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Microsoft's latest: blame Oprah Winfrey

by Sam Varghese

Saturday, 07 July 2007

I live in the state of Victoria in Australia. On this day, the 7th day of the 7th month in the year of our Lord 2007, I hereby declare that I am not bound by the traffic laws of Victoria and that I can drive my car at any speed I choose.

Silly? Stupid? An idiot of the highest order? I plead guilty; I am all these and more for making such a statement.

And so is Microsoft. In grandiose fashion, the software behemoth has declared that it is not a party to the GPLv3 and that none of its actions "are to be misintepreted as accepting status as a contracting party of GPLv3 or assuming any legal obligations under such license." I can hear the laughter ringing out.

To use an American phrase, get real.

Sure, all it takes is a statement of this nature and one is automatically free from complying with existing law. All it takes is that one should say one believes that an act - say like driving at 200kmph in a built-up area - does not violate existing law. Many people in the US also believed that Jim Jones was the messiah. And they drank his Kool-Aid which was laced with cynaide.

Statements like this smack of delusions of grandeur - signs that mental instability is either already upon the collective leadership of the company or that it is nigh. And it firmly puts Microsoft in the same bracket as those who believe the earth is flat and those who believe that it is possible to build a perpetual motion machine.

Microsoft has also stated that it "believes" it does not need a licence under GPL to carry out any aspect of its deal with Novell. I believe that the tooth fairy exists and that Santa Claus lives at the North Pole. See, it's simple? You just have to say "I believe."

What I believe is that too many of the bigwigs in Redmond have got hold of the book The Secret, the latest self-help manual topping the bestseller lists in the US. And they are following the techniques outlined by Australian Rhonda Byrne to create their own version of reality.

And if any single individual should take the blame for such a book - which one would in a kindly mood describe as unadulterated crap - selling as well as it has, then one has to blame the talk show host Oprah Winfrey who had Byrne on her show twice. Book sales went ballistic and I've no doubt that Microsoft picked up its fair share of copies and spread them among top management.

Novell's reaction to Microsoft's statement clearly indicates who is the sub and who is the dom in the deal signed last November; like a serf from days of yore, Novell has come forward and bleated that it will support any code that it releases under GPLv3 as Microsoft has said it will not support such code.

So, in effect, Microsoft is partially backing out of the agreement which it signed on November 2. Not Novell, though; it is desperately holding on for dear life. Send in the oxygen cannisters for poor Ron Hovsepian.

But we should not blame Microsoft or Oprah Winfrey alone. We must also blame the mass of American tech websites who slavishly publish such rubbish when it is spouted out by big companies and actually treat it as something serious, the websites which give legs to this kind of loony bin talk and treat it with anything other than ridicule.

It's part of a trend in America, a trend that has gathered pace over the last seven years. Ever since Dubya rigged his way to the White House in 2000, we've been seeing this kind of "the -law-exists-but-it's -not-for-me, I'm-above-it" talk.

In Donald Rumsfeld, we have the perfect model for Microsoft's behaviour. If he isn't already on the board, I'm willing to bet that he's part of the inspiration behind this.

The opinions expressed in this blog are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of iTWire.

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