How the OLPC's Rose Got its Canker

This blog post explains in painful detail how OLPC was "turned" by Microsoft - and hence why I have personally given up on the project:

As part of a small personal project, I've been reading through the court exhibits presented in Comes V Microsoft. One of those exhibits is a chain of internal Microsoft emails discussing how to get Windows XP on the OLPC.

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Finally, in case you think I've failed to mention it: there is never any talk of "the best technology" or "educating or empowering children" or "customers/governments want Windows" or any such merit-based discussion. Outside of a brief mention of Academic Software offerings - literally the very last thing in the recap and suggested by the OLPC faction - the entire discussion revolves around what benefits Microsoft, what might hurt Google, and exploiting inside information they have on the OLPC project and OLPC people.

Read it and weep.

Microsoft, Its Rose and the Canker

Now here's an interesting thing:

Developing the Future is an annual report examining the impact of the software development industry on the UK economy, from both a local and global perspective. The report is a collaborative work with partners from the IT industry and academia. By exploring emerging trends, the report stimulates debate between stakeholders and calls for positive action to support the UK software industry.

It's interesting because:

The second edition of Developing the Future not only comprises original research commissioned by Microsoft on these fascinating themes, it also includes independent articles from luminaries such as Will Hutton, outlining unique perspectives on the massive change now taking place in Britain.

You'd pretty much expect this to be standard Microsoft propaganda, along the lines of its risible TCO "studies"; but you'd be wrong. Developing the Future is an extremely interesting look at major issues affecting UK software development in the near-future. It is one of the best-presented digital documents I have seen in a while, with excellent photography, and a nice clean design.

The contents aren't bad either: for the most part, the writing is neutral and fair. Only at one point is it clear that there is a canker at the heart of this rose, when the section on innovation starts wittering on about that mythical beast of "intellectual property", and comes out with this extraordinary self-evident truth:

The lack of intellectual property protection for algorithms, software or enhanced business processes are barriers to innovation.

Creating intellectual monopolies in something as fundamental as algorithms is about as sensible as handing out government monopolies on air and water. It's sad to see an otherwise forward-looking document stuck so firmly in the past, instead of promoting innovation and prosperity in the "Knowledge Economy" through the liberation of its wondrous, non-rivalrous, raw stuff: ideas.

Microsoft and Open Source: Two Tales

One is about Microsoft joining with SugarCRM, which produces open source customer relation management software, "to enhance interoperability between their respective Windows Server and SugarCRM products." A key point of this "technical collaboration" is that SugarCRM becomes "the first commercial open source application vendor to adopt the Microsoft Community License."

The latter is an interesting beast. It forms one of several Shared Source Licenses - "Shared Source" being Microsoft's attempt to counter the good vibes and reap some of the proven benefits enjoyed by open source's development methodology. Despite its name hinting otherwise, the Microsoft Community License is not included in the official list of open source licences.

One of the most interesting documents to come out of the Shared Source initiative is called "Microsoft and Open Source". What it presents is Microsoft's public analysis of free software; particularly fascinating is the wedge that it attempts to drive between what it calls "commercial and non-commercial segments". The key paragraph is as follows:

A common misperception about software developed under the open source model is that a loosely-coupled group of distributed developers is creating the software being adopted by business. Although this is true for some smaller projects, the reality is that professional corporate teams or highly structured not-for-profit organizations are driving the production, testing, distribution, and support of the majority of the key OSS technologies.

What Microsoft's document fails to note is that those "professional corporate teams" and "highly structured not-for-profit organizations" are largely filled with hackers: the fact that they are in some cases receiving good salaries instead of the usual love and glory is neither here nor there. The hacker spirit is not tamed just because it wears a corporate hat (just ask Alan Cox).

What is interesting about this is that it shows Microsoft attempting to co-opt the bulk of open source as part of the commercial world, implicitly arguing that it is the commercialism, not the open sourceness that really counts when it comes to great coding. Microsoft, needless to say, has commercialism in abundance, and so - the fallacious syllogism implies - it must be knocking out some damn fine code.

More generally, Microsoft's continuing efforts to cozy up to open source - as with the SugarCRM announcement - are really just further attempts to blur the distinction between the two, to imply that it's six of one and half a dozen of the other, and so to diminish the attractive exoticism of what has hitherto been perceived as a radically different approach.

Which brings us to the second tale.

Daniel Robbins may not be the best-known name in the free software world, but his creation, the Gentoo GNU/Linux distribution, possesses an undeniable popularity - and a certain cachet, given its reputation as being not for the faint-hearted. So when he announced that he was joining Microsoft's new Linux and Open Source Lab in order to help the company "understand open source", there was a sharp intake of collective breath around the free software world.

The news that Robbins is now leaving Microsoft, less than a year after he joined, is therefore likely to produce some similarly audible sighs of relief from that community. Although it is not entirely clear what happened, it is not hard to guess that Microsoft's desire to understand open source was not with a view to entering upon a harmonious relationship between equals.

In other words, the two tales are but one: that Microsoft is applying its considerable corporate intelligence to the conundrum of open source - hitting it, probing it, squeezing it, stroking it, modelling it, copying it, engaging with it, even - to find out where are its edges, what it's made of, how it works; and how it might be defeated.

For all the sweet talk in Microsoft's open source document mentioned above, no one should be in any doubt about the company's real objectives in all this. Its view that open source is some crazy, anti-capitalist, crypto-communistic canker, though not expressed quite so vehemently in public, is surely just as deeply held in private by its core managers (though not necessarily but its coders) as it ever was. Everything else is just a story for the children.