08.25.10
Microsoft is ‘Openwashing’ Azure
Summary: Microsoft resorts to openwashing its so-called ‘cloud’ (“openwashing” is the practice of trying to portray as “open” something which is not)
SOME months ago we began to show that Microsoft was marketing its Fog Computing as “open”, which could not be any more cynical because Fog Computing is probably more proprietary than proprietary software in the traditional sense; people haven't even access to the binaries they use. A company which was created by a Microsoft employee, Black Duck, is currently promoting Fog Computing with this press release. They too confuse “Open Source” with SaaS, whose relationship is complex. This mirrors what Microsoft has been doing to order to ‘openwash’ the defective Azure, which it is trying to ‘openwash’ in some other ways.
“I think this shows move from licensing to SaaS,” remarks praxagora on the deceiving words from Microsoft’s “OOXML Paoli” [1, 2] (see these previous debunkings with small updates in both).
“The fight against cancer would be pursued by the colleagues at the Foundation, with a medical focus.”
–FFII“Paoli says so, and that’s fine,” the FFII says. “The fight against cancer would be pursued by the colleagues at the Foundation, with a medical focus.” That of course is a reference to Steve Ballmer’s remark, which said: “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”
Sean Michael Kerner is now writing about Microsoft’s bogus “Open Source” Foundation, which holds the key to Microsoft-complementary software which gets marketed as “open” (Paoli too refers to, highlights and brags about such fake openness because it’s actually Fog Computing, which impressed nobody but fellow Microsoft folks like de Icaza). Sean Michael Kerner points out that:
The foundation is initially being funded by Microsoft and will be led by Microsoft’s Sam Ramji, though Ramji has also announced his plans to leave Microsoft this month. Novell’s Miguel de Icaza will be part of the new foundation’s Board of Directors (don’t forget Microsoft and Novell have an interop and patent deal).
So why does Microsoft need its own open source foundation? And what’s the difference vs what they are doing with Codeplex.com anyways?
It wasn’t so long ago that Microsoft used CodePlex to break the GPL. It took code from there in order to develop a Vista 7 tool and it violated the licence in the process, just like Facebook does right now [1, 2] (mentioned a few days ago).
In summary, people must beware what Microsoft labels “open”. Microsoft is lying. █
