💾 Archived View for gmi.noulin.net › mobileNews › 321.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 21:39:14. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content

-=-=-=-=-=-=-

Pay Microsoft for what?

2007-10-09 17:33:05

Pay you for what?

(Score:5, Insightful)

by mysticgoat (582871) on Tuesday October 09, @09:53AM (#20910749)

(Last Journal: Wednesday September 26, @10:43PM)

I use Linux, in part because I didn't want to give you any money anymore, so

could you please explain to me why you think I owe you money?

This quote from Ballmer [groklaw.net] that is posted on Groklaw under the

section "[Update 2]", appears to be the Microsoft explanation:

Because our battle is not sort of business model to business model. Our battle

is product to product, Windows versus Linux, Office versus OpenOffice.

But he doesn't stop there. He immediately continues by directly contradicting

himself, and talking about the differences in the FOSS and Microsoft business

models:

The only other thing I would say that is probably germane is, we spend a lot of

money, the rest of the commercial industry spends a lot of money on R & D.

We've spent a lot of money licensing patents, when people come to us and say,

"Hey, this commercial piece of software violates our patent, our intellectual

propery, we'll either get a court judgment or we'll pay a big check. And we are

going to -- I think it is important that the Open Source products also have an

obligation to participate in the same way in the intellectual property regime.

In other words, FOSS should be required to use the same wastefully expensive

business model that Microsoft uses.

I don't think he gets FOSS. I am beginning to wonder if his commitment to the

traditional corporate culture of 1982 is so great that he truly cannot see that

FOSS is based on an entirely different cultural platform. FOSS is a kind of

gift economy where those involved are saying "Hey, since it doesn't cost me to

share what I'm doing, I'll gladly share it with everyone, and I expect others

to give something back to all of us, too." Where traditional capitalist

cultures like Ballmer's see product improvement as a way of getting a bigger

slice of the pie, FOSS focuses on making the entire pie bigger so everyone gets

a larger slice.

To those who are less culturally advanced, the clear successes of FOSS must

seem to be magic. Apache, Blender, Firefox, and the others must all seem to

have been created out of empty aether, and to be without any solid foundations.

Clark's observation about advanced technology seemingly also applies to

business models: if they are significantly advanced, their mechanisms of

operation will seem to be magic to the businessmen of twenty-five years ago who

haven't bothered to keep up.

Posted: 2007770@835.17

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

stranger

Stage three

(Score:5, Insightful)

by Dexter77 (442723) on Tuesday October 09, @08:48AM (#20910019)

"First they ignore you,

then they laugh at you,

then they fight you,

then you win." - Mahatma Gandhi

I see we're on stage three now.