Microsoft turn to free software? That’ll be the day. Some have suggested that Microsoft might embrace free software and thus resolve the present conflict. That actually would be a terrific strategy for them, but I don’t think that Microsoft is smart enough to do it.

The Google App Engine doesn’t really advance the cause of evil all that much, but it’s not exactly good, either. Google makes a big deal about its corporate motto, “Don’t be evil”, but at the end of the day, Google really is just another corporation, no matter how well-intentioned its founders may have been. Regardless of whether the corporation holding the carrot is called “Microsoft” or “Google”, developers should think long and hard before following the primrose path towards lock-in to non-standard designs.

A report by the Standish Group indicates that adoption of ‘open source’ has caused a drop in revenue to the proprietary software industry by about $60 billion per year. That’s not a huge amount of money compared to what has been lost though the misselling of mortgages, but it is still a lot. The report identifies the value of these ‘open source’ products to be about 6% of the world market for software.

There has always been a section of the free software community which has an anti-Microsoft agenda. It’s almost like their mission statement is “It’s not over until Microsoft is dead”. Certainly there is a lot of feeling that if Microsoft went away, a lot of our problem would be over. But do Microsoft even need to “lose”; is there even a battle to be fought and if so what would constitute winning it?

Look through a list available packages for any free OS and you’ll find a sometimes bewildering choice of browsers, mail readers, editors, desktops and tetris-clones available. Despite this many will just blindly install the first one they’ve heard of. Is this a good policy? What good is all this choice if we don’t use it and what are those choices?

Note: please see the bottom of this post for a list of free software alternatives available now!

M6-IT, a Community Interest Community in the UK, are part way through a project to equip socially excluded families with computers running Xubuntu. I was recently able to interview Richard Rothwell of M6-IT about this project and its progress.

Think, for a moment, about what the free software community looks like from the external gaze. “Bloody Communists” - I’ve never actually had a businessman say this to me when I’ve been explaining free software, but I’m sure they’ve thought it. I suppose the smarter ones might have thought “anarcho-syndicalists”. Choosing to use free software may be simply economic, but contributing to any such project is surely a political statement.

So what is this statement? I’m not the person to write your statement, but I can offer mine.

It has long been the case that proprietary software companies regularly engage in FUD (fear, uncertainty and doubt) tactics against their opponents. This particularly seems to apply to Microsoft’s statements about free software in general and GNU/Linux in particular. Recently I’ve noticed a surge in the amount of FUD going the other way—from the FOSS community towards Microsoft and other proprietary software companies. Why do we feel it is necessary to fight FUD with FUD

It’s one of the more popular culture wars in the free software community: GUI versus CLI (graphics versus the command-line). Programmers, by selection, inclination, and long experience, understandably are attracted to textual interactions with the computer, but the text interface was imposed originally by technological limitations. The GUI was introduced as a reply to those problems, but has undergone very little evolution from 1973 (when it was invented at Xerox PARC) to today. So why can’t we do better than either of these tired old systems?

With any paradigm shift, it is difficult to see the new world from the old one, even though it is glaringly obvious once you’ve crossed over. Empirical evidence is one way to bridge the gap. To that end, I want to show some solid evidence for the “impossible” things that commons-based peer production (CBPP) has already accomplished—things that the old conventional wisdom would tell us “can’t be done”. This week, I’ll look at what is probably the most obvious case: free software.

Free software (eventually) works better than proprietary software; why?

Making dramatic statements always implies a need to “back” them (or “prove” them) with facts, data, statistics. However, a statement like “Free software works better than proprietary software” is so broad, anybody can prove it and disprove it at will. It depends on which angle you take, which area, and what your comparison terms are. However, I would like to add an important keyword to that sentence: “Free software works better than proprietary software”. That easily-missed word shyly hiding in brackets makes all the difference.

I’ve mentioned before the recent move among UK charities to become more “professional”, which is often translated as “do what the corporates do” (particularly when it comes to IT). One reason for this is the dreaded bespoke friend-of-a-friend database. These “databases” (and I use the term loosely) are often written by a student, with tenuous links to the charity, looking for a final year project and usually in Microsoft Access and they are usually awful to maintain.