Kjellquist Blog

Microsoft has exercised its corproate muscle again. This time it has demonstrated very convincingly how the open source software movement threatens them. It seems that Microsoft is becoming particularly sensitive to the appeal open source for third world countries looking for alternatives to MS licenses. Obviously, this MS issue relates to the larger issue of intellectual property rights and their enforcement in developing countries.

The UN document is the Vienna Conclusions. It discusses issues around IT and creativity. The original draft of the document discussed how the free software model is changing the way people do business.
The Free Software Foundation Europe states that the original document stated “Increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital works, as they can be freely distributed at almost no cost, but by offering services on top of them. The success of the free software model is one example,”.

The final version of the document surprisingly (well maybe not given MS comments) contains no reference to free software. It states “Increasingly, revenue is generated by offering services on top of contents,”.

Thomas Lutz, the manager of public affairs at Microsoft Austria, asked for this section to be deleted as “it contains only a one-sided perspective on the ICT industry.”
“The rationale for this is, that the aim of free software is not to enable a healthy business on software but rather to make it even impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product,” he added.

I guess Lutz hasn’t heard of Redhat, or IBM for that matter. Remember the heart of IBM’s Websphere is the Apache server!

Lutz’ comments were posted on a conference blog, but Georg Greve, the president of FSFE, who was involved in drafting that section of the document, claims that no-one on his panel was aware of the blog until last week.

Greve criticised Lutz’ comments as “Microsoft propaganda”.
“This is so obviously stupid and nonsensical that it seems pointless to comment on it: Just another monopolist trying to uphold their monopoly by preventing freedom of markets – which is what Free Software really aims at,” he said, on his blog.

But on Friday Lutz denied that the panel was unaware of these changes and confirmed that his blog postings are accurate.
“The Vienna Conclusions document was created through a democratic feedback process as requested by the committee and stated on the committee blog. Each and every participant of the conference was invited to publish contributions, share feedback and offer changes which facilitated discussion and an open exchange of positions,” he told ZDNet UK. “All of our change requests were approved by the committee.”

This kind of comment reminds me of the old EF Hutton tv ad that ended with “When EF Hutton speaks……..”. Another view; when an armed robber enters a store (even if initially invited before their intentions are known) and “requests” the money, do you argue? In a degree of fairness to MS their size and power does present a problem for them. Even if their intentions are good, their position automatically inspires suspicion. Clearly the only alternative for MS is to enlist the support of other corporations such as IBM or Sun Microsystems that have embraced (or at least learned to live with) the open source movement. Unfortunely, this doesn’t seem to be the case with the Vienna Conclusions.

This is not the only change to the document that Microsoft brought about. In a later section of the same document, Lutz asked that a reference to the open source operating system Linux be removed as “this is only one particular – anti-commercial – specificity of the open source landscape.”

I yesterday I saw that Firefox 1.5 (currently at about 11% of the browser market vs IE’s 80+%) is due for formal release on Nov 29 and Mozilla Foundation is readying a signficant media blitz. I guess we should standby for even more broadsides from the MS corporate machine. BTW, PC Magazine recently called Firefox
The best browser gets even better with improved tab controls, reworked user preferences, a more robust extensions system, faster page loading and better security.