Take it easy, Microsoft, will ya?
June 11, 2007 – 20:23 | fisheye, microsoftI have many friends over at Microsoft working on various great products this company has built, so I don’t want this post to sound like average Microsoft bashing. But it is just sad to see Microsoft decided to go after Jamie Cansdale for something he did that actually benefits Microsoft by adding a critical piece to the development stack. Whether it is well within Microsoft’s rights to take these legal actions against Jamie Cansdale, or whether the EULA in question is overly vague, is simply beside the point. The point here is Microsoft, or at least its bureaucratic corporate arm, has once again shown its almost complete disregard of the goodwill of the development community - even its own development community. I know “prosecutorial discretion” as a legal term doesn’t really apply here, but still, perhaps Microsoft could use some of that here, too?
It is when reading news like this that I feel very grateful for being part of the Java community, where openness is the spirit, and where I don’t have to lose sleep over worrying being hauled into a court by an army of corporate lawyers.
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One Response to “Take it easy, Microsoft, will ya?”
I think that many Microsofties are genuinely confused about how to handle the open-source community, much as they were confused about how to handle that Internet thing back in the mid-90’s. Microsoft is still dealing blow-after-blow to the .NET open-source communities under the belief that they, as a company, need to provide a unified, supported product to their customer. Sun has a history of building the community, letting competing ideas flourish and then standardizing them (as well as buying out smaller innovative companies with many of those ideas). Of course, Sun made the mistake - one that they are now correcting - to think that these applications should be used to drive hardware sales; then along comes IBM with their successful service and support model. Each of these companies has a different take on the value of open-source to their business model; it’s unfortunate that many at Microsoft feel that open-source has no (positive) economic value at all.
By Shane Isbell on Jun 11, 2007