How Microsoft Uses Open Against Open

To my shame, Peter Murray-Rust put up a reply to my post below in just a few hours, where it had taken me days to answer his original posting. So with this reply to his reply, I'm trying to do better.

Peter includes this disclaimer:

Before diving in I should get a potential conflict of interest out of the way. We are about to receive funding from Microsoft (for the OREChem project (see post on Chemistry Repositories). This does not buy an artificial silence on commenting on Microsoft’s practice, any more than if I accept a grant from JISC or EPSRC I will refrain from speaking my mind. Nor do I have to love their products. I currently hate Vista. However I need an MS OS on my machine because it makes it easier to use tools such as LiveMeeting (a system for sharing desktops). I’ve used LiveMeeting once and I liked it. OK, Joe did the driving because he knows his way round better than me, but I can learn it. Not everything MS does is bad and not everything it does is good.

Now, I have not the slightest doubt about Peter's future independence, but I do think it's an interesting comment.

It shows that even such a key defender of openness as Peter finds he "needs an MS OS on my machine because it makes it easier to use tools such as LiveMeeting (a system for sharing desktops)". I presume that Microsoft's money comes without strings, but inevitably its availability will make buying its own software easier. Where a cash-strapped project would cast an interested eye over free alternatives, and be willing to pay the price of grappling with new software, those with enough funding - from Microsoft or elsewhere - may well just opt for the familiar.

This is doubtless happening all over the place in science, which means that many simply forget that there are alternatives to Microsoft's products. Instead - quite understandably - they concentrate on the science. But what this implies is that however open that science may be, however much it pushes forward open access and open data, say, its roots are likely remain in the arid soil of closed source, and that Microsoft's money has the effect of co-opting supporters of these other kinds of openness in its own battle against the foundational openness of free software.