As far as people *perceive* their products are good – it sells – no matter how shitty they are.

“If you can’t make it good, at least make it look good.”

–Bill Gates

As far as people *perceive* their products are good – it sells – no matter how shitty they are. Then they will engage is mud slugging of competitors products – FUD tactics.

Microsoft will throw away (or “expend”, to put it more nicely) a lot of money in attempts to stay relevant. As always, it spends a lot of money just to ensure the competition cannot make any and then runs out of business. At the moment, Microsoft’s #1 rival is Linux (and the GPL). You can probably think of many other examples (a recent one being ISO) where Microsoft uses money simply to combat threat rather than develop products.

A quick example case about slashdot abuse:

http://tech.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/04/04/1758203 (See, the summary then the comments, don’t forget the one in which windows server is the ultimate world marvel)

I don’t get it, meta-moderating declaring a shill’s comment is definitely not insightful, might not have any effect, I know that, but I am not sure how it would help them.

Any meta-moderation you do, while well intended, might actually be helping the very same people who turn a blind eye to the issue. I got very bitter with Digg, for example, and almost stopped commenting there because the founders refused to intervene where there was coordinated, systematic abuse and slander against members. At times, it was almost as though threads were hijacked by corporations involved (topic dependent). It’s appalling. As for promoted stories, people just cheat nowadays. The stories which make it in are simply gamed for.

I think that, the problems in slashdot are more of a reason to be there more often and mine some karma and vote in the firehose/etc to counter the efforts from the other side.

There was only one trouble-making person to whom (and whose comments) we needed to append a flag. And he no longer comes here. When Novell employees of SUSE developers come here to vent, that’s not AstroTurfing though. That’s a different type of issue though, but we don’t delete comments.

Companies make mistake and also correct them – but deliberate lying and cheating and double standards are shun upon.

Products might be bad or buggy – these things can be fixed over time – but not lack of ethics to win the race.

http://blog.softwarelivre.sapo.pt/2008/03/28/deco-proteste-da-mais-pontuacao-a-ubuntu-que-ao-windows/

I used the word press plugin “douch bag” and further altered it. Of course it’s not very practical on hudreds or thousands of comments like in Slashdot, but it’s easy on lesser ammounts of comments.

Just edit a comment and add a special flag to it

Google blocking AGPL in Google Code

So, first AGPL was not good enough for Google because it was not OSI-approved. That limited its popularity… Now it is OSI-approved. Still, it is not popular enough to be accepted in the Google closed open source hosting site?

And, by the way, why should people put their open source code in the hands of someone who likes open source only when it does good to its business (ehm, that could include me, but we are not talking about me, are we ?

C’mon Chris [DiBona], give developers the ability of using AGPL for their own projects in Google Code. Your fight for no proliferation of licenses is something I subscribe to, but AGPL is the license of the future, no matter if Google likes it or not. And I can guarantee you it will become even more popular if it is accepted in Google Code…

The following are slightly older but very relevant:

GPL author: Google must share code

Companies like Google that build their business on software such as Linux have a moral imperative to contribute back to the free software community, a prominent open source advocate said Tuesday.

Funambol Helps New AGPLv3 Open Source License Gain Formal OSI Approval

March 13, 2008 – Funambol, the leading provider of Mobile 2.0 messaging software powered by open source, today announced that the AGPLv3 has received formal approval by the Open Source Initiative (OSI). Funambol led the process of the license’s approval by the OSI after adopting AGPLv3 in November. It was the first company to adopt the license, which closes the “ASP loophole”.

Census started for enterprise open source use

Intended as a pluggable architecture for organizations to provide their own fingerprint rules and identify open source packages, OSS Discovery is licensed under the new Affero GPLv3 (AGPLv3) for open source SaaS.

Funambol Is First Major Commercial OpenSource Company To Support AGPLv3

Funambol, the leading provider of mobile 2.0 messaging software powered by open source, today announced it has adopted GNU AGPLv3. This makes Funambol the first major commercial open source software company to adopt the license that was just released by the Free Software Foundation. Funambol adopted AGPLv3 because the company views it as a major open source license of the future.

Bear in mind that Funambol and Google collaborate as far as Android is concerned (big assignment) and Chris DiBona et al at Google could and should take a lesson from their small partner.

M$ also must be doing this. Their India partners (Infosys/Wipro) must be having cheap Indian call center people posting such things on the internet.

Although on the outside it appears that Infosys/Wipro is a reputed brand..my ass…the day people come to know what kind of work goes on inside their offices …they will be put to shame. These big corporates have no ethics or standard. Profit is all that they are interested in.

Only decent company I know is Redhat for open source policy. Google is another eyewash. Only reason they support FOSS is they want to destroy microsoft. Most of google code is still not open source.