Dave Winer doesn’t see how Craig Mundie’s speech last week could be called an attack on open source. I don’t see how it can be called anything else.
Leave aside the Microsoft view — which Dave and a number of other developers support, as they well might — that the GNU General Public License is a malevolent virus. That’s arguably true from one side of the fence.
But one of Mundie’s main purposes surely was to strew FUD on the open-source model. In particular he compared it with the failed dot-com mania, an analogy that strikes me as facile but incorrect.
Open source is a barn-raising, a community gathering that can improve everyone’s lives. The local contractor who’s driven all competition out of the market would naturally be unhappy at such an event.
When you attach financial gain to every human interaction, you think like Microsoft. When you remember the value of voluntarism and community spirit — which Mundie hypocritically praised before he knocked it down — the open source model makes great sense.