Scott Johnson, founder and CTO of Feedster.com, has rehearsed an unusual argument about Microsoft on his blog. He believes Bill Gates and Co. can challenge the Open Source movement and protect its proprietary base, despite the fashionable ethos of the times.

His thesis has two parts. The first claims bluntly that Open Source client-side software is clunky and inefficient. It’s nowhere near as good as most proprietary software, including Microsoft’s.

Firefox, the browser of choice for the geek community, is an example he gives. With 20 tabs open, the memory drain is around 125 MB. Delete some tabs and the RAM isn’t freed up as you would expect. Similarly, Open Source software sometimes fails inexplicably :

Thunderbird is an interesting mail client. For me it consistently refuses to send messages if it’s been running too long so I constantly have to exit mail just to send a message. This happens regardless of whether or not I’m using my Feedster mail server or my (cursedly required) Yahoo DSL mail server.

His answer to the problems? He wants Microsoft to make the case for its desktop boldly and with conviction, something along the lines of, “Microsoft Desktop: It Just Works Better.”

The situation is more complex than that, though. Contrary to thick client superiority, the boot is on the other foot server-side. This is where Open Source comes into its own. Here Linux dominates and, thinks Johnson, rightly so. He has built his business (Feedster) on Open Source server software, he says.

If he had left it there, nobody would complain and his post might sink rather than appear on Tech.Memeorandum.com and draw the attention of Robert Scoble, Microsoft’s evangelist blogger.

Instead he throws Microsoft the idea that they should target the best Open Source developers who are “as poor as church mice” and pay them handsomely to join Microsoft. They should hire “someone like John Coggeshall, a buddy and really good member of the PHP community. If you hire John (and John is now a real adult with real cash needs) then you just (minorly) attacked the PHP project at its core.”

Of course, others will replace them, but it will take time for them to get up to speed. In the meantime, “you’re hiring good software engineers anyway ~ why not hire the people who would otherwise compete with you?”

Hmmm, this obviously begs the question that such developers would want to join Microsoft at all. And it suggests a cynical war against the Open Source people, preying on their need for funds, not just to advantage Microsoft, but to deal a substantial blow to the whole movement.

If Scott Johnson built Feedster on Open-Source technology, why would he devise a master plan for Microsoft to hobble the community? Could he be after a job himself?

[Source: FuzzyBlog]