Just wanted to share this remarkable presentation on Microsoft’s outlook for open source software. It was delivered by David Chou, an Architect with Microsoft at a public event. And as you would expect, it contains quite a few intruiging touchpoints.
As the preso goes “…. the great contribution that open source developers make in our industry… That is not what you have always heard from us, and I recognize that….”. The author has tried to use his sense of humor to dilute the inherent irony of the moment, as is evinced by slides 2, 3 & 4.
While the debate between open source & proprietary software is endless and likely to evoke highly opinionated arguments on either side, there is little doubt about what David Chou says in his blog post “…. open source software products are created by mostly highly technical people, whereas private source commercial software products often are combined multi-disciplinary efforts that include, for example, marketers, analysts, researchers, usability experts, creative designers, user experience experts, mangers, architects, engineers, etc.”
This factor explains why the usability of most OSS sucks big time. Much as I am myself a die hard OSS supporter, there is little escaping this reality. The ‘Ubuntu – Linux for Humans‘ tagline captures this better than anything else.
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Just for the theatrics, check out this SlashDot article, where Steve Ballmer refers to open source software as a cancer. Some user left behind this link on slideshare.