Timothy Lee writes a compelling argument against software patents in the New York Times today. It's the very same argument that Bill Gates advanced back in 1991 against software patents, but now has done a complete about-face. As Lee writes:[I]n recent years, [Microsoft] has argued that patents are essential to technological breakthroughs in software. Microsoft sang a very different tune in 1991. In a memo to his senior executives, Bill Gates wrote, ?If people had understood how patents would be granted when most of today?s ideas were invented, and had taken out patents, the industry would be at a complete... READ MORE

I'm not sure how I forgot this classic ditty from Bill Gates, but it does show a certain consistency in Microsoft's thinking...stretching over the last 31 years:As the majority of hobbyists [open source developers] must be aware, most of you steal your software...[Y]ou...prevent good software from being written. Who can afford to do professional work for nothing? What hobbyist can put 3-man years into programming, finding all bugs, documenting his product and distribute for free? [Red Hat, MySQL, JBoss, Alfresco, Zenoss, etc. etc.]...I would appreciate letters from any one who wants to pay up...Nothing would please me more than being... READ MORE

The Guardian has a fantastic interview with Jeff Raikes, a senior Microsoft executive. Raikes echoes something I heard from Nick McGrath during our dinner a week ago in London - Microsoft focuses on the customer, not undermining competitors. Take that with a massive Great Salt Lake load of salt, of course, but I do think that when competing with Microsoft (or anyone), it's best to focus on the customer, not the competitor. By focusing on the competitor, you let them define the value proposition (i.e., the battleground).

A few gems from the interview:

On SharePoint...

ow there's Office SharePoint Server, which takes the server side to a new level. Bill and I would draw the analogy to when we put together the Office productivity suite in the late 80s: we think Office SharePoint Server …

I had a lovely dinner the other night with Nick McGrath, the head of Microsoft's UK platform strategy. (I can say words like "lovely" because I'm in London this week. I'll therefore also throw in the words "bloke," "top of the morning, guv'nuh!", and "Arsenal.") For all the bile I spill over Microsoft (and there is very good reason for it), I continue to be impressed by the company, as reflected in its people. I've yet to meet anyone in Microsoft's Linux frontline (aka, the counterinsurgency :-) that I don't respect and genuinely like: Nick, Jason Matusow, Bill Hilf, Martin Taylor (before he left Microsoft), Steve Mutkoski, Gutierrez, etc. Great, capable people.

What I like most about Microsoft is the intelligence it brings to bear on its competition. While many enterprise software companies persist in cramming their heads …

The launch of Microsoft's Codeplex "shared source" site is merely the latest attempt to undermine and usurp the open source community via clever marketing.

There are two main reasons proprietary vendors are threatened by open source alternatives: price compression and loss of market share.

Open source companies have a pricing umbrella in relation to proprietary vendors license fees. Proprietary vendors argue that open source alternatives lack features, are less secure, socialist and so on, but fundamentally the difference in features is likely no more than 20%. Open source products are generally 10-30% of the cost of the proprietary competitor. This means you can pay roughly 20% of the cost and receive roughly 80% of the features. This is a very appealing proposition. And the more companies who take advantage of …

I went to Microsoft with Arjen the other day. We talked with Eric Lippert about some new features of C# 3.0 and how MySQL might integrate itself more deeply into the Microsoft Development Environment.

More details if anyone makes noise about being interested.

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A Texas jury has awarded $133 million in damages to David Colvin, after finding Microsoft and Autodesk guilty of infringing upon Colvin’s two software patents for software antipiracy protection. Colvin’s company, z4 Technologies Inc., filed patents for ‘passwords and codes assigned to individual software copies to prevent unauthorized copies.’ Microsoft was ordered to pay $115 [...]

Today, it's just JBoss that is a formal partner with Microsoft. (And maybe MySQL? I don't know....) But tomorrow, many more?

So says Bill Hilf, Heir of Matusow (no, it's not quite the same as being the Heir of Slytherin ;-) in this eWeek article:

Expect to see a lot more interoperability work between Microsoft Corp. and some of its open-source competitors over the next year-like the agreement struck with JBoss Inc. last year-as well as more participation by the Redmond, Wash., software maker in preventing interoperability problems earlier in its product cycle and providing potential fixes when issues arise.

"We have been successful in identifying popular open-source software applications that our customers are interested in using on the Microsoft Windows Server platform and working with those companies or projects to ensure that solution is …

For those who still believe that running Windows instead of Linux is cheaper or more cost effective let me give you a real world scenario I discovered today.

We have an application that runs on Windows and needs a new staging environment. I set out to order two simple HP servers. Once again I was dumbfounded by the additional costs associated with simply trying to run a server. So, after chastising one of my team over the fact that we use anything from Microsoft I did a simple cost analysis and came up with hard evidence of the Windows Idiot Tax, the extra costs imposed by using Microsoft products on a server.

I met with my boss, Patrik today. We discussed some of the work I've been doing the last quarter, the direction we're planning on going and some of the expectations for the next quarter. I also completed my expense report for the trip to Germany in September. Finally.

I feel pretty special that someone would travel from Finland to Seattle in order to see me. Even if it's a stop-off on the way to Cupertino :)

We had lunch at the space needle after our meeting. Very good (and expensive) food there. As the restaurant rotated, I gave him the sitting tour of the layout of the city.

Afterwards, we drove over 520 and did a drive-through tour of Redmond and the Microsoft campus. …