03.29.10
If You Distrust Mono, Then You Are Called a “Microsoft Hater”, “Paranoid”, and “Conspiracy Theorist”
Summary: Microsoft’s obey-or-be-ostracised method for daemonising and thus silencing opposition expands to GNU/Linux through former employees and other collaborators
THE FSF already knows that Mono and Moonlight are a patent liability. It doesn’t take an expert investigator to look at the simple facts, but it does take some thick skin to face insults from Mono bullies. Several of those Mono advocates who try to poison Ubuntu (Canonical) just like they poisoned Novell are former Microsoft employees whom we prefer not to name. Both Mark Shuttleworth and Matt Asay are currently being pressured by former Microsoft employees whom we see, which leads to entryism and newer Mono incursions [1, 2] (Canonical hired some people who worry us). Microsoft influence probably ruined SUSE, which had the best desktop distribution at the time of the Microsoft deal (I used only SUSE on all my computers at the time, except one which ran Ubuntu 4.10). It becomes increasingly important that people stand up and talk about the Pandora’s box or the jar of worms that is Mono. It’s about assimilating GNU/Linux to Microsoft and saturating job ads with “.NET” and “Silverlight”. It’s about ruining Free software not just with patents but with the notion and tool of control. Microsoft could adapt to Java, PHP, Python and so forth; but instead, it is trying to persuade Free software developers to work in reverse and coming to its rescue are former employees, existing Microsoft MVPs, and people whose wage comes via Novell from Microsoft. Mono would not pass the ‘smell test’ if it was developed inside Microsoft.
“Mono would not pass the ‘smell test’ if it was developed inside Microsoft.”We are occasionally seeing people dismissed as “paranoid” if they suggest that Microsoft has something to do with slow adoption of GNU/Linux on the desktop. Honesty is important. Setting information free is important for the goal of spreading the software, at least through education of people, distributors, and decision-makers. “Ten people who speak make more noise than ten thousand who are silent,” argued Napoleon Bonaparte.
We sometimes suspect there is a PR effort to make labels like “Microsoft hater” [1, 2] and “patent piracy” (yes, they now say this about patents too) more commonplace until people repeat them. Bruce Byfield prefers using terms like “conspiracy theorists” (Miguel de Icaza called Jeremy Allison just that because he had criticised Mono [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]) and there is a plethora of other terms to capture mental pictures. McCarthyism was similar to this (“Soviets sympathiser” and the likes of that).
If more people get the courage to speak out against Mono, then Microsoft and its followers will struggle to just paint everyone a “Microsoft hater”. They try to classify and separate. Mono disdain should be the norm, not the exception or the silent sentiment. █
“I saw that internally inside Microsoft many times when I was told to stay away from supporting Mono in public. They reserve the right to sue”
–Robert Scoble, former Microsoft evangelist
verofakto said,
March 29, 2010 at 9:02 pm
Hilarious.