06.08.11
GPL is Declining According to Friends of Microsoft
Summary: A closer look at those who disparage the GPL and where they come from
AS MY PH.D. is associated with statistics, I believe that I have the critical skills necessary to show, even without auditing the data, when methods are selected to fraudulently show outcomes that are false. When it comes to firms with origins at Microsoft, there is no data available. They keep it to themselves and they probably know why. While trying to gain power as spokespeople for FOSS, these firms do everything the proprietary way, even with software patents.
“Be sceptical of what you read regarding software licences. There is a war for people’s perception and people with media clout are being paid to change these perceptions.”On a couple of occasions this week we wrote about the latest numbers from Black Duck. One of the participants in this was funded by Microsoft. The other actually has Microsoft roots and it is this firm which gets challenged by Free software defenders because it “doesn’t give any information on how the three hundred new sites [for example get] added” (this included Microsoft sites at the time, as we mentioned repeatedly [1, 2] because Microsoft had announced a special partnership). The most problematic repository at the centre of all of this (so-called ‘analysts’ typically point at it) is maintained privately by Black Duck, which was founded by Mr. Levin and “in the early 1990s, Levin was a marketing manager at Microsoft,” say many reports like this one. Microsoft marketing, eh? We have a wiki page about the subject that we find so disturbing as firms like these discourage the use of copyleft licences. Microsoft does not like the GPL and it says that “Linux is a cancer that attaches itself in an intellectual property sense to everything it touches.”
Given that SourceForge erroneously marked a GPL-licensed project of mine as Public Domain (I found this out by accident earlier today as I begin working on another FOSS project), there is a lot of room for bias and error. It is not surprising that analysts who are paid by Microsoft try to tell us that the GPL is declining. OpenLogic is also part of those messengers. It is headed by a guy from Microsoft. Be sceptical of what you read regarding software licences. There is a war for people’s perception and people with media clout are being paid to change these perceptions. By selecting methods and data in a proprietary way one can show anything and ‘prove’ anything (assuming the peers are gullible). █
“Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
