Good News -They still don’t get it
July 11th, 2004 by Mark
An article describing Bill Gates’ most recent visit to Asia further convinces me that Microsoft still doesn’t understand how Open Source Software works. Well, either they don’t get it or they do get it but think that everyone else hasn’t gotten it yet, which of course many of us have. There are just a few sentences in here that really stand out to me. Gates was quoted as saying, “[Open source] doesn’t guarantee upward compatibility or do that kind of integration [for seamless computing to work].” Now, this is a gem. It is true that the open source community doesn’t guarantee any kind of upward compatibility. But, the trick is that we don’t have to. Memories of Chris Farley yelling about ‘guaranteed pieces of shit’ in Tommy Boy are very fitting here. It doesn’t really matter if there is no one to blame. Upwards compatibility is something that the open source community will need to survive. We don’t have the resources to reinvent our systems en-masse every year. Everything is incremental. Besides, Microsoft hasn’t guaranteed anything to me recently, and if they had, I would be very upset. OpenOffice.org v1.1.2 is better at opening old Microsoft Word files than the most recent Microsoft Word. That’s right. The open source community is making up for Microsoft’s inability to provide upwards compatibility.
The other quote that stands out of this article is, “…when it comes to a guarantee or having someone who stands behind your software, [open source] is typically not something done in a capital approach.” Once again, having someone to blame isn’t the point. When software fails, having someone to sue isn’t going to make your life any better. In reality, you just want really reliable software. And on top of all of that, Red Hat, Novell, HP and others are betting that they can make money by making these kinds of promises and guarantees. It’s only a matter of time here.
