Tracy Reed: My Un-American Essay; a response to MS exec, Jim Allchin

[ Thanks to Tracy
Reed for this link. ]

“Their immediate goal in Washington is to poison our leaders
on the idea of open source software and prevent it from ever
becoming officially accepted and supported software in government
offices. If the government starts using open standard software
(as opposed to closed proprietary software) they would save a lot
of time and money but Microsoft would lose its biggest
customer.”

“Open source software is already seriously eating their profits.
Only through creative book keeping (counting proceeds from their
investments as bottom line revenue to make up for shortfalls in
software sales) can they keep up their appearance of profitability
and stock price. Of course they will never succeed in outlawing
open source software (I hope) but the idea that they are even
spending time thinking about such things is frightening.
Remember that corporations are amoral. Not moral or immoral but
amoral. They logically determine how to make the most money. They
make decisions without regard to compassion or ethics much like a
computer. Individuals don’t work this way but when you put a bunch
of individuals together and call it a corporation they do. They are
legally obligated by their stockholders to do this. If the
stockholders found out that a big company gave someone a break and
didn’t do everything they could to maximize shareholder value they
would get their pants sued off. It has happened. Not to mention the
problems caused by the large egos and greed in the executive ranks
of many companies.”

“Automobiles were the worst thing for the horse and buggy.
Surely the buggy makers were annoyed. Perhaps if they had $50B with
which to lobby government and society via clever marketing such as
Microsoft does we would still be riding in buggies!”

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