On Thu, 12 Aug 2004, Jan Schmidt wrote:
> I was really hoping for a more meaningful conversation than an MS sales > pitch, and I think we got some of that by way of questions from the > floor, which was good. > > Wandered over Shared Source, monopolies, standards of behaviour for > market dominating companies, commercialisation of Open Source, > interoperability and other stuff in the course of the dialogue. Somebody said that Martin Gregory is a good speaker, and that is certainly true. He is across his subject and handles himself well. We weren't an entirely sympathetic audience. It was clear that Martin was singing from the corporate hymnbook. These things came through to me. Microsoft are not about to relinquish the power their monopoly position gives them, notwithstanding that they perceive a slight public relations problem right at the moment. They clearly misunderstood open source, but they are now learning their lesson, although I also got the feeling that they don't yet understand the concept "free speech, free beer". Martin kept talking about Redhat's coorporate strategy as if it proved that RH and Microsoft are now in the same camp. It reminded me of bygone eras when certain Americans would simply incant the word "communist". He incanted the words "shareholder" and "Redhat" as if it proved that Redhat was deserting the OSS fold. The next 2-3 years will be interesting. We can expect aggressive legal action some time in the future regarding IP and patent, including protection of file formats and reverse engineering. (my opinion) It's pretty obvious that Microsoft's response to the problem of interoperability is: "if everyone used Microsoft the problem wouldn't exist". My take is that the only the thing that will stop them is anti-trust action. Ha. The major problem with Microsoft is that it's a monopoly. Last night tended to re-inforce that idea to me. David. -- SLUG - Sydney Linux User's Group Mailing List - http://slug.org.au/ Subscription info and FAQs: http://slug.org.au/faq/mailinglists.html
