07.01.10
Microsoft is Trying to Kill Linux Conferences
“I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. [...] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?”
Summary: News from Europe suggests that Microsoft still uses old tricks to ruin competitors’ conferences and take away European sovereignty
Microsoft had entered LinuxTag 2010 [1, 2] in order to "infiltrate" the event, to use its own wording. Begrudgingly, Fab from Linux Outlaws complained about it in the latest episode [Ogg] where they say that in LinuxTag 2010 Microsoft plastered its things all over the place by paying money to be there and put off those who attend. It’s a normal Microsoft routine which we last wrote about on Monday. Here is the Linux Outlaws episode in question (skip the first half an hour or so):
The short story is that Microsoft brought some American employees to Germany in order to sing that tired old tune about Microsoft as an “open source” company. It was a keynote talk at LinuxTag, a Linux conference. Microsoft paid it a lot of money to get this privilege. It’s always the same story. Everyone was appalled, or at least that’s the impression given by the audiocast.
André Rebentisch points out that Microsoft has also just gotten a contract which poses a threat to Europe.
A bit strange that the French make defense contracts for their critical information infrastructure with American companies and surrender their domestic procurement rules.
Why don’t they think before making such mistakes? Was the public consulted at all? █
