05.17.11
IDG Helps Sell the Illusion of Microsoft as ‘Friend’ of Open Source
Summary: More of IDG’s shameless spin explained and the straight dope regarding the CentOS news
IDG, which controls a lot of technology news sites and gets paid by Microsoft through IDC and though advertising, still insists on deceiving using the pattern which can only be excused when they call it a “blog”. And this spin which we wrote about many times before should not be easily excused, as IDG should be more responsible/liable than any other media outlet for doing this. The hiring of writers affects their convictions and biases.
Free/Open Source software proponent are very much able to see the reality-bending, but IDG might be appealing to the village fools and maybe some bosses who do not understand technology. They can in fact be the target audience and find themselves on the receiving end of a reality distortion field.
So, what is the latest example that we speak of? The sites we follow link almost exclusively to IDG regarding stuff like this. It is whitewash from IDG’s Microsoft boosters, designated to the “blog” or “Subnet” area. One booster says: “OSBC 2011 also gives Microsoft another opportunity to declare its love for open source with a keynote on vendor collaboration around cloud computing.”
As we showed some years ago (and got confirmation for that), the person who brought Microsoft to OSBC was Mac Asay, who recently posted an article saying that Google goes proprietary and Microsoft goes “open”. It is truly baffling. He parroted the Microsoft spin that they have been trying to propagate. “Matt Asay Tweets Re Microsoft and CentOS,” writes Groklaw, listing some examples of his recent tweets, e.g
Microsoft just announced at #osbc that CentOS is now a first-class citizen on Windows Server R2 Hyper-V platform.
Microsoft supporting CentOS is a first-class capitalist move. Red Hat’s #1 competition is non-paid Linux, now Microsoft accentuates it.
I think it’s a bold, bold move, and one that threatens Red Hat in a way that Oracle’s own Linux never could.
“Makes me wonder what side Matt is on,” Groklaw remarks. Well, when OSBC becomes a Microsoft showcase, then it has clearly jumped the shark. But it was the same in previous years (they needed the money [1, 2, 3]).
Just in case, let it be clarified that this is not what the IDG spin has suggested. There is no goodwill here, just self interest. Microsoft tries to make PR out of selfish acts, just as it is infiltrating Linux conferences, trying to pretend it gets along (or that Linux proponents are intolerant). But actually, Linux proponents and GNU users can get along just fine with Microsoft. The problem is that Microsoft won’t leave them alone. It is spitting at their work and taxing their Linux gadgets using even blackmail and lawsuits against TomTom, Motorola, and Barnes & Noble.
“The problem is that Microsoft won’t leave them alone. It is spitting at their work and taxing their Linux gadgets using even blackmail and lawsuits against TomTom, Motorola, and Barnes & Noble.”Another one of IDG’s Microsoft boosters, Jon Brodkin, has moved on from just Microsoft advertising to Microsoft whitewashing (which can be even worse because it distorts reality in retrospect). Here is the spin on the news, where patches that only help sell proprietary software from Microsoft are somehow compared to “love”. Very cheeky. And this author goes further than that as he has been pushing it into Linux sites like this one, setting the ground/scene to misunderstanding by the site’s followers.
There is yet more of that fluff which fills aggregators.
The problem is that unlike Windows sites that mock GNU/Linux these days (see the editor’s remark here), IDG pretends to be objective news and sometimes it’s even labelled “open source” when it fact all it does is distort the values of open source and sell us Microsoft as a “Open Source Hero” (as Microsoft sometimes uses as a slogan of sorts [1, 2]). To be fair to Brodkin, the Microsoft booster of The Register did the same, so it does not seem as though IDG is the only culprit.
In summary, while Microsoft is extorting and suing Microsoft hires ‘geishas’ of sorts to give gifts and compliments to reports, whose role then becomes to whitewash Microsoft for more rewards and “access” to staff. It is then them — not their victim — who claim to be “hated” and claim to be victim of “hatred”. It’s amazing reversal and a well-funded PR campaign might actually be able to achieve this.
As we said it before, IDG is like the Fox News of the IT World, assuming proprietary giants are the GOP. Guess where advertising money and analyst contracts typically come from. █
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Agent_Smith said,
May 17, 2011 at 8:06 pm
Oh, oh, M$ supporting CentOS in its virtualizer Hyper V is no love for open source. Actually they(M$) are literally F… Red Hat. No wonder why Red Hat is hiding its code. Vultures like SCOracle and M$ are exploiting the very nature of Free Open Source Software to harm it.
Sad, very sad. And, I see no solution, either ethical or technical for this kind of exploit.