Microsoft Wins a BUNGL For Open Source Strategy!

Microsoft has been in the news a lot lately, mostly for trying to join up with a reluctant Yahoo in an effort to buy a search and advertising victory that it couldn't earn.  The proposed acquisition of Yahoo is already being panned in the blogosphere, so awarding a BUNGL to Microsoft may seem like piling on, but if you do the hard work of earning a BUNGL, then I can't withhold it from you, so here goes.

Micrsoft is the February, 2008 winner of the Bundling Gluttony (BUNGL) award, for their inspired open source software strategy.  Mary Jo Foley describes the strategy by saying

Microsoft wants to encourage the coexistence of two software stacks: a Microsoft Windows stack (Windows, Internet Information Services, SQL Server, .Net) and a Linux-free/Windows-centric LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack, minus the Linux – something like a “WAMP.”

(More on Mary Jo's "All about Microsoft" blog here).

Hmm.  So Microsoft wants you to run free software on top of software that you have to buy from Microsoft, instead of running free software on top of other free software.   Is it just me, or does that kind of work against the first instincts of most open source users?

But why is Microsoft's open source strategy worthy of a BUNGL?  After all, Microsoft isn't forcing customers to buy Apache and Windows together. 

Here's the rub: Microsoft is very happy to sell you Windows when you want to run Apache on it, but they refuse to port Microsoft Office to Linux.  Their open source strategy is a thinly-veiled attempt to kill the one true open source operating system competitor, Linux, and they will do anything in their power to make it harder for Linux users to continue to use Linux, including working to make Apache, MySQL, and PHP interoperable with Windows.  The emperor is attempting to dictate to the market which open source applications it can live with.

By contrast, Google has used open source as a very effective weapon against Microsoft, as reported by my friend and blogging inspiration, Mitchell Ashley. 

By having an open source strategy, Microsoft is holding out an open hand of friendship to the open source community, while their other hand is behind their back, holding a knife. 

So, for disrespecting potential customers in the open source community by thinking they could fool them into buying Windows, I award Microsoft the February, 2008 BUNGL.  Congrats, and we're looking forward to more creative attempts at market manipulation in the future.