Skepticism about Microsoft’s claim it will play nice with others
Microsoft is not exactly known for playing well with others, so when it made a big ballyhoo about how it’s going to support interoperability with open source programs, there were a lot of people not buying it. APC comments:
Microsoft’s newfound enthusiasm for interoperability adds up to largely hot air and a poorly-concealed upgrade pitch, and as such doesn’t represent any sort of victory for the open source community.
Mary Jo Foley doesn’t believe it either. She says:
Microsoft’s “significant†announcement on February 21 turns out to be not so significant at all. Microsoft is promising — for the umpteenth time — that it will share all the protocols and programming interfaces needed to allow interoperability between its products and others.
Foley continues:
I believe there are individuals at Microsoft who understand that interoperability is important to customers. But until Microsoft shows a real change in its behaviors around interoperability, I see pledges like these as little more than the same-old rhetoric.
Ars Technica notes that the EU (which Microsoft is trying to influence) is pretty skeptical and notes:
In case you needed a reminder of why people don’t trust Microsoft, the SCO watchers over at Groklaw took a break from those duties this week to post a 1997 internal Microsoft memo on technology evangelism (it surfaced as part of a court case). That memo (PDF), which started with the heading “Evangelism is War,” said in its first paragraph that “every line of code that is written to our standards is a small victory; every line of code that is written to any other standard, is a small defeat.” The document goes on to discuss how to buy off analysts, stack conference panels, and secure “independent” reports that favor your position.
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