By Michael Hall,
Editor
Somewhere in the UK, yesterday, Steve Ballmer opened his mouth
and demonstrated, once again, that Microsoft doesn’t much like open
source software and thinks Europe ought not be embracing it. In
keeping with similar mouth-noises the man and his coworkers at
Microsoft have made of late, he even went so far as to say Free
Software advocates are “anti-business.” Once again, nothing
surprising here.
Microsoft has done an awfully good job, lately, of grabbing
headlines and attention with very little effort. A four paragraph
item was submitted several times over by Linux Today readers eager
to get the word out that Steve Ballmer’s got, um, “issues” with
open source software. Craig Mundie earned his company a place at an
O’Reilly convention for the effort of a speaking appearance in New
York and a single web page on Microsoft’s site.
I wrote Richard Stallman a few days ago to see if I could get a
copy of the questions Microsoft folk handed out to reporters at his
New York University speech last week. The New York Times had
reported on the questions, readers wanted to see them. In passing,
I mentioned to him that the MS “Shared Source” site had posted a
new list of naked assertions with question marks at the end, and I
wondered if they might not be the same questions Microsoft had
asked reporters to tell…er… “ask” him. I mentioned that I
planned to link to them at some point.
No interaction I’ve ever had with RMS has involved much verbiage
on his part, so I shouldn’t have been surprised when his response
to that aside was simply:
“Why link to hostile propaganda full of falsehoods?”
Well… good question, and I’m of two minds about it.
On the one hand, golly, there are some serious page views and
eyeballs to be harvested in tossing out the latest Microsoft
outrage like so much red meat. It’s Pavlovian in its
predictability. In fact, an informal tally I just made showed 50%
of the past week’s top stories on Linux Today being specifically
Microsoft-related, comprising over half of the (unofficial) page
views the top ten stories brought in.
It’s easy to say “we provide a community service by linking to
this.” Indeed, the moral high ground is there for the grabbing: we
provide a rallying point in the battle to promote Linux… just
being good advocates… provide people with a place to gather and
strategize.
That reads well, but it does little to dispel the image that
invariably comes to mind when I find a new bit of Microsoft
flamebait:
I see a pair of mannequins fashioned to look like Ballmer and
Gates tossed into a wrestling ring while a gaggle of becaped
musclemen and assorted leather-bedecked Baron Von Raschke and Mil
Mascaras clones with penguins tattooed on their chests leap off the
top turnbuckle and take turns smashing the mannequins with chairs.
The mannequins, of course, have the same contented smiles one
expects the real Mr’s. Gates and Ballmer to have as they watch the
spectacle from the box seats. It helps my imagination that I went
to an actual wrestling match once and had the privilege of getting
to watch a toothless old lady battle her way to the edge of the
ring so she could shriek obscenities and give Jake “The Snake”
Roberts both middle fingers until being carried back to her seat by
security, where she contented herself with brandishing a Styrofoam
“Hacksaw” Jim Duggin two-by-four and, well, giving people the
finger while she shrieked obscenities.
Is Steve Ballmer clearly distorting facts when he implies that a
company writing one piece of GPL’d code may have to open the source
to its entire catalog? Yes, yes he is. Is Linux Today telling you
about it going to affect your response if a coworker mentions this
particular bit of disinformation as if it’s fact? One would hope,
given the centrality of the GPL to the shape of Linux today, the
average advocate of any worth will know that’s hogwash and figure
out a way to say so diplomatically. So the answer is, to my mind,
“no.”
In other words, rather than taking the time to bring news to
you, LT’s just creating an opportunity to preach to the choir when
we cover every burp and twitch from Redmond. We’re also providing
room for opportunists to market to you when they play on the
obsessiveness of some in the Linux community when it comes to all
things Microsoft.
This obsessiveness is ultimately corrosive, because it involves
time spent cataloging and listing the reasons to be against
Microsoft. Dwelling too long in this sort of negative space
involves eventually forgetting watchwords like “flexibility,”
“freedom,” and “efficiency” as the list of Microsoft’s
transgressions grows and we consume more energy cataloging
them.
When, at one of my last jobs prior to coming to work at LT, I
decided to build a small, backup system for a database I
maintained, I didn’t bring the technology people into my office and
tell them “Look at what Windows couldn’t do for us.” I told them
“Look at what we can do with Linux.” Had I phrased it the other
way, I doubt they would have been as receptive. As it was, the
Windows advocate in the group I demonstrated things to was left
with the ball firmly in his court, having to explain why a working
system shouldn’t be used. He couldn’t.
This isn’t to say that some Microsoft news isn’t worth covering.
It’s important, for instance, to note the matter when they attempt
to proprietize a standard or impede the use of software based on
open standards. In other areas, though, specifically when they
involve the inflammatory rhetoric of its executives, it seems more
moderation is called for.
Some will read this as an attempt to shuck responsibility for
past exploitation of the “Anything But Microsoft” crowd and its
fixation with Redmond’s maneuverings by sniffing in disdain and
claiming the eyeballs made us do it.
We’d like to offer instead that this is an attempt to take
responsibility and adjust our coverage, so overwhelmed by
page-view-drawing flamage lately, to reflect news and opinions that
are about something besides being against something.