Hugh Macleod recently asked "How Well Does Open Source Currently Meet The Needs of Shareholders and CEO's?" It's an illogical, inconsistent post that should have scrolled out of the memory of mankind, but somehow it has been mentioned far and wide, including a mention on the popular Coding Horror, among other highly ranked blogs, many of which just muddied the waters of this misleading question even worse.

The original post by Hugh was baffling, first confusing the Microsoft Partner program with gross Microsoft sales, and then completely hodge-podging software as a commercial product with software as a consumable.

There aren't any open source billionaires selling software as a product, Hugh tells us, so therefore open source doesn't service shareholders and CEO's (of non software-as-a-product organizations) as a consumable.

Huh?

Hugh isn't even commenting on the financial viability of building a software as a product company around open source, where such a question merits sober consideration (though there are quite a few very successful open source businesses, whether a company can survive and thrive with their crown jewels open sourced needs to be considered on a case by case basis). Instead he's claiming that every organization needs to ensure that their suppliers are making boatloads of loot (preferrably suppliers with an ownership structure that centralizes it on one or two individuals), which is a rather odd consideration. Or worse, that their suppliers share some nonsensical correlation with someone else that is very successful.

Open source is a very contentious topic, and to many it is threatening to their world. It is often grossly oversold as a silver-bullet, when often it only plays a marginal part (both Firefox and MySQL, as examples, are overwhelmingly developed by a traditional team in a traditional way, and the source just happens to be available. It really isn't the driving force of their march forward).

Yet to correlate software as a consumable so arbitrarily holds no value whatsoever, and isn't a good foundation for any discussion.

And most remarkably it uses Bill Gates as the example of the merit of non-open source software as a consumable -- yet Bill Gates is perversely probably the single biggest reason the open source market is so vibrant and alive. The anti-Microsoft rallying cry was a critical early factor in the growth of the OSS community.

Microsoft recently released a new technology/product named Silverlight. Many in the Microsoft-enthusiast community, seemingly only seeing the world that Microsoft delivers to them, cheered in applause at this innovation, declaring that it completely changed the rules of the game: Soon we would see fat apps and web apps dancing in the streets together, no longer segregated.

The world was freed from the awful tyranny of HTML!

Microsoft, the story goes, innovated up some vector graphics and a way to interact with and transform them from script, changing the world from the boring, raster-graphics monotony of yesteryear.

Amazing!

Wait -- wasn't SVG already a pretty mature technology at the turn of the century? Why yes, now that I think of it, I recall deploying solutions that actually used glorious vector graphics, declaratively described and transformed with layers of vector goodness. Of course Microsoft, despite being on the SVG committee, didn't actually support it themselves (by then they realized that the whole web thing was probably unhealthy to their operating system stronghold, so such an incredibly rich addition to the browser was unlikely to occur), and instead one had to use third-party plug-ins like Adobe's SVG Viewer. Then of course the banner was passed to the Macromedia cum Adobe Flash product, where rich, cross-platform, vertically-scaled vector graphics rendering primarily occurs today (though SVG is revived through its inclusion in the standard release of Firefox, and is becoming a standard graphic format for a certain domain of images on Wikipedia).

I imagine the brainstorming session that yielded the name "Silverlight" consisted of some people thinking "We're innovating up a Flash clone, so think of anything that reminds you of Flash". Silver light, aka a light bouncing from a silver-color flash enclosure, is hardly a stretch.

The product itself might be entirely worthwhile, but thus far nothing I've seen makes it any more compelling than Flash. Indeed, the limited targeted platforms of Silverlight -- both from a breadth and depth perspective, the rank immaturity of the product, the grossly conflicted interests of its host, and the massive ubiquity of Flash makes Silverlight a contender that needs to really wow to sell itself.

Nothing I've seen wows me any more than the existing Flash demos wow me (and even those aren't very compelling, and many Flash implementations are abusive overkill). The asinine sales video certainly didn't convince me.

All of that is pretty much irrelevant, though: Microsoft wants to take a run at Adobe, hoping to get some strategic control to lever in the future. That's fine, and if the product really does provide some sort of advantage above and beyond Flash to excuse the massive disadvantages, then it's definitely a product worth considering.

What really gets me irked, though, is the perceptive of some of this industry to only see the merit of certain solutions when they come from their camp. I recall when .NET was in the initial betas and having a breathless, excited peer, fresh from their Visual Basic 6 nightmare, declaring the wonderful advantages that garbage collection, JIT compilation, reflection, and so on brought to development.

"If it's so great now, why haven't you been embracing Java for years?" I asked.

He had no answer. I truly think he was completely unaware that what he was describing was already available. This sort of virgin enthusiasm, with cheerleaders completely blind to other solutions available to them, is far too common.

WPF itself is a decent addition to the .NET Framework (although the name ".NET 3.0" is absurd), and it does add a lot of whiz-bang, but they need to do a better job of selling it than videos like this. For all the talk about improving user interaction during that video, everything they showed managed to slow user interaction, reduce data density in a detrimental way, and overall just add junk that detracted from the experience of the app, but remarkably it's what people always first try to use to sell things like this.