Microsoft puts the boot into competitor

By RICHARD WOOD

Microsoft seized the moment at an open-source conference for state-sector IT staff to make an all-out assault on its competitor, attacking "weaknesses' in the way open-source software is created.

Competitive strategy manager Brett Roberts told the Government information systems managers' forum in Wellington yesterday that despite the common perception, the open-source community and Microsoft were not at loggerheads.

Proprietary software vendors were at one end of a continuum and non-commercial open-source developers at the other, he said.

All were moving to the middle - Microsoft had "shared source", and open-source vendors included their own proprietary products and commercial services in their offerings.

But Roberts soon went on to attack, asking who owned the planning roadmap for the software and who stood behind it.

Open-source software development could potentially "fork" into differing products, he said.

And Roberts questioned whether the business models selling Linux were sustainable.

He said a statement by an IBM representative at the event "that there will be no IBM distribution of Linux" spoke volumes.

That was a reference to statements by IBM's United States Linux programme director, Mary Ann Fisher, who said IBM would leave the creation of Linux packages to specialist companies such as Red Hat and SuSe.

Fisher said IBM did not want to be an operating system company and Linux was an ideal match for IBM software.

She said open source was fundamental to the development of the next phase of IT involving "grid" or "autonomic" computing.

The approach of having "many eyes" looking at open-source code meant bugs that could cause security issues were fixed quickly, said Fisher.

Roberts questioned that assertion, and asked the audience to prove it.

"I have yet to see that if you double the eyes you will get half the bugs," he said.

"Security is about a process."

He also went on the attack over legal issues, saying people should research the licence agreements used in open source.

Ninety per cent of developers "don't give a rats for the legal stuff", he said, but CIOs and chief executives did.

Roberts said companies should obtain legal advice on their use of open-source software. Everyone had an opinion, "but the ones that matter are the legal ones".

His main message about Microsoft's software was that it worked as an "integrated stack", which was better than Linux and open-source offerings together, and better than a mixture of Microsoft and open source.

"We like to think that we are a pretty good company of plumbers."