Clueless in Seattle

Ray Ozzie speaks, and he speaks about Open Source Software. I don't even know what to quote from his statement. They're just not in the right ballpark. The only thing Ozzie communicates here is that he just does not understand the open source community, which _is_ the community for building out the internets.

This comes from the guy who built Groove out of proprietary Microsoft bits and proprietary bits from his developers. By the time they were shipping Groove, those bits had rotted. COM this and that, custom proprietary object database foo.

Had the protocols and the bits within Groove been even somewhat open, they might have grown a community around it, and kept it alive. Maybe some of those bits are living inside some Microsoft product. Running COM this and that???

Microsoft's "groove" looks more like a rut and face it, they've flipped the bozo bit. What a long, slow, excrutiating slide into oblivion they're on unless they can figure out what's really happening on the internets these days.

Update: This is an example of what BobWarfield at SmoothSpan calls: "Microsoft's Expensive Rift with the Web."

Another update: James Robertson ties this into the Smalltalk community. Seaside seems to be taking Smalltalk to another level. Smalltalk is an interesting community re: open source. As with the Lisp community there's always been a significant "openness" to Smalltalk, predating the actual open source licensing of various implementations. However there's no way the various vendor's Smalltalk GUI's could ever have been unified into an open implementation, but Seaside is on its way toward that end.