Dan Gillmor published some comments from Linus Torvalds regarding that Craig Mundie speech. Torvalds makes some important points, but falters in his choice of heroic scientific researchers,
I wonder if Mundie has ever heard of Sir Isaac Newton? He’s not only famous for having basically set the foundations for classical mechanics (and the the original theory of gravitation, which is what most people remember, along with the apple tree story), but he is also famous for how he acknowledged the achievement:
“If I have been able to see further, it was only because I stood on the shoulders of giants”.
One of the greatest scientists of our time, having done more for modern technology (and thus, btw, for the modern economy) that Microsoft will ever do, acknowledged the fact that he did so by being able to use the knowledge (what we now call “intellectual property”) gathered by others.
In fact, Newton was the scientific version of Microsoft in his day — prone to fits of rage against his intellectual peers and a master of Microsoft-style tactics.
Look at how Newton handled the dispute with Leibniz over who had priority for inventing calculus. Newton, by then president of the Royal Society, appointed his own “impartial” committee to review the competing claims and then mangnaminously agreed to write the final report from this “impartial” committee (though his name was nowhere to be found on the report). To provide further aid, Newton anonymously wrote a review for the prestigous Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of the committee report he had written.
Reminds me a lot of how Microsoft conducts its much-publicized server tests — cripple the competition and stack the jury.