11.27.10
Groklaw: Florian Müller is “Still Pushing Microsoft and Patents.”
Summary: The spin machine which tries to poison advocacy against software patents is being highlighted by Groklaw
MICROSOFT mobbyist Florian Müller keeps flaming and defaming Groklaw (calling it “Groklie”), then whining about “censorship” and snitching to so-called ‘journalists’ whom he is schmoozing and/or ‘spamming’. Müller has been using these tactics for a long time to throw mud at just about every single entity which promotes GNU/Linux and Free software (both the moderates and the more principled). The mobbyist, Müller, already spins the sale of Novell in favour of Microsoft and while Groklaw covers Oracle’s Java case against Android the mobbyist advocates .NET/Mono, which is what he also does for a living (when not campaigning for money, i.e. lobbying).
“Müller without an actual request. Müller also sends duplicate (ish) comments to many sites.”“I see Florian is still pushing Microsoft and patents,” wrote Pamela Jones, the editor of Groklaw, in response to a piece from The Guardian. For those who do not know yet, Müller is mass-mailing journalists to ‘inject’ his spin (we explained this in more details before and gave examples), so sometimes it’s possible that one among very many will slide in a quote or a talking point mailed by Müller without an actual request. Müller also sends duplicate (ish) comments to many sites. This guy is a pusher, just like many other lobbyists. More recently he spread rumours about Red Hat's NDA with Acacia, which Bruce Perens criticised them for. Simon Phipps too criticised them for it and it it stuff like this which the mobbyists can take out of context and distort to daemonise Red Hat:
Communities depend on transparency and equality. Anything that causes community members to engage in actions related to the community that are bilateral will likely be a problem. So some examples:
* Implementing a standard that is covered by patents may mean that some community participants are bound by the terms of licenses for those patents. Bruce Perens speculates that this is the case for Red Hat and JBoss, for example. Perens comments:
But it’s important to note that Red Hat, as defendant, would have had to agree to seal this case knowing its legal partners in the development of JBoss, the open-source community, would be forever kept in the dark regarding whether their own licenses were being violated.
Red Hat messed up in this case, but we mustn’t let Microsoft mobbyists turn us against one another. That’s what they hope to achieve. █
