03.19.10
IRC: #boycottnovell @ FreeNode: March 19th, 2010
To use your own IRC client, join channel #boycottnovell in FreeNode.
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Novell Hires More Mono People (Despite Sacking SUSE Developers) and Microsoft Buys an OSBC Spot/Seat
“I’d like to see Gnome applications written in .NET in version 4.0 – no, version 3.0. But Gnome 4.0 should be based on .NET.”
–“Gnome to be based on .NET – de Icaza”
Summary: Novell and Microsoft continue to fund development with the desired bias of using Microsoft APIs; Microsoft pays for its share of OSBC (again) and gets to set the tone with a keynote speech
THE correction we made the other day was perhaps premature because Paul Cutler, whom we quoted as being a Novell employee, is indeed becoming a Novell employee (and has probably had that planned for a while). “So technically I was wrong,” said our reader, “he’s not at Novell *yet*, but obviously he will be.” Here is what he wrote a short while ago: “Wrapping up my last day at Webroot today (packing boxes!) and then off until 4/1 when I start at Novell!”
It may be April 1st, but it doesn’t seem like much of a joke.
For over a year we have shown that while Novell reduces GNU/Linux focus (and lays off SUSE employees) it is increasing its focus on Microsoft with software like Mono and Moonlight. “That GNOME guy that said Mr. Cutler didn’t work for Novell was clearly disingenuous (I assume he was a GNOME guy anyway),” said our reader. “GNOME is such a joke, they are giving power to Novell so Novell can rape them and force Mono down their throats and thereby force it down everyone else’s throats. Such a joke.”
“There is a substantive effort in open source to bring such an implementation of .Net to market, known as Mono and being driven by Novell, and one of the attributes of the agreement we made with Novell is that the intellectual property associated with that is available to Novell customers.”
–Bob Muglia, Microsoft President
We hope that even with excessive Novell power in the GNOME Foundation (including the Director) GNOME 3.0 can stay free of Mono at the core.
“Microsoft is trying to redefine “open source” and associate it with Microsoft and Windows.”We are seeing similar trends over at OSBC, which Matt Asay allowed Microsoft to join [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (he also let Microsoft enter the OSI). They are still paying a lot of money to control the agenda at the event (Novell and Microsoft up at the top, only second to Red Hat; “Where’s Canonical?” asks us a reader). Microsoft’s investment in this event is paying off. “MS presents keynote speech at the OSBC,” tells us a reader in private and points to this article which says: “The presentation by Microsoft’s Stuart McKee, who holds the title of national technology officer for the United States, continued a pattern in recent years that has seen Microsoft publicly embracing the open source movement and even funding it.”
It’s not funding it. It pays money for developers to move over to Windows. That’s different. It’s like saying that Microsoft is funding the elections (in exchange for favours that it receives later, ones that are incompatible with citizens’ interests, such as tax breaks that cronyism enables [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9]).
We notice that Geeknet, which got filled with some former Microsoft employees [1, 2], is there as well. It’s all just slush funds for Microsoft if it wants to coerce its competition, which is precisely what it’s trying to do here. The Novell deal was an inexpensive one and it turned Novell into an extension of Microsoft.
Microsoft is trying to redefine “open source” and associate it with Microsoft and Windows. It’s an old strategy. Last year we showed how Microsoft tried to paint ARM devices (they won’t run Windows) as incapable of handling normal computing tasks by calling them “smartbooks” [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] and comparing them to phones rather than small “PCs”. There is also the “industry standard” FUD from Gartner (where “standard” means Windows on x86) and now there is “PC”, which they try to equate to just “Windows”. Below we add some logs of a conversation from several hours ago; it’s about the term “PC”, which quite frankly, Apple too played a role in establishing as synonymous with “Windows” because of its many adverts. █
Patents Roundup: Europe, ACTA, Aldi Attacked by the MPEG Cartel, and More
Summary: Europe’s policy on software patents and the ACTA factor; the MPEG patent pool turns out to be not much of a sleeping giant but an awake one; patents relating to cancer genes continue to needlessly cost lives
Microsoft keeps struggling to change Europe’s patent law and enable taxation of Free software. The FFII’s president, Benjamin Henrion, has tracked some of the latest developments in that regard; they happen to include ACTA.
“Just heard one guy on RTBF Purefm from an anti-piracy org in Belgium that they were pushing for “technical measures” on the ISPs (filtering),” said Henrion, who added that the “European Parliament ITRE committee [is] promoting interoperability and technological neutrality”; he skeptically points to this document [PDF] from the Committee on Industry, Research and Energy. ACTA booster Paul Rübig [1, 2] is the reporter and here is the text which alludes to patents (inside “interoperability”):
SUGGESTIONS
The Committee on Industry, Research and Energy calls on the Committee on Legal Affairs, as the committee responsible, to incorporate the following suggestions in its motion for a resolution:
Recommends that the Commission should:
1. Promote availability of EU-wide licenses for intellectual property rights (IPR);
2. Consider, as a step towards an internal market for IPR, licenses based on the original language, enabling a licensee for a work in one language to distribute it across the EU in that language;
3. Promote interoperability and technological neutrality, allowing content covered by IPR to be distributed regardless of technology or format used, and allowing convertibility of content between formats;
4. Maintain strong protection of IPR while facilitating legal use of works through easily available, one-stop, EU-wide licensing options, supported by transparency regarding the holders of the IPR;
5. Consider effective sanctions to deter infringement of copyright and prevent the losses caused to rights holders as a result, while upholding the principle that, for example, communications providers are mere conduits and as such not liable for infringement occurring through or facilitated by their services;
6. Make full use of sanctions available to it under competition and trade law where relevant;
7. Include, where relevant, an evaluation of the impact relating to IPR, in particular with respect to small and medium-sized enterprises, in all impact assessments;
8. Contribute, through the European Counterfeiting and Piracy Observatory, to the development of common standard procedures and criteria to enable the production of reliable and comparable data on the occurrence and value of counterfeiting and piracy across sectors.
FFII Greece has this new article describing the patent situation in Europe:
This is a presentation I made at an open source conference in Greece, 13 March 2010, at TEI of Piraeus.
Getting involved with software patents seems boring, and, unfortunately, it is, at least for me. I’m a computer professional and I like writing code. I’m a Python/Django fan, and I’m involved in a couple of free software projects. One of them is a state project (and it’s free because I took the opportunity to move it towards the right direction when I saw that the right people were in the right positions). I don’t like politics and legal issues much. However, I do occasionally mess around with copyrights and patents; not because I like it, but because I like being free, and it is a price I pay to defend my freedom.
[...]
I’m in Greece, I create a new invention, and I patent it at the Greek Industrial Property Organisation. What happens in other countries? Could someone from Italy copy my invention? The answer is they can, because the Greek patent is only valid in Greece. In order to solve this problem, many European countries signed the European Patent Convention (EPC) in 1973. Under the EPC, the European Patent Office (EPO) was born. If you are granted a patent by the EPO, then it is practically valid in all countries that have signed the EPC.
Note that the EPC is not a European Union treaty, but a treaty of the 36 countries that have signed it. The EPO is not an EU institution, but an international institution of the 36 countries that have signed the EPC.
“Since EPO failed to change the law, they then attempted to change the court,” quotes Henrion from the article above. This leads us to discussing the ACTA, which has a European Parliament meeting scheduled for 2 weeks from now (Room ASP 1G2).
Henrion has transcoded the following video, which he says is about “Punishing Patent Pirates with freeze of bank accounts.”
Direct link (“European Parliament about ACTA: Punishing Computer Pirates”)
The original video was in a Microsoft format (more here). Henrion claims that “Microsoft sponsors the European Parliament’s infrastructure, so now 600M EU citizens have to pay.” He also shows this parliamentary questioning where the “European Commission confirms they won’t give the ACTA documents to the public, since other countries oppose [it].”
Lastly, and also via Henrion, this article in German shows “ALDI threatened by MPEGLA in Dusseldorf court, the European version of the Eastern District of Texas.”
In this decent new recording, Novell’s former community manager for OpenSUSE asks: “What’s Bilski got to do with open source?”
Joe ‘Zonker’ Brockmeier speaks with Aaron Williamson, counsel at the Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC).
The session was very good and interesting, but ironically, it’s available only in MP3 format (needs software patents). They should look at that new Aldi case for insight into the ramifications. The MPEG-LA-LA Land is mostly promoted by companies like Microsoft and Apple.
The creator of the World Wide Web says that “software patents are a terrible thing”, but often we forget about the patents that actually kill people. We previously gave examples where treatment of cancer was impeded by patents [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7]. This mostly revolves around a very controversial patent that we mentioned before and is now mentioned in Reuters [via].
New Study Points Out That Gene Patent On Trial Is Very, Very Broad
Myriad Genetics’ disputed patent on the BRCA1 breast cancer gene is “surprisingly broad” and could interfere with future research, three experts said on Tuesday.
They are killing people by obstructing doctors rather than saving lives. ACTA may have a similar effect. Patents and life are sometimes incompatible. How about those fashion patents that we sometimes mention? Some people already strive to obtain copyrights on clothes.
Basically, Suk’s whole position is based on the fact that the monopoly rents of designers is decreased by a lack of copyright, but she fails to consider that this leads to greater and more frequent innovation (which we see all the time in the market). What’s even stranger is that she flip-flops her argument in the middle of the paper. She talks repeatedly about how designers need big profits to have the incentive to innovate, but then says that big designers aren’t the ones really threatened. Instead, she claims, it’s the smaller designers. But, those designers didn’t have those big profits to protect in the first place. They’re out there trying to make a name for themselves by designing something new and cool — so they have plenty of incentive to innovate. And if their design this year is copied, that’s great for them because it gives them greater recognition and means the demand for their original products will be even greater the following season.
Do we want to live in a world where knitting can become a punishable offense for ‘infringing’ someone’s design? Seriously, when did the patent system lose sight of its original goals? It’s not there to assist big businesses; rather, it’s intended to protect small businesses with from the minority of the opulent. █
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Linux is Not Against Software Patents (and Why Linus Torvalds Should Speak Up)
Summary: An inconvenient truth about the Linux Foundation is brought up again now that Linux is attacked with software patents that are named
Linux is a fine kernel, but it is not the Free desktop or the Free software movement; it also does not share all the same values as the FSF and the FFII, for example. Linux has grown to become more than a one-man project and it now falls under the banner of a foundation, which introduced corporate interests from software patents proponents (with large portfolios, evidently) such as IBM, Google, and Oracle. Linus Torvalds worries about software patents and he opposes them, but at the same time he relies on companies that fund Linux development.
Now that Microsoft adds its weight [1, 2, 3] to Apple’s software patents assault on GNU/Linux [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] maybe it’s time for Torvalds to speak up. It’s unlikely that he will.
At the Linux summit, OIN is still somewhat central (it’s like an extension of the Linux Foundation). FFII’s president wrote the following yesterday: “OIN, or the codification of vapour inventions, companies can capture and codify open source “inventions” http://i5.be/aC5”
“HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection…”
–Peter Chou, HTC CEOJust to clarify, even though the OIN can be effective sometimes [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], it does not aim to end software patents. It might be a hindrance if what isn’t part of the solution is part of the problem. OIN is not a problem, but it’s not a permanent solution, either. It deals with problems as they arise rather than eliminate the problem at its root. The funding sources of the OIN are pro-software patents, so this approach only makes sense to them.
Going back to Apple’s lawsuit that Microsoft endorses, here is HTC’s new and official response, which includes the statement: “HTC disagrees with Apple’s actions and will fully defend itself. HTC strongly advocates intellectual property protection and will continue to respect other innovators and their technologies as we have always done, but we will continue to embrace competition through our own innovation as a healthy way for consumers to get the best mobile experience possible.”
One reader interprets this as endorsement of software patents, whereas another says (about “intellectual property”): “Like copyrighted GPL code?”
China does have software patents, but for Apple to pull this card is simply a sign of misery. We don’t have the same problem in Europe although the TomTom case contests this assumption. The next post will discuss Europe in a lot more detail. █
Microsoft Sued by VirnetX (Again) and Kodak Alleges That Microsoft’s Patent Troll Bullies Companies Along With Ray Niro
Summary: Intellectual Ventures is said to be attacking companies using its proxies and Microsoft suffers the wrath of the very practice it advocated with investments (patent trolling)
WITH some of its latest patent deals (e.g. Amazon [1, 2, 3]), Microsoft made it abundantly clear that it views racketeering [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7] as an acceptable business model. No Microsoft executives have been arrested for it because we live in a society that typically jails the poor and glorifies the rich. It’s part of the indoctrination system. We are taught that large entities are immune to social responsibilities, whereas small ones can be viewed of “crooks”, “nutcases”, or “terrorists”. Both are harmful and there is room for infinite hypocrisy.
But anyway, Microsoft is quickly finding out that those small “terrorists” — the patent trolls — can cause a lot of damage. Shortly after losing the VirnetX case [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8], Microsoft gets sued by VirnetX again (this time triple damages for Vista 7). VirnetX is of course just a patent troll that contributes nothing to industry, whereas Microsoft is a marketing firm that contributes nothing to industry, except harm and monoculture.
“Usually Microsoft doesn’t develop products, we buy products.”
–Arno Edelmann, Microsoft’s European business security product manager
Here is some more coverage of Microsoft’s loss to VirnetX:
Microsoft has been ordered by a US federal jury in Texas to pay nearly $106m to VirnetX Holding Corporation for infringing two internet communication patents.
Microsoft’s booster Emil Protalinski says that Microsoft will appeal, as usual. It’s the same rollercoaster of exhaustion when it comes to i4i [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11, 12].
“Microsoft is a patent troll or at least a backer of some; one could argue that Microsoft is a patent troll by association…”Based on the words of Microsoft's patent troll at Intellectual Ventures, this massive patent-trolling firm was created after discussions with Bill Gates; he created his own troll to ‘address’ the issue of patent trolls. In order to avoid the “troll” status, Gates and his friends established a model whereby there is reliance on a central hoarder of patents that lends patents to legal attack dogs. This business model has proven successful because some large companies paid "protection money" to Intellectual Ventures under NDAs. Intellectual Ventures has no less 1,000 firms connected to it; these firms are akin to armed mafia people who will go around shooting victims and their families under “mysterious circumstances” unless those victims pay money to the mafia Dons, namely Nathan Myhrvold, Bill Gates, and their ilk (they are financially connected and Gates is part of this vehicle that resembles pyramid schemes). Microsoft is a patent troll or at least a backer of some; one could argue that Microsoft is a patent troll by association and the following new article sheds light on the connection to the father of patent trolling, Ray Niro. We wrote about this connection before
“Kodak Says Intellectual Ventures Behind Patent Lawsuit Filed By Shell Company,” says TechDirt:
It seems that at least one company sued over such a patent is hitting back. Joe Mullin points us to the Legal Pad blog, which notes that Kodak, who has been sued for patent infringement by a shell company (PFI) being represented by Ray Niro (famous for, among other things, being the first person labeled a “patent troll,” as well as suing a bunch of companies he didn’t like with a bogus patent — finally rejected for good, recently — that he claimed covered any website that used a JPEG image), doesn’t believe that it’s really the shell company that’s behind this lawsuit. It’s demanding that Intellectual Ventures take part…
The original report asks, “Will Patent Holder IV [Intellectual Ventures] Show Its Face to Kodak?”
Kodak is trying to draw large patent hoarder Intellectual Ventures into court.
With its 30,000 patents and opaque veil of mystery, IV has shied away from the courts, likely because an allergy to discovery. But with its new money making scheme of selling patents to trolls who then file lawsuits (free reg. req.), you knew that IV would eventually end up in a courtroom.
Here are the basics on the Kodak case:
1. IV sold patent to shell company named Picture Frame Innovations.
2. Picture Frame, represented by Ray “the original patent troll” Niro, sued Kodak for patent infringement.
3. IV co-founder Peter Detkin told me last year that IV is now cutting deals where it sells patents and takes a cut of any money made by filing lawsuits (free reg. req.). So it seemed like IV might have struck such a deal with Picture Frame and Niro.
We wrote about Kodak and patents before [1, 2]. █
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Democracy is Not the Same as Freedom
UDS Karmic Group Photo, by Kenneth Wimer
Summary: People have lost track of real mistakes that Canonical is making and instead they focus on buttons and themes
ANYONE who wishes to fork a GNU/Linux distribution can do just that, provided the GPL is obeyed and trademark law too. That’s the power of Free software. Some people conflate that with democracy, which is an entirely different — if not a Utopian — view of the world where everyone is said to be perfectly happy based on consensus (an impossibility). In some sense, “democracy” is just a word that people like to say.
Ubuntu GNU/Linux can’t be everything to everyone, which is why we defend its latest decision to change the theme and we have no problem with Mark Shuttleworth’s latest response, which led to resentment or at least suspicion. Linux development and Wikipedia editing are the same. People give advice and offer an opinion for all to see, but it’s a meritocracy, not a democracy.
Here is Shuttleworth’s controversial message in full (it more or less repeats what Jono Bacon has been telling us in the Boycott Novell IRC channel for several weeks).
On 15/03/10 23:42, Pablo Quirós wrote:
> It’d have been nice if this comment had been made
> some time ago,
> together with a deep reasoning on the
> concrete changes that are in mind.
>
> We are supposed to be a community,
> we all use Ubuntu and contribute to
> it, and we deserve some respect regarding
> these kind of decisions. We
> all make Ubuntu together, or is it a big lie?We all make Ubuntu, but we do not all make all of it.
In other words, we delegate well. We have a kernel
team, and they make kernel decisions. You don’t get to
make kernel decisions unless you’re in that kernel
team. You can file bugs and comment, and engage, but
you don’t get to second-guess their decisions. We have a
security team. They get to make decisions about security. You
don’t get to see a lot of what they see
unless you’re on that team. We have processes to help make
sure we’re doing a good job of delegation, but being an open
community is not the same as saying everybody has a
say in everything.This is a difference between Ubuntu and several other
community distributions. It may feel less democratic, but
it’s more meritocratic, and most importantly it means (a) we
should have the best people making any given decision, and
(b) it’s worth investing your time to become the
best person to make certain decisions, because you
should have that competence recognised and rewarded
with the freedom to make hard decisions and not get
second-guessed all the time.It’s fair comment that this was a big change, and
landed without warning. There aren’t any good reasons
for that, but it’s also true that no amount of warning
would produce consensus about a decision like this.> If you want to tell us
> that we are all part of it, we want information,
> and we want our opinion
> to be decisive.No. This is not a democracy. Good feedback,
good data, are welcome. But
we are not voting on design decisions.Mark
People keep arguing over something as unimportant as a default theme which any new user can trivially change. This is a waste of effort because Ubuntu’s real problems are different. We have a problem with Ubuntu’s attitude towards Mono* (dependency increases over time [1, 2]), its relationship with Yahoo!/Microsoft [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], and some also criticise the company’s promotion of the music store/online storage (reasons vary and include the involvement of Amazon, DRM, patented formats, and so on). Here is another new rant:
Ubuntu One Music Store: Tops or Flop?
Music seems to be a viable income stream also under Linux. After Amarok and Rhythmbox have earned at least a few hundred bucks with Magnatune, Ubuntu is now breaking into the market as well.
What Canonical does here is fair enough and the company did try to establish a deal around Ogg. It’s not so simple to make the market fit minority demands, rather than popular demand driving the market.
We are generally optimistic about the next release of Ubuntu and in our daily links we include a lot of positive news about the distribution. Bruce Byfield says that this next release is “Ubuntu’s Most Innovative”, but in his article he also casts a mistake as a merit:
Early in Lucid’s development cycle, the Ubuntu Development Summit announced that The GIMP would be dropped from the default selection of software installed. Since The GIMP is widely considered an example of excellence in free software, the announcement created some controversy, but the decision was in keeping with Ubuntu’s general priorities. Not only does The GIMP take up considerable space on a CD, but, more importantly, its features far exceed what beginning users could need.
For those who do not know or remember, most users voted to keep The GIMP, but their opinion was ignored or at least just ultimately rejected by the ruling majority. That’s what meritocracy means and that’s fine. The problem is, does Canonical realise the consequence of its actions? By ignoring a majority opinion it creates the perception that Free software is not receptive to feedback. Nowadays, our reader Ryan keeps ranting about Ubuntu being the “same as Windows” (development- and feedback-wise) and last night he argued that “Ubuntu beat Rhythmbox up and stole their lunch money. They modified the referrer in Rhythmbox and now Magnatune owes them $100. Are they really so petty that they’re going to keep that money and deny it to GNOME?”
We previously explained why Canonical’s search deal with Yahoo!/Microsoft was merely a case of taking money away from Mozilla — money that was used to develop Firefox, Thunderbird, and other great software. Canonical will be paid by Microsoft (via Yahoo!) at the expense of Mozilla, which was paid by Google. That again is the type of thing worth criticising, not some petty issue to do with a default theme and buttons that can easily be changed. █
____
* Some minutes ago, Popey from Ubuntu wrote: “Liking the new automatic sync feature in the latest Tomboy” (they just don’t see the problems with Mono).
Amazon and Dell: Friends or Foes of GNU/Linux?
Amazon does worse things than killing of trees for books
Summary: What Amazon does not want to tell us about software patents in its recent deal with Microsoft; more reasons to suspect that Dell pays Microsoft for Ubuntu GNU/Linux
ONE of our readers, who goes by the name of “Mad Hatter”, has just explained why he will not link to Amazon anymore. As some people may recall, we called for an Amazon boycott* [1, 2, 3] not just because what Amazon does to the patent system but also because it joined Microsoft’s anti-GNU/Linux racket after hiring many executives from Microsoft (entryism). Here is the explanation about reasons to avoid Amazon:
By signing a deal with Microsoft, for technology that the Free and Open Source Community developed, Amazon has shown a lack of respect for the ‘Intellectual Property’ of the Free and Open Source Software Community. Amazon’s action is an attack on the community. It can also be considered an attack on the Constitution of the United States of America, which states
To promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries;
The wording above makes mention only of the Authors and Inventors. The drafters of the U.S. Constitution clearly meant that only the Author or Inventor of a work or invention can speak for that work or invention. Therefore if there are issues with a work or invention, the party who has the issues must approach the Author or Inventor, not a third party such as Amazon. In simple terms, Amazon has no right to admit that the Linux Kernel infringes on Microsoft’s patents, only the Authors or Inventors of the Kernel have that right. By making an admission that they have no right to make, Amazon has engaged in what is known as ‘Slander of Title.’
As he put it in a previous post:
So if you are considering a lawsuit against a competitor who uses Free and Open Source Software in the product you claim infringes on your patents or copyrights, don’t expect the community to like what you are doing, and do expect them to do something about it.
In other news, Dell appears to be lying about GNU/Linux, Vista 7, and maybe software patents (Dell announced in 2007 that it had joined the Microsoft/Novell deal).
On many occasions before we explained and showed why we suspect that Dell pays Microsoft for so-called “Linux patents”. The potential evidence comes from many places, including videos from Dell. And now we find this disappointing report showing up in the news, shortly after it turned out that Dell sells machines with Ubuntu at a higher price than equivalent machines with Vista 7.
Dell bars Win 7 refunds from Linux lovers
Dell has told a Linux-loving Reg reader that he can’t receive a refund on the copy of Windows 7 that shipped with his new Dell netbook because it was bundled with the machine for “free”.
In October, another Reg reader succeeded in gaining a $115 (£70.34) refund from the computer maker after he rejected the licence for Microsoft’s OS and installed Linux instead. Microsoft’s EULA, you see, provides for such a refund.
One of our readers asks, “If it’s ‘free’ then how does MS factor in the revenue into its accounts? If it’s not ‘free’ then who enthused DELL to not pay the refund?” █
__
* Boycott as an action to correct a corporation’s behaviour, not to ostracise.
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Unsolicited Mail from Microsoft Canada Wants Developers to Create/Increase Government’s Windows Lock-in
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 DealShow 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!
PrizesThe 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© 2010 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.
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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. █
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