OPINION:
In a now-prophetic scene from Netflix’s “Space Force,” John Malkovich’s chief scientist discovers a crisis that can’t be resolved because Microsoft is auto-updating.
He stares into the distance and, with the fury of a man who has watched mediocre software make consequential decisions on behalf of humanity, delivers his verdict: “F—- Microsoft.”
This month, life imitated art.
Hours after the Artemis II crew achieved liftoff, they encountered something recognizable to every office worker and IT administrator: two Microsoft Outlooks, neither one working.
NASA Mission Control — the organization that once calculated orbital trajectories by hand and put men on the moon with less computing power than a modern wristwatch — had to remotely log in to fix email.
Humor aside, what happened aboard Artemis II represents a more serious problem, one the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing has warned about for years. When a single software vendor is permitted to use its licensing architecture to entrench itself so deeply into an institution’s infrastructure that switching becomes economically and operationally impossible, you don’t get just failing software. You get failing software nobody can remove.
You get failing software on a spacecraft.
NASA runs Microsoft software at a cost of $100 million per year. Like virtually every other government agency, it is locked into a Microsoft ecosystem from which switching is not a realistic option. This is no accident.
It is the intended outcome of decades of licensing practices that our Principles of Fair Software Licensing were written to address: clear and intelligible terms, freedom to move to the cloud provider of one’s choice, interoperable directory software to prevent lock-in and licenses that cover reasonably expected uses of software, including emailing from space.
This is the fundamental corruption of tying as a competitive strategy, a practice the Federal Trade Commission is now investigating. It doesn’t merely distort market share; it also destroys the incentive to be excellent.
After all, why build bulletproof email when your licensing structure guarantees that the customer stays regardless?
The Artemis II Outlook incident will be remembered mostly as a meme, but it deserves more. If NASA had genuine freedom to run its infrastructure on the provider of its choosing, then Microsoft would have had every reason to ensure that its software worked in space before the launch window opened.
Instead, Houston had a problem: Outlook.
RYAN TRIPLETTE
Executive director, Coalition for Fair Software Licensing
Washington
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