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Fake Steve Jobs 1, MicroBorg and Freetards 0

The spoof blog The Secret Diaries of Steve Jobs has the best news summary of the recent debate over Microsoft's motivation behind releasing the source code for the 3.5 framework. It's concise, insightful, and most importantly hilarious. With all the animosity and paranoia constantly floating between Microsoft and the Open Source Community, I almost forgot that there is another rather large group that hates both the MicroBorg AND the freetards. As an aside, why doesn't Apple, or any other 3rd party vendors for that matter, ever seem to get criticized for keeping their code proprietary?

If you're interested in hearing some well thought-out alternative viewpoints on this topic, read these posts by Ayende and Miguel de Icaza. I agree with their desire to see Microsoft eventually loosen their proposed licensing agreement and legally allow for modifications and enhancements to the framework. The vast majority of developers would never take advantage of open licensing in corporate software shops because it would to the maintenance nightmare to have to reapply changes every time Microsoft released a hot fix or update. However, I do think that a few of the alpha-geek elite like Miguel and Ayende would come up with some innovative stuff if given the opportunity and both Microsoft and the rest of the developer community would end up in a better place because of it.

At the very least I hope that Microsoft is smart enough to realize what a public relations nightmare it would be if they ever legally went after the Mono project for any potential similarities in code. I am someone who quickly gets bored with excessive Microsoft bashing, but even I would turn my back on them in disgust if they did that.

In the meantime, I am going to bask in finally being able to step into the base class libraries with the Visual Studio debugger rather than having to rely upon Reflector or second-hand google detective work. Cheers to Scott Guthrie and the people who helped make this possible!
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Print | posted on Friday, October 05, 2007 12:39 AM

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