Summary: Microsoft wants volunteers to help their countries become hostages of Redmond

Back in 2008 we recalled an incident where Microsoft scraped the names of Austrian GNU/Linux users and then sent them unsolicited/bulk mail trying to 'convert' them. One reader of ours, an avid user of GNU/Linux, has just been sent such a message by Microsoft, perhaps because they found out that he can also develop.

This happened in Canada, where Microsoft's trouble with the law is a subject that we wrote about several times over the past week [1, 2]. Parts of the public sector in Canada move to GNU/Linux, so Microsoft probably wants the Canadian government (which Gates invests in for unknown reasons) to become more Windows dependent. Microsoft depends on developers. As Steve Ballmer stressed in his eccentric fashion (see video at the top, it's somewhat reminiscent of the nürnberg rally), it's all about developers. It's also why Mono and Moonlight are so beneficial to Microsoft; they give Microsoft control over developers, not mere users. They want more control even over KDE developers, but fortunately, they never quite got there.

By contrast, yesterday in the news we found this post about Gnome Do, which is a case of Canonical employees manufacturing more Mono for GNOME. Novell's staff has this new project called Pinta (mentioned in [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6]), which is built by the same guy who worked on Paint.NET (and a Novell employee, which means that some of the income comes from Microsoft's investments in Novell). Earlier this week in OStatic, Pinta was promoted as a Mono-based substitute for the GIMP.

Pinta is a Solid Image Editing Alternative to GIMP

[...]

Modeled after Paint.NET, Pinta makes a great lightweight alternative to GIMP. It works on Linux, Mac OS X, and Windows, and has enough features to get all but the heaviest of editing jobs done.

We have already written enough about what Pinta may mean for Microsoft's strategy around developers and around patents, so we won't be discussing this again. Instead, let us look at what Microsoft is doing in Canada. Here is a screenshot of part of the E-mail it sent out to many people (even GNU/Linux users).

To quote the text (bar the hyperlinks, for obvious reasons):

The ultimate coding competition has returned. Are You A Talented .Net Developper?

Want to try your hand at developing on Windows Azure or Windows Server €®? There's over $15k worth of prizes up for grabs if you do.

Now's your chance to put your skills to the test, going toe-to-toe with Canada's best and brightest web developers during the FTW! Coding Competition. Here's The Deal

Show us your web applications deployed on Windows €® + IIS or Windows Azure and enter the competition in either of the following two categories:

Best Windows Azure Application: Write a new application to run on the Windows Azure cloud platform.

Best Open Government Application: Create an app that uses any of the existing Canadian Open Data Catalogues, such as those published by Vancouver, Toronto or Edmonton.

That's it! So sign up, and may the best developer win! Prizes

The winners will walk away with $15,000 worth of top-of-the-line DELL products, with the 1st place prize being the ultimate Dell Office Computer Make Over. Plus you could win 1 of 4 bonus prizes.

The competition's Grand Finale will be taking place this spring during Microsoft's Make Web, Not War 2010 conference in Montreal. Prizes Find Out More!

Follow us on Twitter @ webnotwar

List prizes

SponsorsDelliWeb Microsoft SQL Server 2008 ExpressWindows AzurePHP Québec Finals taking place at Make Web Not War

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What's with the slogan "Make Web Not War"? What is "War" in this context? Microsoft insists that “Evangelism is WAR!” [1, 2]

At first sight, there was nothing too rogue about the E-mail, but our reader who received it said that "it's a .NET programming competition for an app that accesses "open" government records. [...] They say any language for one, except its for a windows app."

It also gives Microsoft control of the citizens' data (because of Azure and the so-called 'cloud' option for government), just like in NASA [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], which is a travesty.

What we found most curious is the use of a "competition". This is how the greedy control freaks from Microsoft always do something they don't want to be seen as doing. Basically, they look for free labour which also achieves something that the company wants no direct involvement in (like AstroTurfing, which it externalises to outside agencies). In Japan, for instance, they organised some competitions for porting L[inux]AMP applications to Windows. Microsoft paid almost nothing for people to discriminate against and harm GNU/Linux. ⬆