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Simon Phipps's personal commentary

Scoring Points

Dare Obasanjo (a Microsoft employee, who I doubt is trying to score points and who I have actually met despite the appearance otherwise) tries to change the subject into competitive rivalry in response to my posting below, which is admittedly robust (I'm in that sort of mood after being abused by Rod Smith lately...) Dare says:

When Microsoft folks weren't blogging and directly interacting with our developer community people railed because they felt the company was aloof and distant from its developers. Now we try to participate more and it is a sign that “it's a closed-source dictatorship - no amount of pushing up-hill will fix that”. I guess you can't win them all. :)  

The appearance of Microsoft employees commenting in public is laudable and refreshing and working wonders for their employer. But it doesn't change the fact that the biggest problem Microsoft has is that it thinks all the smart people work for it, to paraphrase Bill Joy - all the technology and architecture decisions are made behind closed doors and the community gets no vote. The appearance of listening is all well and good, but the fact that anything could change unaccountably at any time in the technology will get less and less acceptable as the connected society takes hold.

That's why I think open source is at its heart a societal trend and not a free-stuff or an anti-Microsoft movement, which ultimately we all must face or fail. It's why I think at its heart the JCP has got it right and is getting better all the time. And it's why I continue to be bemused by the automatic hostility Java faces from the open source community.

posted at 8:03 PM (UK) | |