How To Make A Damp Squib Out Of A
Smoke Grenade? Ask Mr.
Smith!
Brad Smith from Microsoft is clever. Last week he announced the disclosing under license of the Windows server source code.
The company claimed in a press
release they would go
"beyond EU decision". In fact, he was trying to kill two birds
with one stone: Firstly he wanted the world to believe Microsoft were
complying with the European Commission. Secondly he pointed quite a
big gun towards our community.
But EU Competition Commissioner
Neelie Kroes wasn't taken in by him: Reuters quote her as saying that
the Commission never
requested their source code.
In a different article Reuters
reported
that this offer would help proprietary
software competitors but not the Free Software community. Huh?? Not
the Free Software community? So which competitor is Mr. Smith
speaking about? Maybe he should go and talk to his marketing
department to find out that the samba
project is the only competitor left in
the desktop/server-market. And samba is Free Software, Mr. Smith! But
what if the marketing department is still seeing lots of proprietary
competitors? Maybe they feel surrounded by lots of competitors who do
not exist at all? Microsoft - a global giant, suffering from a
persecution complex? Anyway: What do we learn from the lesson Mr
Smith has taught us? Paraphrasing: Anybody may benefit from our
source code - provided that they are not our competitor!
So what if a samba developer writes
code in the future? Microsoft most likely will bombard him with its
armies of lawyers for copyright infringement (You know: Rumors say
MS has supported SCO with 50 Million US$
- so you really can expect them to run this "FUD business" properly).
And - for the sake of
completeness - there still seems to be one (in comparison to their
persecution complex of course minor) problem left: Let's say you are
a French pupil at school and want to learn English - what do you need
to learn? The classroom answers of your neighbour or grammar and
vocabulary books? Of course, it's the latter!
To me it looks like the
morphing of Microsoft's smoke grenade into a damp squib!! Anybody
here to make film on that?
Reports in English:
Trade
Arabia, Local
News Leader, Computer
Business Review Online,
Out-Law.com,
Bloomberg,
TECHWORLD,
Leading
The Charge, Stuff,
Wired,
Metro,
The
Scotsman, Herald
News Daily, Computerworld,
International
Herald Tribune, New
York Times[1] + [2],
Wallstreet
Journal Europe, The
Guardian, ZD
Net UK,
Reports in Flemish:
Planet
Reports in French:
Reuters,
VNUnet.fr,
Challenges.fr,
La
Tribune, Liberation.fr,
Capital.fr,
Le
Nouvel Observateur,
Boursorama,
Le
Devoir.com, Tageblatt,
Reports in German:
Computerpartner,
PC
Magazin, Golem.de,
die
tageszeitung,
de.internet.com,
inside-it.ch,
InfoWeekOnlineNEWS,
Die Welt,
pressetext.at,
Handelsblatt,
Heise.de,
Reports in Italian:
Unimondo,
Distretto
PMI
