OSNews

I don't know why people think there's a whole load of controversy over this statement from an employee at Microsoft who is supposed to go out and understand what open source is for them. This is exactly the same view of open source software that Microsoft has had for eight or nine years, ever since it shockingly appeared on their radar.

The fact is, even after all this time and many attempts to understand it, Microsoft just has a fundamental and totally unfixable philosophy and comprehension problem of open source software and how it is developed.

The problem for Microsoft is the same one I've described before. They are absolutely, so desperate it's unreal, to get the message over to people that the vast majority of people using open source software are paying money for it. This is not only because it validates their own business model, but they are trying to reassure themselves of something that pretty much terrifies them really.

That is, if an OEM, business or organisation can, off their own bat, download a CD ISO of an operating system, burn it and install it on all their PCs and they find out that it is good enough - there are applications, they can develop software for it with APIs and documentation that work, there is a growing pool of third-party software they can download and buy....... If that really and truly were to be the case then it would blow Microsoft's own cash cows of Office and especially Windows totally out of the water and the house of cards things like Visual Studio and Windows Server are built on. The concept of client/server licenses would be gone, as would Client Access Licenses which hold back people from using Terminal Services, you could mount a drive with your applications on and run them from there - it would all be accepted.

Don't fool yourselves. Those comments from Bill Hilf are about Microsoft reassuring their own paranoia rather than sending out a message to anyone.