April 14th, 2005
Apple makes a stronger proprietary argument
Today I matched the latest arguments on the blog of Microsoft’s Jason Matusow against concerns expressed in the latest Gartner survey on open source, reported by ZDNet DataPoint.
They match up pretty well.
- Fragmentation caused by multiple distributions?? Large IT shops want to decrease complexity, manage risk, and reduce cost, says Matusow.
- Higher support costs? Linus? Law ? many eyes make all bugs shallow…has turned out to be more fantasy than fact,?says?Matusow.
- Multiple licenses becoming difficult to manage??"Commercial requirements of customers are driving them to place non-open terms in their support contracts," says?Matusow.
- Frequent releases creating potential incompability?? Many of the startups I spoke with at the show have proprietary software built to help customers be more successful with OSS technologies,?says Matusow.
- Dependency issues, potential patent or copyright problems?? Matusow didn’t mention it this time, but he has done so before.
The struggle between Microsoft and open source remains a political struggle. Advocates poke holes in one anothers’ arguments. Customers vote with their wallets.
Why don’t we hear anything from Apple on any of this, as when it’s pushing the new Tiger release of OS X? The easy answer is they’re not in the enterprise space. Still, Apple uses lawyers to protect code and trade secrets, just like Microsoft. They just don’t pay the same political price.
So today’s question. Might Microsoft have a better chance of success if they acted in the same way as Apple? Let’s discuss it in TalkBack.
Dana Blankenhorn has been a business journalist for 30 years, a tech freelancer since 1983. You can follow Dana on Twitter. See his full profile and disclosure of his industry affiliations.
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