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SAN DIEGO -- Thursday's debate between Microsoft and Red Hat at the Open Source Convention here was billed as a kind of Nixon-visits-China summit: Two parties of conflicting philosophies who don't know much about each other would meet, discuss a few relevant issues and then perhaps publicly agree that the other side had valid concerns.
It would be fluff, in other words, but at least it would be important fluff, setting in motion some kind of engagement.
But that didn't happen; when it comes to what kind of software the masses will use, Thursday's debate won't make a whit of difference. Not only was it fluff, with each side saying repeatedly that the other had some "incredibly smart people" working within its ranks -- the fluff was often uncivilized, unfocused, unsubstantial, and so, in the end, rather meaningless.
On the one side, you had a bunch of open sourcers waving around plastic red hats in support of Michael Tiemann, Red Hat's chief technical officer. Red Hat handed out the hats. (This angered some people from Sun Microsystems, which paid $45,000 to sponsor the event -- apparently, the Red Hat hats were clashing with the free OpenOffice.org T-shirts Sun was handing out.)
And on the other side you had Microsoft Vice President Craig Mundie straining credulity by insisting that the company's execs really didn't mean it when they said they hated open source.
"It has been reported that Microsoft doesn't like open source," he said at the start of his speech. "But let me be clear: Microsoft has no beef with open source."
What about the time that Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer called open-source software a "cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches," or the time that Jim Allchin, Microsoft's VP for Windows, suggested that open-source software was un-American?
Mundie said those comments were all a big mistake, and furthermore taken out of context by the media. He elaborated on the point in a media Q&A session after the debate: "I know Steve (Ballmer)," Mundie said. "That was an unfortunate choice of words. I don't think he'd use them today."
Ballmer is a very busy man, Mundie added, and sometimes he gives "terse" responses because he's pressed for time. "When he talked about the cancer, he was trying to express the company's concern about the GPL."
The "GPL" is the General Public License, which defines the terms under which many open-source software projects can be used. What Microsoft meant by "cancer" was that businesses who develop under the GPL are essentially giving up the right to charge for their intellectual property.
In Microsoft's view -- first elaborated by Mundie in a speech at New York University in May -- giving up intellectual property is a very bad thing for business:
"In this sense, open-source software based on the GPL mirrors the dot-com business models that proved the least successful during the past year," he said at NYU. "They ask software developers to give away for free the very thing they create that is of greatest value in the hope that somehow they'll make money selling something else. In effect, it puts at risk the continued vitality of the independent software sector."
But on Thursday, Mundie said repeatedly that Microsoft's views were limited to GPL software and not all "open-source" software. Pressed on whether Microsoft thinks that open software released under other licenses (for example, the FreeBSD license) are fundamentally bad for businesses, he said, "In general, no."
But that doesn't mean Microsoft loves open source, or that it shares any of the ideals of that movement. That's why everything Mundie said seemed so cagey here. He might have "no beef" with open source, but he gave no indication that Microsoft is going to support that community any time soon.
Indeed, what he didn't say was more illustrative of the company's views: He didn't say that open source is good for innovation, or that Microsoft might possibly be bad. He didn't say that Microsoft is exploring ways to offer open-source software. And he didn't say that he wanted an ongoing dialogue with the community.
And had he a worthier opponent, Mundie might have been called on some of those omissions -- but that wasn't to be: When Tiemann, of Red Hat, approached the podium, it was clear that he'd been programmed simply to attack Microsoft, and not to make any kind of rational case for open-source software.
Apropos of pretty much nothing, he spent much of his time talking about some kind of "civil war" within Microsoft, in which open-source advocates were being squashed by management. He said that Microsoft's "shared source" license -- broadly viewed by the open-source community as just a marketing gimmick -- was actually a "treaty crafted by Microsoft executives to quell that internal civil war."
This was an easy point for Mundie to refute: "The leadership of the company is not uncertain about what we're doing," he said, "and there's no civil war at the management level."
While focusing on this civil war idea, Tiemann failed to mention the virtues of open-source software that everyone always offers -- that it fosters innovation and leads to better products.
During a roundtable debate that followed, only Mitchell Baker, of Mozilla.org, mentioned this. "The smart people at Microsoft have to get filtered through the business plan," she said, implying that the smart people in open source can innovate even if it's not in the business plan.
Innovation needs serendipity, she said, and the freedom to try untested ideas. That's why open source is so cool.
Or, as Bruce Perens, an open-source proponent who works at Hewlett Packard, said: "(Open source) is more nimble because we can do everything. We can try it all, and the way we compete is straight Darwinism."
The problem with Microsoft, according to many people at this conference, is that it's too big a predator -- so big that it can often throw Darwin out the window and do what it pleases with the land of software. (Microsoft vehemently denies this claim, both in the media and in the courts.)
Few people here mentioned that, either -- the fact that Microsoft may get more respect from developers if it acted more cordially once in a while, and that they probably don't need to change their whole licensing model to just get their props.
But that didn't happen. There were extremists on all sides, and nothing was solved.
