02.05.13
Former Novell Employees in Microsoft’s Fight Against GNU/Linux Adoption
Summary: UEFI, Mono and OOXML recalled along with their role in suppressing GNU and Linux adoption
The other day we named SJVN (Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols) for publishing “Linux on Windows 8 PCs: Some progress, but still a nuisance” and the context was spin that said Microsoft liked Linux while attacking its booting rights. Groklaw‘s Pamela Jones wrote something similar to us: “What’s clear to me is that Microsoft hates Linux, it would like it to die, and it throws tacks in its roadway perpetually at every opportunity.”
“What’s clear to me is that Microsoft hates Linux, it would like it to die, and it throws tacks in its roadway perpetually at every opportunity.”
–Pamela JonesThe media spin which says Microsoft likes Linux often cites or quotes former Novell employees (we will abstain from naming some in order to keep this impersonal), i.e. people who were paid by Microsoft to work on stuff like Hyper-V, Mono, Moonlight, and OOXML.
UEFI is a similar story and former Novell staff maintains it. The same goes for Mono backer Xamarim and some elements of LibreOffice (the Go-OO component, which was made obliged by Microsoft money to promote OOXML). We previously explained how OOXML helped impede FOSS adoption in Germany, e.g. in Freiburg [1, 2, 3].
Behind the scenes in Munich [1, 2, 3] Microsoft worked to lobby against it too, using a study which the The H says is nonsense, based on what Munich itself is saying:
Talking to The H’s associates at heise open, the head of the Press and Information Office at Munich City Hall, Stefan Hauf, said that it was not possible to conduct a thorough analysis of the study based on the published summary and that many of the study’s assumptions could not be verified due to the lack of detail. Hauf said that, for example, the study factors in support costs for 12,000 clients from the start of the project, although the number of clients gradually rose to 13,000 over the duration of the project. Additionally, workplace maintenance and support is only a minor work aspect for the 1,000 IT staff that are listed in the study, he added.
HP’s calculation completely omits hardware costs as the study assumes that Linux and Windows systems have “roughly the same hardware requirements”. Hauf disagrees: this approach ignores “the experience that Linux clients have lower hardware requirements than Windows clients”, he said. The official added that the study does not differentiate between migration and regular life cycle management costs, and that regular updates of the same operating system were rated as migrations.
HP is worth boycotting over this, but since Red Hat relies on HP servers and both are UEFI backers we find those two sharing a bed, more so this week. █
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Needs Sunlight said,
February 6, 2013 at 6:17 am
Boycotting HP will be hard because the main alternative, Dell, is getting owned by M$. M$ is investing in Dell both directly and, via Silver Lake Partners, indirectly. That will be enough to reduce Dell’s already meager support of Linux. The situation is further complicated in that many institutions and municipalities have agreements that bind them to purchasing only from Dell. That gives M$ a vector through which to spread Vista8 or other dreck.