Strategist Criticizes Open Source

Open-source software development inhibits research and poses risks to customers, according to Microsoft Senior Vice President for Advanced Strategies Craig Mundie. With Mundie’s speech, the company is trying to shore up public and political support for its main business model—selling proprietary software—against the open-source philosophy, which promotes public release of the source code of software products. The company also wants to raise doubts about open-source competitors, such as Linux. The speech might signal changes in the company’s policies that could give enterprise customers some of the benefits of open source.

Threats Claimed to R&D, Customers

Mundie leveled two major criticisms at the open-source concept in his speech (the text of which was published on the Web before it was delivered at the New York University Stern School of Business).

Open source hurts research and development by software vendors. Open-source software, Mundie argued, makes it difficult for software companies to fund research and development from the sale of software products. He attributed recent robust growth in the economy to this research and development, and said it relied heavily on the ability of innovators to sell licenses to their intellectual property. Mundie acknowledged that open-source software benefits hardware and service vendors (e.g., IBM, Sun), but he argued that such businesses don’t deliver software innovations to the public as rapidly as software companies do.