03.13.10
AstroTurfing for Vista 7 Still Alive
Summary: Andre Da Costa is still trolling the competition of Vista 7 while promoting this incarnation of Vista in exchange for gifts from Microsoft
OUR dear reader Goblin is the man who exposed a Microsoft AstroTurfer, Andre Da Costa, who also goes by the pseudonym “Mr Dee” in CNET. We have noticed that he is still trolling articles about GNU/Linux. “After he confessed to nymshifting one has to wonder,” wrote Goblin. “Maybe the Da Costa name has become too toxic to use? I see now he’s pimping Window 7 competitions,” he added [1, 2]. The reality behind Vista 7 is still being warped. Also from last night’s conversation:
| _goblin | Speaking with many non-tech folks who are using Windows 7….all is not well…. | Mar 12 21:21 |
|---|---|---|
| _goblin | the general consensus is “Its just as bad as Vista” | Mar 12 21:21 |
| _goblin | looks and works great the first couple of times…..connect to the net, install a few apps and it reveals its true form. | Mar 12 21:22 |
| Omar87 | _goblin, let’s hope more sounds like these come to the surface. | Mar 12 21:22 |
| _goblin | these comments are coming from “average users” who already had their fill of Vista. | Mar 12 21:23 |
We are not at all surprised to hear this. On the contrary, many people are pleased with Mandriva, which is one of my favourites (others in the family use it). Another reader commenting on the same superb article from Richard Hillesley points out that:
Anyone else see the irony?
[...]
This paragraph brought a wry smile to my face:
“Miguel de Icaza, at that time a rising star of the free software movement and co-creator, with Federica Mena, of the rival GNOME project, expressed the mixed feelings of many users and developers. “KDE was an inspirational project,” he told Linux Journal, “but at the time, the Qt toolkit on which KDE was built was a proprietary toolkit.”
The fact that he’s working with Microsoft now in producing the wretchedly slow Mono to provide compatibility with .NET and potentially laying Linux open to all sorts of future problems is deliciously ironic.
In terms of Mandriva, hopefully they will survive and flourish again, it still hangs in there fairly high up in Distrowatch. They probably do KDE better than any other distro and have done a splendid job with the now excellent KDE4 desktop.
There is some new Mono software from Novell employees this week [1, 2]. It’s fine for Novell, but it’s a patent fine for the rest.
Mandriva is indeed an excellent distribution. It puts to shame other operating systems, but it just doesn’t advertise as much. Since it is still KDE-centric for the most part, it hasn’t much of a Mono problem, either. █
Needs Sunlight said,
March 13, 2010 at 11:34 am
Mandriva can stay clean if it manages its staff carefully in regards to preventing the entryism that is affecting Ubuntu at the volunteer and staff levels. Entryism is the staffing equivalent of squatting, annexation or transmigration traditionally used to destroy or suppress.
Mono, like other Microsoft software, is not a technical problem it is a staffing problem.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
March 13th, 2010 at 12:08 pm
Mandriva has great staff.
Needs Sunlight Reply:
March 13th, 2010 at 12:54 pm
Yes, they do.
However, so did Ubuntu for a while. Ubuntu decided to do a 180 away from the methods and priorities that brought them this far. A lot of the community was cut out of the process to get that turn. Ubuntu’s not terminal stage yet, but soon will be unless recent staffing additions and ‘volunteers’ are rotated out and their damage undone. I don’t suppose Asay will suddenly magically stop being hostile to free software but if he did improve, that would be one help.
Mandriva is one of the distros that could do well to learn from the mistakes of others. It’s not a new concept to let another’s wounds be your warning. Success is a process.
Dr. Roy Schestowitz Reply:
March 13th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
When I first embraced Ubuntu (2004) I viewed it as an “easy Debian” developed mostly by former Debian developers. There was no Mono.