Cnet’s News.com has an article entitled Microsoft: Open source ‘not reliable or dependable’. It’s about comments Jonathan Murray (Microsoft Europe’s VP and and CTO) made to BBC World in the first part of a documentary called The Code Breakers. Murray states:

Some people want to use community-based software, and they get value out of sharing with other people in the community. Other people want the reliability and the dependability that comes from a commercial software model. And again, at the end of the day, you make the choice based on what has the highest value to you.

I find it absolutely hilarious that a representative from a company with notoriously unstable and insecure software actually said that.

Say what you will about open source software, but in the 10 years or so that I’ve been using open source operating systems (I’m speaking mostly of FreeBSD here) I might have had the OS crash on me maybe 5 times. Even saying it crashed 5 times is a stretch, but I’m being generous here. The Windows machine I have at work has crashed at least that many times in the past month. Don’t even get me started on applications crashing.

Now, I don’t blame Microsoft for making such incredibly false claims—they’re in the business of making money. If you don’t sell your product, you don’t make any money. I understand that. But what I absolutely hate about this whole thing is that there is some middle manager somewhere (probably somewhere in this building, actually) that’s going to read this article and take it for gospel when it’s simply not true. The worst part about it is that the end result will be that the company spends a ton of money on a lousy product when they could’ve had better for free.

Perhaps Microsoft should take their own “commerical software is more dependable and reliable” line seriously and release some software that’s actually reliable and dependable. Until then, I’ll continue to look elsewhere when I actually need a product to work properly.