Not when people make mistakes.  Not necessarily so bad when they say they would do it, and don’t.  But when they try to cover their mistakes.  Or when they won’t admit.  Or they won’t change, and make the same mistakes again and again.

why am I mentioning this.  Because I saw something quite interesting in Joel’s blog
that I thought was funny and yet fully expressed what i wanted to say.  It goes like this…. “Don’t piss on my leg and then tell me it’s raining.“  Yes, that makes me, and I guess most of us really really upset.  But why do people keep doing it?

I was attending a business meeting, when the topic started to shift to open source.  And one of the attendees started saying, ” of course, Wilson Ng has been a Microsoft advocate and partner, and we do expect him to oppose open source.”  I grimaced and shrugged.  I have often been characterized as such.  But I believe that I have grown old enough in the industry that I have stopped looking at things as black and white, and start to be more circumspect.

Looking at things objectively means you understand that generalizations tend to be wrong, and it often is.  Not all Americans are angels, and not all 3rd world officials are corrupt or incompetent.  Not every thing  Microsoft does is bad, and defective software do not automatically become good when labeled as open source. 

After doing business with Microsoft over the last dozen or so years,

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