On Tue, Oct 26, 2004 at 12:26:08PM -0500, David Nicol wrote:
http://www.davidnicol.com/October2004/microsoft_challenged.htm
We believe the commercial software model has had substantial benefits for users of software, allowing them to rely on our expertise and the expertise of other software developers that have powerful incentives to develop innovative software that is useful, reliable, and compatible with other software and hardware.
Haha "compatible"
Also, they screw-up (whether intentionally, or out of negligent ignorance) the difference between non-proprietary and non-commercial; as well as calling Linux an "operating system" rather than a kernel. And, they don't acknowledge at all that there are many programmers who are *paid* to work on open source software. Perhaps they correct these glaring errors elsewhere in the report.
This last error I mentioned, about paying programmers, they may have some stake in perpetuating, as it cuts too close to their own modus operandi otherwise. IBM or Red Hat or SuSE paying open source programmers as part of the <*cough*> "value add" to their product and service offerings might look to a discriminating observer not much different from Microsoft bundling, say, a web browser or media player with their software at no additional charge. The difference, of course, being that customers using the open source offerings will never be locked-in the way customers of these proprietary systems will be.