Dave sent this to attendees of the July 24th Open Source Summit at the O'Reilly Open Source Conference in San Diego. FSB'ers might want to read it as well. -russ Dave Winer writes: > Good morning! > > Yesterday I got an email from Brian Behlendorf, CTO at Collabnet and > president of the Apache Foundation, in response to a DaveNet piece [1] that > talked briefly about the open source summit last Tuesday. > > In that piece I said "We can work with Microsoft. Looking back over the last > few years, most of the time our collaboration has been open, productive and > fair. They listened, we did too, and we developed some new interesting > software. There is a precedent for fair competition. Let's make the most of > that." > > Brian said: "I agree we can work with Microsoft, but sometimes they put > terms on the relationships that just make that impossible. I was glad I was > about to get Mundie to state "of course!" when I asked if they had patents > they planned to enforce against independent implementors of .Net and > Hailstorm. It's amazing how perfectly they craft their offering such > that those who raise the more serious issues about them came off sounding > like paranoid lunatics, and when the predictions of those "lunatics" come > true (as in, "MS will use their monopoly on the desktop to create a new > monopoly on the Internet") people will just write it off with a "who could > have known? they probably earned it anyways" set of comments. While that > debate on Thursday's panel (if you saw it, if not, there's video on > technetcast.ddj.com) made MS come out looking more reasonable than the open > source folks, I think people are even more aware now of some of the deep > issues their proposed new architectures present." > > That prompted me to watch the video [2] of the debate from last Thursday in > San Diego. > > Now I've been in the "ecosystem" defined by Microsoft and the companies they > subsumed for over 20 years, and I've never seen them be this bold, nor stoop > to such a low level. The patent threat that Behlendorf mentions was > confirmed by Mundie and Stutz. It's changing my thinking about the road > ahead. It's going to be a lot rougher than I thought. > > My only advice is to use your mind, stay centered on what you believe and > state it clearly. There is no consistency to what Microsoft says. There's no > point, imho, in arguing with them, or trying to show them anything. On one > hand they complain about interdiction by government, say they depend on > developers, and stand for innovation; all while they're releasing bits of > source code under very restrictive terms, and openly saying that they will > use patents to limit competition. They're smart enough to know that they're > being inconsistent, so any debate with them isn't going to get them to say > "Oh I see, we made a mistake, we'll fix it." That's not what this is about. > > On Tuesday at the summit I said that Microsoft will likely be a victim of > patents, not an abuser of patents. I must retract that now, I see something > has changed, for the worse. I do not recommend working with Microsoft until > their position on patents changes. > > Dave > > [1] http://davenet.userland.com/2001/07/27/a10CabRideApart > [2] http://technetcast.ddj.com/tnc_play_stream.html?stream_id=592 > > >