11.16.09
Revisionism from Microsoft’s Partner, Likewise
Summary: An example of disinformation about history being spread by those to whom open, royalty-free standards are a foe
ONE of our readers has alerted us about what seems like revisionism — a topic that we covered many times before, e.g. in:
- IDG/IDC Does Microsoft’s Revisionism to Deny Crimes
- More Microsoft Jack Revisionism
- How History Gets Warped — Not Forgotten — to Conceal Microsoft Violations
- The New York Times, Hosted by Microsoft Revisionists
Getting down to the latest claim of revisionism, our reader points to this article which says: ‘“In the dot-com bust it was Unix to Linux migration because Linux was cheaper than Solaris on SPARC,” says Barry Crist, CEO of Likewise, a maker of integration and identity management software for mixed environments. “Phase 2 [of corporate open source adoption] has been accelerated by the current economic conditions. IT is looking to do things in a cost-effective manner and there are a lot of viable open source solutions out there.”‘
Our reader says: “It looks like another Microsoft partner trying to establish revisionist history of the history of the WWW.
“You can spot the Microsoft partners by how they stick to Microsoft talking points and how they exist to rope businesses into Microsoft infrastructure and elimination of open standards.”
–Anonymous“During the dot-com, Linux was being added in addition to SunOS on Sparc and Digital Unix on Alpha. Microsoft had not yet even begun to infect the server room at the time, despite the beginnings of FUD and even a smattering of false advertising.
“Linux was often used to get a web service up and running with the least amount of delay on old PCs while the real hardware request was making its way through administrative channels.
“Unluckily, Linux ended up giving managers the idea that Windows servers worked. Most of the claims of growth for Windows in the server room can be blamed on Microsoft eating Novell Netware’s market through false advertising (see court cases) and BSA strongarming. Once those were in place, users bitched up a storm at the loss of reliability. The fast response by the IT dept was to slap Samba on a machine and not tell anyone. The increased reliability of files services for Windows users was attributed then to Windows Server, rather than Samba on Linux. Often the Windows server that a zealot manager forced on the IT department sat in the corner humming away, consuming electricity, WITHOUT a network cable. Then came the day, that under the belief that the server room was using Windows, the managers replaced a departing tech with a Windows monkey who promptly zapped the Samba…”
We gave several examples of migrations without permission back in August. This issue is real.
As for Likewise, it is the "Microsoft version" of Samba (adding software patents to the original software). Our reader shares this older article which starts with: “What’s it like to be an open source company that’s also a Microsoft partner dependent on the Windows world? Not bad, says Barry Crist, CEO of Likewise Software…
Our reader then adds: “You can spot the Microsoft partners by how they stick to Microsoft talking points and how they exist to rope businesses into Microsoft infrastructure and elimination of open standards. That company is peddling Microsoft alternative to Kerberos+LDAP+(puppet/radmind)
“Another apologist company is Cloudera, which seems to be one of Microsoft proxies to damage the Apache foundation and Hadoop in particular.”
Our reader points to a press release, but this latter assessment/speculation is highly questionable. Cloudera was formed by a man from Oracle, whose company had been bought before he left (one can see its genesis in the official Web sites), so any suggestion that its GNU/Linux-based Hadoop distribution is a negative thing would require considerable proof. Regardless, the part about Likewise was worth a quick discussion. There are reasons for distrust, many of which we covered before. █
“What we are trying to do is use our server control to do new protocols and lock out Sun and Oracle specifically”
–Bill Gates
“Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the US Department of Defense.”
–Richard Stallman
