browse a large archive of commercial projects that never shipped, so we can't really compare. I am willing to bet that there are more abandoned open source projects, but I don't think it's as skewed as you suggest.
Excellent news (Score:5, Insightful)
This was exactly what latin american free software needed. FSF - LA [fsfla.org] successfully "converted" many Brazilian trade unions to Free Software. Uruguay adopted Linux for OLPC, Argentina was going to adopt Linux but then Ballmer paid a visit to the president and now they use dual-boot. Ubuntu is already more popular than Mac, and Microsoft is the paradigm of "colonialist foreign corporation" that all the leftists despise. (See this article [venezuela.net.ve] (spanish) from Venezuela: "Free Software vs. Privative Software: freedom vs. slavery")
I recall the last time Stallman visited Argentina, he spent more time with politicians than with programmers. I really hope this is our chance. OLPC is like Gramsci: if the kids learn linux there's no way to bring them to Windows once they grow up.
EULA (Score:4, Insightful)
If closed-source is so competent, why does every EULA I ever read disclaim any warranty?
Re:The giant writhes (Score:3, Insightful)
Where "unAmerican" is shorthand for "unLatinAmerican". ;-)
If you ever want to get into an argument with someone from South America, use the word "America" when you mean "the United States".
Mindless MS bashing misses translation, news at 11 (Score:2, Insightful)
It looks as though some mindless MS hating monkey submitted another summary with the actual article being 2 links away from the "source". The sentence finished with:
The executive added: "When convenient, the companies say they are open. They use it for your own benefit. "
I think that's a pretty fair statement. The article headline appears to be badly translated; it looks as though he is saying that the company is incompetent when they are declaring themselves open in an effort to explain why they are not completing in the market (i.e. 'our product may not be better than yours, but its open'). In the interest of accuracy the article linked in the summary also modified the bad translation to make it seem more coherent, the direct translation (from the article TFA links) is:
Rincon also needled competition betting on open standards and free of charge, such as Google. "When you do not can compete, you are declaring open. This masks incompetence. "
I'm sure if they hadn't of edited it the bad translation would of been more obvious.
Suckwear (Score:5, Insightful)
This seems like a good sign to me. If the project isn't interesting or important enough to warrant being finished, abandon it. You can't really do this if you are writing a commercial product. Usually it just ends up sucking, and clogging up the retail channel with cruddy software. Better to die a deserved early death, then waste people's time and money.
Re:not long for his job (Score:1, Insightful)
Reportedly 50% of start-ups fail within a year, 95% within 5 years... so is it fair to estimate that software-based startups are failing at the same rate?
Re:The key word is "compete" (Score:1, Insightful)
To be clear. Open means you can be sure the code integrity meets your requirements. You can make sure there are no known conditions (that you are capable of testing, or observing) that will cause availability concerns. What you cannot presume is there is any confidentiality of your processes or code.
When the code is closed, you cannot make sure it meets your integrity requirements easily you cannot make sure that the code is developed to a level of stability your environment requires and you still cannot presume there is any confidentiality of your processes or code.
If you believe compiled means secure you are not an IT professional.
Re:Open Can Be Last Refuge Of The Incompetant (Score:5, Insightful)
But releasing the shitty software as OSS could potentially solve those problems for you. Bug hunting is easier for sure. You don't have to deal with minor patches really. And if the software is valuable the group can figure it out for you
Re:not long for his job (Score:4, Insightful)
Except you can't say that each start-up represents a project. Some may represent more than one. Back during the .com boom, many represented none. And what about projects that were transferred to a new company as part of the selling off of a start-up's assets?
So, while yes, one could assume a similar failure rate of start-up companies in software as other areas, that failure rate has absolutely fuck-all to do with the current conversation of comparing open source project abandonment with commercial.
Personally, I think there's more open-source abandoned projects by a huge amount, but mostly for one reason: amateur coder starts a project on own time, realizes it goes beyond current skills, abandons, starts new project later. There's absolutely nothing wrong with that, either. It's a great way to learn and push yourself.
My only problem with projects like that is that often it's never clearly established that it's abandoned, or who is in current stewardship, or anything like that, and so these half-done projects remain around, lowering the average quality of OSS, and making it incredibly hard to find something current and/or decent. That's at least one decent thing about commercial software: it's easy to tell who is in charge of a piece of software, and if they're bothering to maintain it any more.
Re:Suckwear (Score:5, Insightful)
But I can't count how many times I have yanked the code for an "abandoned" project to see how they did something, or rolled an entire module into something else. Just because the shiny distributable package is no longer useful doesn't mean the project "alive and kicking" somewhere, in some other form.
THAT is one of the key differences for me, open source can be abandoned but it probably won't ever die, closed can easily slip into the night.
Re:not long for his job (Score:5, Insightful)
by far the largest part are abandoned, half-finished and/or complete garbage.
I have a project on Sourceforge [sourceforge.net] that I haven't updated since March, and the last update before that was in November. It's not abandoned. To the contrary, I use it in an hourly cron job on a production server. The thing is, it works. Unless a user writes to me with a patch or request, I doubt I'll ever have a reason to update it. It does exactly what it's supposed to do, I haven't experienced a bug in several years, and it compiles without warning on every 32- and 64- bit Linux, FreeBSD, and OS X system I have to test it on.
A lot of projects probably have been abandoned, but it's kind of hard to tell. A lack of updates to a project doesn't have to mean to no one cares. It might also mean that it's, well, finished.
Re:not long for his job (Score:3, Insightful)
TCP/IP stack and SMTP server were written with department of defense funding.
The first web server and browser were funded as a project by CERN
The first Kerberos implementation was closed source developed at MIT
The first NFS was written by Sun Microsystems.
Do you have any other examples of innovative OSS projects?
False. Incompleter projects are valuable. (Score:3, Insightful)
An incomplete project also serves as prior art. Many of those incomplete projects have value, if only to show that some patent troll has been anticipated.
Re:not long for his job (Score:4, Insightful)
On that note, let's follow the trail
open source = incompetence
BSD Sockets = open source
Winsock (windows sockets - the TCP/IP stack Microsoft first used in Windows) = BSD Sockets, taken directly from BSD code (Microsoft loves the BSD license)
Winsock = incompetence, ergo Windows networking = the product of incompetence!!
Re:not long for his job (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah this is a totally new concept for people that are used to being on what ever companies upgrade treadmill. I mean in many cases the commercial products been mature for years the only reason THEY come up with updates is they need your money for them to have.
Re:not long for his job (Score:4, Insightful)
Also, there's no conveniently damning repository of abandoned closed source projects - after all, it's not like there's some major website dedicated to hosting them (and how would that even work? "Give us your code but we promise we won't look at it?").
You just plain can't use Sourceforge or freshmeat as an indicator of how often open source projects are abandoned vs closed - using just that data, we have exactly zero information on how often closed source projects are abandoned. I bet you anything that closed source projects get abandoned more often, if only because they're more likely to be started by some PHB than by a dev with fire in his belly.
Re:EULA (Score:2, Insightful)
Because users are often incompetent, and are quick to blame software that is not at fault. Because there's little market for selling software that *does* come with a warranty. Because there's no generally accepted software development methodology that allows software to be inexpensive, reliable, and featureful, all at the same time.
And because they can. FOSS licenses often state that no warranty comes with the software. Surely you aren't implying that they aren't competent?
Re:not long for his job (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:not long for his job (Score:2, Insightful)
Also, if your code is obfuscated and undocumented, it's less likely to live very long, because nobody will want to help you with your shit. There can be some counter-examples, for software nobody else want to do anyway but are necessary, so somebody have to do something about it. Those somebody should be sanctified...
Re:not long for his job (Score:2, Insightful)
bump the version up (Score:4, Insightful)
if the software is as stable as you mention (and I trust you, if you've been flawlessly using it inproduction),
maybe you should consider bumping the version up to 1.00 and post last update explaining what you said above.