● 04.21.10

●● Smearing Free Software is a Terrible Business/Marketing Strategy

Posted in Free/Libre Software, FUD at 1:07 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: FUD tactics or cheap shots against Free(dom) software no longer jives well with Jive Software

“Jive Software retreats from ‘dumb mistake’ on open source,” says this blog from Oregon’s press. It relates to this earlier report about Jive taking shots at Drupal and Liferay, only to be exposed and denounced.

I’m a little late to this tale, but wanted to note the little spat that broke out last week between Portland’s Jive Software and the open source community.It started with a white paper Jive published last month, provocatively titled “Jive vs. Open Source.” Jive took it down, but accounts describe it as positioning Jive’s software as superior to open source alternatives, Drupal in particular.Acquia, a commercial open source company specializing in Drupal, responded directly with this post, “Don’t Jive Me,” announcing new software called “Drupal Commons” as a direct competitor to Jive SBS.

The moral of the story is that publicly attacking Free software is a bad idea; that’s why Microsoft uses so many proxies to do its attacks on Free software (and we have given many examples over the years). At one stage, Microsoft too attacked Drupal, later retracting and apologising just because it got caught. █

“Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”

–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO

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