Having worked for three startup companies in my career, of my favorite shows this winter has been Startup Junkies on MOJO. It documents the daily trials and tribulations of running a startup company, in this case Earth Class Mail. Their service is both useful and innovative, the staff and management seem capable, and the show is entertaining to watch, at least for me.

However, something in the latest episode really irked me. Earth Class Mail was planning to announce their partnership with Microsoft at a conference, and was scrambling to port their software to .NET in time for the conference. Okay, that's fine. I have no beef with .NET or Microsoft, and I usually don't question anybody's choice to use those platforms. However I found the following statement from Ron Wiener, CEO of Earth Class Mail, very disturbing:

...we launched our platform on open source code, which was free, and we knew that later on we're going to need to be able to scale -- we're going to need to move to the Microsoft .NET plaform so that we could handle millions of simultaneous users.

Could this be a more obvious shill for Microsoft? What's worse though, is that this statement promotes more of the usual FUD about open source, implying that it can't scale. Somebody forgot to tell Yahoo! and eBay and Google. And all the other companies we work for that use open source. Shame on you, Ron. I'll still watch the show, but I'm keeping my eye on you!