Posted by Ryan on June 25, 2008 at 10:30 am · Filed under people, thought
This letter from David Stutz is back from 2003, but still seems to me to be relevant. I found this via a post by Cory on BoingBoing.
Read on and enjoy
Digging in against open source commoditization won’t work - it would be like digging in against the Internet, which Microsoft tried for a while before getting wise. Any move towards cutting off alternatives by limiting interoperability or integration options would be fraught with danger, since it would enrage customers, accelerate the divergence of the open source platform, and have other undesirable results. Despite this, Microsoft is at risk of following this path, due to the corporate delusion that goes by many names: “better together,” “unified platform,” and “integrated software.” There is false hope in Redmond that these outmoded approaches to software integration will attract and keep international markets, governments, academics, and most importantly, innovators, safely within the Microsoft sphere of influence. But they won’t.
Exciting new networked applications are being written. Time is not standing still. Microsoft must survive and prosper by learning from the open source software movement and by borrowing from and improving its techniques. Open source software is as large and powerful a wave as the Internet was, and is rapidly accreting into a legitimate alternative to Windows. It can and should be harnessed. To avoid dire consequences, Microsoft should favor an approach that tolerates and embraces the diversity of the open source approach, especially when network-based integration is involved. There are many clever and motivated people out there, who have many different reasons to avoid buying directly into a Microsoft proprietary stack. Microsoft must employ diplomacy to woo these accounts; stubborn insistence will be both counterproductive and ineffective. Microsoft cannot prosper during the open source wave as an island, with a defenses built out of litigation and proprietary protocols.
I think it’s taken many years, but it does feel like Microsoft is starting to actually do just this.
I have often wondered why they don’t open up their free software to public as open source or shared source. I’d start with the web technologies Internet Explorer, Messenger, and all the Live services applications.
I managed to convince some of my co-workers to start using Live Mesh as a lightweight collaboration tool. The experience has been interesting so far. We’re all working with one shared folder at the moment. Since the features are pretty limited in the preview that’s about the best we can do.
One of the first things that really surprised me was how limited it is at understanding what’s going on with a document that is being “shared.” For example we’re all working on one Excel document. A real simple list of information. If two or more of us have it open, then who ever saves it last overwrites the version. The history in the News section can be a little delayed at times while things sync so it’s not always obvious that someone else is editing the document.
I was happy to see that the service did notice an issue and gave me a chance to save my version with a different name. But it seemed to take a couple of minutes before I saw the notification in the right hand Mesh bar. I’ll see if I can re-create it so I can get some screen caps.
I can’t wait until there is better application integration. It would have been super nice to let me know that some else had it open still. And better yet notified me in the app that it had changed. Most of the office apps have a merge features built in.
I’d also like to see a way to share areas of a document. For example, in Excel, it would be cool to define a Mesh enabled range of fields and allow for real time sharing of those fields. So that when someone else updates them, I could except the change and see it in my working document. Same could be true in Word. Then it would be like SubEthaEdit only with all the features of Word.
I’d like to talk about the News feature of Mesh next, but I think I’m going to keep that as an entry of it’s own. I have a lot to say about it.
I need to get his new book “Here Comes Everybody” which is about organizing without organizations. You can watch the interview of him discussing the book on the Colbert Report.
So when is it okay to borrow someone’s html code and design? I think there are times when it’s okay to take a snippet here and bit from there. Most likely they found it someplace else too. I guess I could be better at citing the sources when I do this, but sometimes I’m bad about it. Sorry. I would never take a fully functional design, javascript function, CSS library, or anything that was fully completed by someone else with out giving them credit.
Recently my friend Mark Wieman’s business site design and code was lifted as is and used for the Celebrities Against Autism site. This was done without notifying him or crediting him for his work.
Mark’s a freelance interactive producer. He makes a living creating web sites and designing user experiences. Because of this there is a monetary value associated with his work. So to me, taking the design and not paying isn’t all that different from stealing from him.
So he went ahead and contacted them and told them it wasn’t cool. As a result they changed the background color and added a Creative Commons Licenses where Mark’s old copywrite information used to be. I didn’t grab a screen shot of the first rev of the site, but I did grab one after they updated it with the fancy yellow background.
Putting the CC license on the site really takes the cake though. First they take his work and then they licensed it for anyone else to use as well. Well, that is nice of them.
I know non-profits don’t have much in the way of money, but there are plenty of free templates out there for them to have used. What I really wonder is, if the person who is taking credit for the site made any money at all for their work. Even as an employee of the non-profit, it just doesn’t seem right to me.
![nec_lcd[1]](http://www.futile.com/wp-content/uploads/2008/05/nec-lcd1.jpg)
