12.27.10
Gemini version available ♊︎The Voice of Treason
Summary: Another layer of the onion is peeled off to reveal what stinks of Microsoft lobbying
MR. Florian Müller is a target because he pretended to be pro-FOSS while he was campaigning against FOSS. This has “ACT” written all over it and, for those who do not know, ACT is a confirmed Microsoft front group. Secrecy is suspicious if not sinister when basic questions — such as the ones Müller is frequently asked — cannot be answered. Not even a yes/no question can be answered. He has many things about him which suggest that he is still lobbying (as a campaigner for hire as he would probably prefer to call it), just as he has done in his latest jobs. This is not an ordinary case of legitimate advocacy of Microsoft agenda; we are soon going to expose some recently-unmasked Microsoft activists whose role at Microsoft includes harassing bloggers, cursing Linux, promoting Microsoft, and insulting Microsoft critics, with preliminary details in the latest episode of TechBytes.
“Twitter finds FOSSpatents similar to MicrosoftPresse,” writes Groklaw. “‘Nuff said. Wait. What’s the definition of a FOSS patent, by the way?” See the screenshot at the top. It comes from the FFII, which Müller has been attacking again recently. The FFII has been very, very naughty because it stands in Microsoft’s way and antagonises software patents. Müller has been trying to incite some members of the FFII against others, which is a dirty old divide-and-conquer tactic whose intended consequence is civil wars.
Richard Jones from Gartner claims that CPTN patents do not affect UNIX/Linux, but he is wrong (Gartner is wrong a lot of the time and we documented several examples of this). “He says that Novell never got any UNIX patents,” explains Pamela Jones over at Groklaw, “But they did. You can find the list of patents “related to the business” in the Attachments here to the APA between Novell and Santa Cruz. Novell, after all, got everything from USL, lock, stock and barrel.”
“To the media, a suggestion: ask Mueller who pays him currently. See if you get a straight answer. If not, ask him if he works for Microsoft. I have. Others have. He wouldn’t say.”
–Pamela Jones, GroklawIn order to defend against this, Groklaw recently suggested that everyone joins the OIN (even free of charge) within weeks. Shortly afterwards there was a lot of OIN news [1, 2, 3] and in relation to KDE's announcement about joining the OIN Pamela Jones wrote: “It may be puzzling to those who imbibed Florian Mueller’s anti-OIN FUD or who don’t know exactly all that OIN does [Microsoft Florian is mass-mailing journalists to plant his disinformation through them]. What they get is explained here. You get more than licenses to OIN-owned patents. You get licenses in perpetuity to all member’s/licensee’s patents that relate to Linux, including the 882 patents Novell is planning to sell to the Microsoft consortium, made up of Microsoft, Oracle, Apple and EMC. So in case, in some alternate universe, the idea behind the sale was to give those dudes some patent infringement possibilities as a patent troll entity, the plan has been foiled for those who join OIN prior to the closing of the sale, which ought to inform us that OIN is not helpless against patent trolls. To the media, a suggestion: ask Mueller who pays him currently. See if you get a straight answer. If not, ask him if he works for Microsoft. I have. Others have. He wouldn’t say. That reminds me: when he and others in the TurboHercules group claimed that Microsoft had no connection to TurboHercules, did that turn out to be true? Live and learn, y’all.”
TurboHercules is partly owned by Microsoft and Intellectual Ventures is like a spinoff of Microsoft created by a Microsoft man with investment from Microsoft. John White, a patent attorney, criticises Intellectual Ventures very strongly, so even those who litigate with patents treat this whole trolling scam as an embarrassment and a danger to their occupation. █
“Prior art is as effective as US soldiers in Iraq: They control the ground they stand on, and nothing more. I used to say Vietnam, but, well, you know…”
–Richard Stallman
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