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."
Re:Fedora 13 (Score:3, Interesting)
Installed Ubuntu Netbook Edition and my wired and wireless connections worked out of the box. No he doesn't have a point.
Re:Open after all (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:not long for his job (Score:2, Interesting)
My guess is that it shows the level of frustration Microsoft is having with OSS.
OSS is never on the edge of innovation. In fact, it is almost universally behind the times. However, it forces the industry to innovate to survive, which is great for technology as a whole.
Can you give some examples? (Score:1, Interesting)
>I'm under no illusion that it's often not as good as paid, closed software that does the same thing.
As a linux user for 13 years, I'm really curious to know what closed software do you use that does the same thing as open source software, but does it better? I'm trying to get from where you're coming from. I don't use Free(dom) software just because it's $0, I use it because it doesn't bite me on the ass like proprietary software has (Nvidia's binary blobs being my #1 suspect. I hate them for the kernel panics they caused me. I gave up on OpenGL for 3 years until Nouveau was good enough that I could use it with the remaining Nvidia cards I have left. I had 5 nvidia cards. Now I'm down to 3 machines with Nvidia cards, and when each dies, I'll switch them over to AMD.)
It's been my experience that with proprietary products I had flakey binary products (Nvidia) that chained me to a particular linux kernel or glibc (wordperfect 8). I hate the eula crap that treats me like criminal scum (you may not use this product. please type in this random 40 digit crap to activate. Please install our spyware, etc.).
So what I would like to know is what kind of proprietary software have you used that is either barely better (?) or does something so much better that you're willing to put up with the headaches of eulas/flakey behavior/etc.?
Re:not long for his job (Score:4, Interesting)
"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."
You mean like how Outlook 2003 had half-assed, crippled IMAP support that languished for 4 years until Outlook 2007 came out? Which still left out a few important details that were kinda addressed in Outlook 2010? And you got to pay $$$ for each incremental improvement?
I almost like Outlook 2010 but it took them 7 freakin' years to get IMAP right enough not to suck. Actually, it took MORE than 7 years. I'm pretty sure it was part of LookOut 97.
The whole idea that money must be involved to create a quality product really grinds my gears. Back when OpenOffice hit 2.0, one of our mucky-mucks took up the challenge to do all of his office tasks with OO. Several months later, he declared that he hadn't touched an Office product once, the learning curve wasn't bad, and he was able to do everything he needed with OO and several things that Office couldn't do. So we're sticking with M$ Office because it must be better because we pay for it. Sigh. Before I could even open my mouth, he came right out and said that there was no rational basis for the decision. Free software just doesn't feel right.
That attitude is starting to change but it's sooooo sssssllllloooooowwwww in an industry that moves so fast.
Re:Fedora 13 (Score:3, Interesting)
Or at the very least a rogue driver of some sort (doesn't have to be attached to any hardware).
Vista was pretty rough on vendors, and broke a lot of drivers that used to work, which is not cool in my mind. 7 is much, much better about this, and I've never experienced a problem in windows like the one I had trying to get audio to work in two separate media packages that decided they each wanted to use their own scheme. Ugh. I'll take a bluescreen once every six months over that any day.
Re:Lost in (Score:5, Interesting)
It sounds like he is being taken out of context.
For example, I've noticed a common theme lately for old, entrenched products. If they start to fall behind and their market share starts to dip too low, they open source their code. This generates lots of good press and a whole new army of free worker bees improving your product. The down side, of course, is you lose complete control, but if you've been screwing it up this whole time that might not be a bad thing.
Probably the biggest example of this is Mozilla, which came as a direct result of the disaster that was Netscape's "upgrade" (they took a fantastic product and killed it with incompetence).
So he's not necessarily saying open source = incompetent, what he is saying is that often the reason companies open source their code is as a way to mask their own incompetence (i.e. not the open source community's incompetence).
It seems plausible.
Re:not long for his job (Score:3, Interesting)
He was probably not refering to anything in particular, just making some FUD.
Re:not long for his job (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:not long for his job (Score:3, Interesting)
Heh! Thanks. The "happily ever after" part is that my company's actively working to replace the aging FoxPro project with a PostgreSQL-native version, so the plan is for my work to be obsolete in the near(-ish) future.
The nice part is the feedback I've gotten from users who want to use it for the same reason I do: to migrate their data out of an old proprietary app into a modern database. Almost every version I've released has been due to someone who wrote to me because they had some new variant of Xbase table I hadn't seen yet, so I tweaked the program to add support for their data. The requests have tapered off over the last year or so, either because no one uses the program anymore, or because it works for the majority of users and they don't need to ask for help now.