Fun with De Icaza

Making Money from Open Source still an issue

From the above article I found interesting quotes from our friend from Microsoft & Novell, Miguel De Icaza (PDC, Basicly Microsoft-con):

“If your livelihood depends on the product that you’re selling, until you can figure how you’re going to make money on that thing, I say, keep it proprietary,” de Icaza said.

“Keep it proprietary” is something you could say that would label you a traitor to the FSF. Such attitude doesn’t appear over night.

Young developers without a lot of obligations can more easily consider doing open source projects, de Icaza said. But someone with a family and tuition to pay has to tread carefully when taking a technology to the open source route.

This statement is a little misleading because there have been people who brought new technology to open source, and ended up getting hired to keep working on it. (Pulseaudio[1], and Linux Kernel contributions are at the top of my mind). Greg Kroah-Hartman mentioned at this linux plumbers conference for example that Intel wanted to get recruiters into the talks. Recruiters? Oh yeah cause its easy to get a job with Open Source.

Miguel also downplays and flat out misleads about Java (apparenly GPL means “it belongs to everyone”):

Also during the session, de Icaza downplayed concerns about Oracle owning Java via its planned acquisition of Java founder Sun Microsystems.

“It doesn’t matter,” de Icaza said. Java is not like .Net, which is specifically owned by Microsoft, he said.

“Sun has stated that all these patents are free for anyone to use,” and Java technology is available under the GNU General Public License, de Icaza added.

Java is now “the property of the human race,” said de Icaza. “It belongs to everyone.”

Some people (Including Joss) find it hilarious to imply that Miguel works for Microsoft via Codeplex proxy. Well, here Sara Ford explains working at Codeplex as a Microsoft Employee.

Also during the panel session, Sara Ford, program manager for Microsoft’s CodePlex.com site for open source projects, noted she had a learning curve regarding open source as a Microsoft employee.

“I’m born and raised Microsoft. It’s an interesting place,” to learn open source, Ford said. At CodePlex, those in charge were at first unaware they could reject project contributions. CodePlex now hosts 12,400 projects.

That concludes this segments “Fun with De Icaza”

[1] “Red Hat basically hired me to help improving audio on Linux. So that’s what I am doing during work.”

http://jaboutboul.blogspot.com/2009/05/sound-of-fedora-11.html