01.14.16
Corporate Media Should Stop Pretending That Former Microsoft Staff is Now FOSS and Linux ‘Analysts’
Demonstrating the rogue business model of much of today’s media
Summary: A site called Linux Insider, which many people may assume to be a Linux news site, is stuffed with Linux-hostile material from people who are connected to Microsoft
The ‘cancer’ (on the Web) which is IDG (dominating technology coverage in many languages and usually attacking GNU/Linux whilst accepting money from Microsoft and Apple) is officially up for sale, but in the mean time we see that not only its writers but also its other employees (e.g. in IDC) produce some FOSS-hostile propaganda. This needs to stop. A lot of people still complain about Galen Gruman (even in our IRC channels) for his latest facts-free attack on GNU/Linux, but the problem is much broader than this and we have been writing about it for almost a decade.
“This was posted in a site called Linux Insider, but it’s anti-Linux nonsense promoting a Microsoft-connected firm, using talking points from a Microsoft-connected ‘analyst’.”Richard Adhikari, who for a number of years has published many anti-Linux (or anti-Android) pieces such as this, usually along the ‘security’ theme, is now talking to Hilwa from Microsoft. Well, it’s not as bad as speaking to Enderle (which ECT does very often, allowing him to smear Microsoft’s competitors without disclosing his ties to Microsoft), but it’s still pretty bad. ECT previously spoke to him without disclosing his relationship with Microsoft (and so have others). This time he helps bolster the marketing for Black Duck, an anti-FOSS firm that came from Microsoft. To quote parts of this promotional piece from Adhikari (promoting fear of FOSS and helping Black Duck drive sales):
“Containers have caught the imagination of developers because they provide convenient bundles for deployment,” said Al Hilwa, a research program director at IDC.
“We have been expecting a variety of software development tools to add support for containers, and in this context, it makes perfect sense to see leading code-scanning players like Black Duck support Docker containers,” he told LinuxInsider.
[...]
Scanning tools do enable more secure deployments, but developers still have to take action, IDC’s Hilwa said.
Code-scanning technology is analogous to virus-scanning software, he continued.
“A repository of vulnerability metadata or signatures has to be maintained, and the code is scanned against it.” Hilwa said. “The role of the scanning software is to keep this metadata up to date.”
Does Adhikari know where Black Duck came from? Did he check where Al Hilwa came from? This was posted in a site called Linux Insider, but it’s anti-Linux nonsense promoting a Microsoft-connected firm, using talking points from a Microsoft-connected ‘analyst’. It demonstrates a lot of what’s wrong with today’s corporate media. Thankfully, Jack Germain still writes for ECT’s Linux Insider and unlike Adhikari he doesn’t just write articles that attack Linux. █
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