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Microsoft Tries to Lure Linux Luminaries Away From Linux

Eric Raymond's mug



Summary: Microsoft continues to try buying out its rivals from the GNU/Linux world

TECHRIGHTS has a small repository of information about what Microsoft did to Borland. This predates this site . The short story is, Microsoft abused its monopoly power to crush a smaller competitor, taking away from Borland some of the key people. It's a form of monopoly abuse that reduces competition and enables Microsoft to boost prices, reduce quality, and lock everyone into Microsoft products (not just development products).



"People who are feeble joined Microsoft and they know who they are."Microsoft has been trying a similar strategy against Free software and GNU/Linux. We've covered some examples before, including Eric Raymond (shown above). People who are feeble joined Microsoft and they know who they are. They sold out. Gianugo Rabellino is one of the latest (now promoting "open surface" nonsense for Microsoft) and Simon Phipps seemed to suggest some months ago that Microsoft was trying to recruit similar people to buy the perception that it is part of its competition and is therefore not worthy of antitrust scrutiny or scepticism. This also disrupts the competition's operations. Moments ago in IRC we also found out that twice in the past Microsoft tried to recruit the community manager of a GNU/Linux distribution (it's in our IRC logs). This reminds us of the tactics Microsoft used against Borland, namely destroy the competition by buying it away or removing the key people using money. To quote the confession, "about 4 months into working at [Linux company]I had the second offer" from Microsoft. Quite rightly he refused and we respect this declination which shows the putting of one's values before money. It helps show the strength of the GNU/Linux community and the sneakiness of Microsoft, which is trying to buy out its competitors and critics (long history there and definitely a subject for another future post).

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