The New York Times reports that a senior vice president at Microsoft, Craig Mundie, is going to expand on Jim Allchin’s statement in February about the dangers of open source software. Hasn’t anyone at Microsoft noticed that Mundie and Allchin between them are doing a good job of summarizing the government’s antitrust case against Microsoft?
Look at how the NYT’s John Markoff describes an interview with Mundie,
He cited the history of Unix, which has been replete with incompatible versions. Although he acknowledged that the open-source approach had created new technologies, he said that business models using the open- source community were suspect.
“It is innovation that really drives growth,” Mr. Mundie said, arguing that without the sustained investment made possible by commercial software, real innovation would not be possible.
This is precisely what Netscape and other competitors claim about Microsoft — that it’s embrace and extend model coupled with its willingness to just give software such as Internet Explorer away in order to gain market share is a business model that stifles innovation.