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Rebuttal to Mr. Sanjiv Mathur, Head of Marketing, Microsoft India

Mr. Sanjiv Mathur, Head of Marketing, Microsoft India, had his viewpoint on Open Source Software in Governments published in the November 27 issue of the Economic Times. Here is a point-by-point rebuttal of his claims made in the article.

To begin with let me first clarify the term ‘Free software.’ The word ‘free’ here specifically means what you can do with the software, not the price.

And you can do a lot more with free software than you can with commercial software.

While you can obtain the basic software free, it is distributed and sold for a charge by companies who develop applications on it.

Oh, really? Does the Samba team charge for the excellent software they provide that involves reverse-engineering Microsoft’s networking standards and providing interaction between UNIX and Microsoft-based products? Does the OpenOffice.org team charge for its revolutionary office suite, which according to a poll on linux.com satisfies the needs of nearly all MS-Office users? Do the KDE and GNOME teams charge for the superb desktop environments they’ve built? On a larger scale, in case he’s referring to distributors, does RedHat charge for the entire 3 CDs worth of RedHat 8.0 that they’ve put on their ftp site for download? Do any of the other distributors? Wrong, sir, wrong. Most companies that develop applications on Open Source platforms do NOT charge.

And by the way, where you draw the line between “basic software” and the “applications developed on it”? Because Linux is essentially a huge set of applications ranging right from the kernel to the desktop environments, working together to produce an OS. There is no “basic software” anywhere in the UNIX world. All are applications. Mr. Mathur is still stuck in the Windows world where you have a “basic” Windows product and then have to buy additional applications that run on it.

As a result, the pricing structure becomes very similar to commercial software as companies promoting free software charge for initial >installation, support, training, etc.

To suggest outright that the pricing structure of Open Source Software is similar to commercial software is flawed. Unless a company specifically approaches a Free/Open Source Software vendor for support as regards initial installation, further support and training, there is no obligation upon that company to pay the vendor. Such charges as mentioned by him are not mandatory, and indeed, several companies moving to Free/Open Source Software do not opt for support from the vendor.

Though the price debate is still under the microscope, the total cost of ownership underscores the fact that when you invest in software or hardware, there are a number of hidden costs that come into being. In the commercial and free software debate this element becomes of critical value as studies reveal that TCO of free software is quite high.

Prove it. This doesn’t make sense. As mentioned by R. Gopalakrishnan, secretary to the chief minister of MP, the TCO of Free/Open Source Software is anywhere between one-half to one-tenth of the equivalent commercial solution, even when accounting for your “hidden costs”.

Microsoft believes in the overall benefit of the software ecosystem — one that recognises the roles of government, education, private industry and end users to develop a healthy interaction that advances the public knowledge base, protects IP rights, furthers innovation and spurs further growth.

Our primary concern is not with open source as a whole, but with the GNU General Public License. Its role in discouraging the development of commercial software threatens to undermine intellectual property, stifle innovation, and limit entrepreneurism while reducing choice in the market.

Reducing choice?! The fact that the Open Source community has over 3 high -quality equivalents for every major commercial offering, speaks volumes for the proliferation of choice in the Open Source market. Instead the very nature of GPL is what encourages and fosters Open Source products of high quality – because everyone gets to make use of the best code contributed by the most talented developers.

The best catalyst for software innovation and industry growth is the market place, supported by a strong regime for intellectual property protection. If an organisation is looking at moving over to free software, it is attracted by the short term benefits where the initial investment may be less than what they would need to do for commercial software.

But price is what Microsoft is harping about; the Open Source community has always stressed upon the “free as in speech” advantage that Free/Open Source Software offers. And while Microsoft brands the Open source philosophy as “communist” and “anti-American”, listen to their Head of Marketing speak – “supported by a strong regime for intellectual property protection”. This kind of “regime” is exactly what fosters monopolies. If Microsoft is really interested in advancing technology, then the best way to do so is to make public your best technologies, so that others can extend them. The best implementation shall win. Those that don’t make the grade will lose due to lack of market acceptance.

However taking into account the longer term implications; they definitely need to think of the overall value proposition that a platform offers vis-a-vis the other.

Same flaw – Same argument. See above.

They need to evaluate the basic acquisitions costs of free software vis-a-vis the long term costs which include integration costs between various components, backwards compatibility costs, collaboration with the partner community, trained manpower.

He mentions integration costs between various components. The best part is that a lot of the integration is done by the distributors themselves. Then again, the integration part isn’t as hard as Microsoft makes it out to be – excellent sites like Linuxfromscratch.org describe how to get a complete Linux system, using nothing but the source codes of various software. Imagine doing that with Windows 2000 components!

From a larger perspective, the UNIX philosophy isn’t even about the kind of integration that Microsoft (and the Windows world) are used to. UNIX is all about tools, tools which each achieve one fixed function, and then to combine these tools in almost infinite ways in order to achieve your end. This is what gives UNIX its fabled flexibility and transparency.

As far as integration between components goes, if each one of those components follows clear, open, simple standards of communication (as opposed to cryptic, closed, binary-based standards) , there shouldn’t be any problem.

These costs are absorbed by the commercial software companies and the value is passed onto the customer. Moreover, once free software is installed, it also becomes a source of elevated security vulnerabilities for IT buyers, because the source code is freely available: no one person is responsible for it.

This argument is now beginning to bore me – Open Source software being more vulnerable to security just because its source code is available. How does Microsoft explain the fact that in spite Windows NT/IIS Web servers making up a small fraction of web servers on the Internet, as opposed to UNIX/Apache-based ones, the former are the ones which are most frequently hacked? Indeed, UNIX wouldn’t be such a hit on mission-critical servers (such as web servers) if it were so vulnerable just because its source was available. Go check out NetCraft.com for a rating of the longest-running web servers; all of the top ten run BSD, a free variant of UNIX. I quote “Applied Cryptography”, Bruce Schneider, John Wiley and Sons, Inc, page 3, speaking about the public key-private key encryption algorithm:

"All of the security in these algorithms is based on the key (or keys); none is based in the details of the algorithm. This means that the algorithm can be published and analyzed. Products using the algorithm can be mass-produced. It doesn't matter if an eavesdropper knows your algorithm; if she doesn't know your particular key, she can't read your messages."

Or, even more relevant, to “Practical UNIX and Internet Security”, Simson Garfinkel and Gene Spafford, O’Reilly and Associates, pages 40-45:

"... This is especially true if you should find yourself basing your security on the fact that something technical is unknown to your attackers. This concept can even hurt your security."

Scary, isn’t it?

Microsoft’s investments in e-governance in particular go back several years, and we were amongst the first IT companies to strike alliances with the central and state governments. Today, we have MoUs with 18 state governments in India, and are doing pioneering work in developing e-governance applications and solutions. Some results of our successful partnerships include the Gyaandoot Project with the government of Madhya Pradesh, the Bhoomi Project in Karnataka and work with the Treasuries department of the government of Haryana. We at Microsoft believe that a healthy software ecosystem is one built on choice with government agencies and all entities having the ability to select which software model fits their needs.

We believe that an open market approach where software products compete on their technical merits is the best model for the long-term growth of the software industries in all countries.

Good attitude. But having said that, don’t use your financial and political clout to undermine other offerings, whether closed-source or Free/Open Source. History is rife with examples of how Microsoft has used non-technical means to further its interests.

Software companies make heavy investments in R&D and if they do not have a chance to be compensated for their R&D spends, the cycle of sustainable innovation is disrupted and the health of the local software industry is jeopardised.

The form of R&D that the Open Source community puts in, is far more than any commercial offering, both in terms of quantity and quality, since those who develop Open Source Software are committed to the code they produce, the fact that they are at all coding the software bears ample testimony to the fact that they put in an amazing amount of time and research into their product. The beauty of the whole ecosystem is that developers do not *expect* to be compensated for the work they put in. Compensation is the fact that they gain a higher standing among their peers. To a true developer, this is the highest form of reward.

As a result, it would discourage any organisation to take on the effort of expensive R&D to improve upon the same as they would not see any benefit in doing so.

This would lead to a disruption in the software ecosystem. Both open source and commercial software are integral parts of the broader software ecosystem, and the two models have co-existed within the software ecosystem for decades.

We are not averse to sharing our source codes with our customers if it will be beneficial for them

Well, then by all means do so. It will be immensely beneficial for all, not least you.

, however we are concerned about the potential implications of GPL. The problems created by GPL result from the onerous licensing terms that it contains. The GPL requires that all third parties must have the right to make unlimited copies of GPL-licensed software and distribute them free of charge. Obviously, it is extremely difficult for a software company to generate revenue by distributing a program if everyone has the right to distribute unlimited copies of the same program free of charge.

He misses the other side of the coin – If anyone can copy your software and market it as their own, remember that they have to make it available under the exact same licencing terms that it was available to them. Thus if they can make unlimited copies of your software, so can you, of their product. Whatever modifications the “third party” makes to your software to make it better, you can view those same modifications and use it in the next version of your software.

Thus in a process that builds upon itself, the software in question keeps getting better and better. The vendor who in the end markets his product better, will win. But customers always have the option to switch to the other alternative(s) available. In the end, the customer benefits. Those are the new rules of the game. No one has, or can, decree that vendors have to keep making vast profits the way they have always been doing. If, in the interest of producing radically better technology, vendors find that they cannot do businesss the way they have traditionally been doing, then that’s too bad. New business models will evolve to fit the new trend in technology. All Microsoft is doing is stifling this evolution towards better software by branding it as “onerous”.

We believe that software has commercial value and attempts to render software free will ultimately undermine the software industry, causing less R&D to go into software development and ultimately less innovation for consumers.

Sanjiv Mathur, Head of marketing, Microsoft, India

And finally a contradiction. When he started this article he said that in the end, Open Source software in the marketplace is not much different from any commercial offering. So how will attempts to render software free “ultimately undermine the software industry”? The software industry as we know it today will undergo a sea change in the future. Software today is looked at as a product, rather than a service. That will eventually change.

Clearly Microsoft has a fundamentally different viewpoint on software than the Free Software/Open Source Software community. They shall go their way and we ours. May the best man win!