Microsoft vs. Peru

The Register ran MS in Peruvian open-source nightmare. Peru is considering a bill to require that all public offices use only open-source software. Once Microsoft got wind of this, Señor Juan Alberto González, General Manager of Microsoft in Perú issued a stern warning against doing so and provided the usual raft of logic.

In an extremely well-written reply, and possibly the most eloquent and accessible defense of Open Source software I’ve seen, “[Peruvian Congressman David] Villanueva Nuñez slices and dices with great skill to reveal the internal inconsistencies, unsupportable claims and irrational conclusions which the MS flacks trade in.”

He makes the distinction, which was completely lost (though probably deliberately) on Microsoft, that the Bill does not prohibit the state buying software, it prohibits using software that is not open-source. It is possible to sell open-source software. The Bill only guarantees that the software is open-source, stable, and has an open document format.

“… nothing in the text of the Bill would prevent your company offering the State bodies an office “suite”, under the conditions defined in the Bill and setting the price that you consider satisfactory. If you did not, it would not be due to restrictions imposed by the law, but to business decisions relative to the method of commercializing your products, decisions with which the State is not involved.”

He goes on to address Microsoft’s concerns of competition being reduced:

“…the Bill *stimulates* competition, since it tends to generate a supply of software with better conditions of usability, and to better existing work, in a model of continuous improvement.”

…and because of the lesser impact of the marketing dollar on such a market:

“This influence of marketing is in large measure reduced by the bill that we are backing, since the choice within the framework proposed is based on the *technical merits* of the product and not on the effort put into commercialization by the producer; in this sense, competit[ion] is increased, since the smallest software producer can compete on equal terms with the most powerful corporations.”

This is really not what Microsoft wants to hear. First of all, remember that Microsoft is certainly not opposed to less competition…they’ve been in court for the last 10 years because of illegally stifling competition. They’re against a market that is not stacked in their favor. Don’t ever think that MS has Peru’s best interests at heart. They are told that, in fact, competition is open, it’s just limited to the realm of technical merit, where marketing dollars won’t have much of an influence at all. Definitely not a level playing ground for a cash-rich producer of third-rate software like Microsoft.

He goes on to bash unnamed “anti-competitive … big software producers” for locking users into lousy products, whose only repair can be effected by upgrading to another proprietary version at the user’s expense, and whose data format is proprietary, effectively blocking users from migrating to other products.

The next issue addressed is one of security, and, once again, Microsoft’s closed model comes up short because “Non-Disclosure clauses which prevent the user from publicly revealing security flaws found in the licensed proprietary product.” There is also the security and up-time of the software itself, where, as users of Microsoft software, we know Microsoft once again is backing a loser:

“… the huge costs caused by non-functioning software (“blue screens of death”, malicious code such as virus, worms, and trojans, exceptions, general protection faults and other well-known problems) are reduced considerably by using more stable software; and it is well-known that one of the most notable virtues of free software is its stability.”

This is truly a wonderfully written rebuttal to the manipulative propaganda that Microsoft espouses. It is filled with references back to other points because of redundancies within Microsoft’s “points” and references to contradictions between those points. For the full text of Microsoft’s original letter (in addition to the excerpted points in the reply), see MS FUD.