Ballmer's Macaca moment
Summary: A deal Novell signed as a lifeline is becoming an anchor and Microsoft, which tried to get some street cred by dealing with Novell, is now about as popular in the open source community as the guys at SCO. All because of a few ill-chosen remarks.
It's beginning to look like Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer's outburst claiming patent rights over Linux may be his Macaca Moment.
You remember Macaca, don't you? S.R. Sidarth (right) was a little-known aide to underdog Senate candidate James Webb in Virginia this summer, assigned to follow and photograph incumbent George Allen.
It's common these days. They're looking for the rival to do something stupid.
Allen did. Sidarth's video led to other revelations and crystallized the nature of opposition to Allen. Webb won, narrowly, and will be part of a new Democratic Senate majority. Salon named Sidarth its Man of the Year.
Flash forward a few months to Ballmer who, after keynoting the PASS conference in Seattle, rashly claimed in the Q&A that anyone who didn't use a Novell Linux might henceforth be in Microsoft's legal crosshairs.
The unscripted remark crystallized opposition to the Novell-Microsoft deal in the open source community. Despite Novell's best efforts, the stain won't wash out. And as with the Allen campaign things just keep ge
tting worse.
As Mary Jo Foley reports Jeremy Allaire, the lead developer of Samba whom Novell hired with great fanfare in April, 2005, has suddenly quit, citing the Microsoft deal and saying it corrupts the company.
A deal Novell signed as a lifeline is becoming an anchor and Microsoft, which tried to get some Linux street cred by dealing with Novell, is now about as popular in the open source community as the guys at SCO.
All because of a few ill-chosen remarks.
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Talkback
allISON
It's worse than usual -- Jeremy reads and posts here.
Rubbish Commentary
I doubt you even know the difference between Jeremy Allaire (created ColdFusion) and Jeremy Allison (works on Samba). Then again, why let a few facts get in the way of a good Microsoft/Novell bashing.
Bit more than a slip of the tounge
As in a 'Fruedian moment'?
Absolutely
paying bills
Your previous article on OSS taking the cost out.
One of the costs of software is salaries of programmers. Taking the cost out and you have programmers who dont get paid. Isnt this precisely thats happening at RedHat too. Didnt Marc Fleury make the comment that RedHat isnt spending the required amount on JBoss software development.
OSS just does not pay programmers. Only the selected few get paid or you have to be at a company that donates software/money to OSS or be in a research project.
To be in this select few you first have to do a lot of software development for free before they even contact you for the possibility of being in the select group.
What OSS is doing is taking software programmers and making them into tech support. I'm a programmer, I like to get paid for programming and not for providing support to the non programmers.
Necessary cynicism
2. What OSS is doing is making a more free-lance approach to the creation of software affordable to more people. This does have a few advantages. Talk to any writer, photographer or other artist though and you will discover there are many many disadvantages in America at least to doing freelance work. The whole system is rotten, as far as the rights of creators versus the rights of distributors. At the same time, one of the things I and presumably everyone else was taught in art school was how to offer support for our creations and that it was our responsibility. So yes. Your last paragraph is dead on.
OSS is not the cause though. It's the world that's changing.
Correction
More generally, the software industry has matured like other industries, and now a few big companies predominate. Good ideas are still worth money in the proprietary marketplace, though the money is more likely to come from selling the idea to a large company than from a product.
And OSS is (in part) a method of development which saves money by not paying the people who do essential work well. A company like Red Hat is then able to sell the software to organizations which do not take full responsibility for elaborate software in use.
Services? Primarily a line item on the bill so that the senstivities of those being exploited for cheap development do not feel their ideas are being violated. If Red Hat eliminated services others could easily replace them, and Red Hat would probably not reduce its prices.
As Red Hat tells investors, it's in the business of providing software.
end of the road for SUN
If SUN continues along its current path things will only getter worse and ultimately hard working engineers will be laid off.
A good company like SUN will cease to exist. Is OSS worth it when you look at it this way, especially when OSS dont recognize others patents and intellectual property and repeatedly keep violating them.
Programming What? Robots?
If serious - it looks like college was a waste of time.
So...
The free market doesn't guarantee anybody a living; that has to be earned.
Oh, and about "providing support for non-programmers", if you spent more time talking to end users, maybe you'd have a better idea of how to meet their wants and needs (resulting in better software). Personally, I think all programmers should do at least a little tech support.
Techies need to learn to listen
100% agreed. As a software developer, project manager, and customer, I find that too often developers don't have a clue what their customer want. In meetings, getting the technical people to [b]listen[/b] to the customer is a nightmare. They spend too much time trying to impress people with how much they already know to actually learn something about the customer's needs and wants.
Sigh, yet another OT rant. (NT)
Gaffes are useful
Sen. Trent Lott's comments about the historic impact of Strom Thurmond's non-election as President in 1948 were interesting (I certainly didn't agree), but his efforts to explain it away revealed enormous political cowardice. Sen. Allen's "macaca" moment revealed him to be an abusive bully (which is a lot worse than being a racist). Ballmer's comments about Linux show him to be much the same, and have demonstrated that MS' seeming efforts to play nice are little more than a public relations ploy.
Sometimes the most useful thing a public figure can do is to talk without a script.
Microsoft's Undisclosed Balance-sheet Liability
,----[ Quote ]
| (Gates:) "And through Windows NT, you can see it throughout the design.
| In a weak sense, it is a form of Unix. There are so many of the
| design decisions that have been influenced by that environment. And
| that's no accident."
|
| In light of the recent saber rattling about Linux and patents, the "There
| are so many of the design decisions that have been influenced by that
| environment" sentence is particularly interesting if these patent
| threats include things that are prior Unix art. "In a weak sense, it
| is a form of Unix" is also telling. I said before that I don't think
| that's the case; I think the patent stuff is talking about things like
| Samba and Mono, but even there the "influenced by that environment"
| could be important in the court of public opinion if not in actual
| law.
`----
http://aplawrence.com/Unixart/gates_quote.html
Microsoft's stolen code and IP infringements
,----[ Quote ]
| Soon, MS-DOS 6.0 was released, including the Microsoft DoubleSpace
| disk compression utility program. Stac successfully sued Microsoft
| for patent infringement regarding the compression algorithm
| used in DoubleSpace...
|
| F. Scott Deaver, owner of Failsafe Designs, says Microsoft is guilty of
| the "outright theft" of his product name and intellectual property
| (IP)...
|
| Alacritech sued Microsoft in Federal District Court on August 11,
| 2004, alleging that Microsoft's existing and future operating
| systems containing the "Chimney" TCP offload architecture uses
| Alacritech's proprietary SLIC Technology architecture...
|
| In April 2001, Intertrust initiated a lawsuit against Microsoft. The
| lawsuit ultimately accused Microsoft of infringing 11 of Intertrust's
| patents and almost 130 of the company's patent claims...
|
| Visto Corporation has filed a legal action against Microsoft for
| misappropriating Visto's intellectual property... "Microsoft has a
| long and well-documented history of acquiring the technology of
| others, branding it as their own, and entering new markets," said
| Mr. Bogosian...
|
| Telecoms company AT&T accused Microsoft of infringing its patent for
| a digital speech coder in its Window software in a lawsuit it filed
| in 2000...
|
| The likelihood of Microsoft having to pay millions of dollars in
| damages for infringing the contested Eolas patent for web browser
| technology increased last week when the US Patent and Trademark
| Office reaffirmed the patent's validity...
|
| A bitter fight has broken out between Symantec and Microsoft.
| Symantec claims that Microsoft stole code from Veritas software...
`----
http://www.openaddict.com/e107_plugins/forum/forum_viewtopic.php?1385
Is Microsoft infringing upon Xerox, Apple and Unix intellectual property?
,----[ Quote ]
| Intellectual Property is a term widely abused in the software industry
| by firms such as Microsoft and SCO using it to scare people into not
| using certain products in favor of their own. This disparaging tactic
| has even been given a name: Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt (FUD). It seemst
| hat anyone nowadays can make bold, unsubstantiated claims of IP
| infringement without actually having any proof simply to hurt another
| products reputation and destroy healthy competition. In this article,
| we will explore what intellectual property is and why every computeru
| ser should care when unreputable companies abuse legal systems in
| order to gain an unfair business advantage.
`----
http://www.openaddict.com/page.php?27
The Apple vs. Microsoft GUI Lawsuit
,----[ Quote ]
| Without warning, Apple filed suit against Microsoft in federal court on
| March 17, 1988 for violating Apple's copyrights on the "visual displays"
| of the Macintosh. (Apple also filed suit against HP for its NewWave
| environment that ran on top of Windows 2.0.)
|
| Apple's suit included 189 contested visual displays that Apple
| believed violated its copyright.
|
| Microsoft countersued, but it failed to stem the bad publicity.
| Windows' development community was terrified that any court ordered
| changes to the software would render their products incompatiblea
| nd make Windows undesirable to consumers. Borland's CEO said itw
| as like "waking up and finding out that your partner might have
| AIDS."
`----
http://lowendmac.com/orchard/06/0825.html
Windows Vista vs. Mac OS X: The Copycat Olympics
,----[ Quote ]
| In Microsoft's defense, though, why wouldn't you want to "borrow" ideas
| from other successful products? Vista, Leopard, and Linux are all
| competing against each other, although in reality, each one is better for
| a different set of users. Apple may go on and on about the similarities
| between Tiger and Vista, but they're there for a reason. When
| innovation fails, then you need to try and learn from the best, and
| that's what Microsoft is doing. However, they're a little late to the
| game, and the competing follow-up usually isn't as good as the original.
`----
http://www.osweekly.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=2300&Itemid=449
All the Myth about Microsoft!
,----[ Quote ]
| * Microsoft was first with graphical user interface
|
| * Microsoft designed BASIC Language
|
| * Microsoft designed visual basic
|
| * Microsoft invented DOS
|
| * Microsoft designed the first spreadsheet - Excel
|
| * Microsoft designed the first word processor
|
| * First with Internet browser
`----
http://196.2.70.231:8080/ict_blog/open-ict-hacks/microsoft-myth
Microsoft Myth link is outdated and broken
[url]http://findsecrets.blogspot.com/2006/11/all-about-microsoft-myth.html[/url]
TY, BTW. :)
What do you expect from a buffoon
Who is Jeremy Allaire?
You've got it backwards
It's telling that you chose a political moment to parallel what's happened with MS and Novell. I think the allusion to politics is very apt. A big part of what I dislike about the OSS community in general is its insistence on a certain ideology (like religious adherence to the GPL, continual carping about copyright and patent issues, etc.), a McCarthyite attitude towards those who don't drink the Kool Aid, and an insistence on defining itself in opposition to MS. Thankfully not all OSS projects define themselves in this way. They're just focused on building and enhancing their project. I find those waters nicer to swim in.
The Linux community has once again chosen an enemy, because Novell wouldn't toe the party line with them. Is this constructive behavior? Is it going to get them anywhere? Do they care?
What's happened with MS and Novell, and Oracle buying up OSS projects is a part of the process of OSS going mainstream in the business community. What some don't like is in order for this to happen the projects have to be taken out of the hands of the true believers and placed in the hands of producers who have to meet deadlines, and make a profit. It's a matter of priorities. It doesn't mean the death of open source. It's the maturity of some projects. Even with projects that get bought, there are earlier versions of those projects that remain open source. They can be forked. New open source projects can be started by whoever wants to.
We will see how Novell fares without the support of the community ...