OPEN SOURCE BLOGROLL

Open Source Weblog

The case for technological atheism
April 20, 2007

There may be some hope for Microsoft after all. Sam Ramji, the company’s director of platform strategy, has written a very perceptive post about the mistake of framing technology decisions as “traditional software vs. open source software”.

Combine it with James Governor’s call for the industry to stop taking a black and white view of technology and you have an argument for everyone to turn the religious fervour down a notch or two.

“Software is technology. It can be delivered as a product or as a solution. It must meet the needs of its users. Users come in different segments as defined by their needs and their ability to communicate with each other about the technologies they are using,” writes Ramji giving his perspective on Hugh Macleod’s unfortunately outdated view of the Microsoft versus open source debate.

“This is not a war. This is about technology. It’s only a war when we hold on to hunter-gatherer era tribal mentalities and say “Our way is good! Their way is bad!” adds Ramji.

Meanwhile, Governor is on similar ground on his assessment of the OpenXML versus OpenDocument Format.

“Our monotheism does us no favours. A more polytheistic sense, of using the right tools for the job, and being in mastery, bringing a more distributed spirituality into our technology saturated lives,” he writes.

“And document formats seems an obvious place for that kind of thinking. One true format? What do we need that for and what god are we worshipping? What are the problems we’re trying to solve?”

Amen to that!