Cut out or altogether drop the sweet talk, Microsoft...

“This anti-trust thing will blow over. We haven’t changed our business practices at all.”

--Bill Gates

Summary: Microsoft's claims of "love" for GNU/Linux aren't being accepted by the community, so a lot of the PR campaign falls on deaf ears (except those wishing to be fooled and further disseminate the lie, e.g. in Microsoft-friendly/-funded media companies)

THE following message was posted not too long ago at Reddit. It's more like a blog post published as a submission in the site and it is titled "Remember: Microsoft is still (and will always be) hostile to Linux and FLOSS." We thought it was worth reproducing below (without any of the comments) because it also alludes to many things we covered here before, including Comes vs Microsoft.

Will the all the "nice" PR and news of Microsoft (seemingly) getting close to Linux, it's easy to forget how Microsoft IS hostile to Linux and everything open source. Remember: All they did was get a new CEO, the company culture is still there.

All that's changed is instead of publicly hating on Linux, they now publicly love Linux, but are really still very hostile to Linux. This will never change.

Just remember the Iowa consumer case files ( http://edge-op.org/iowa/www.iowaconsumercase.org/ ) which has a lot of internal emails from Microsoft, many of them basically state their love for all things Windows and MS and hatrid for everything else. All are in PDF format and have been unsealed (thankfully). Some even go into detail about their plotting with things like the Vista Ready program in order to trick consumers (they basically don't give a shit) etc.

Then there's Halloween docs: http://www.catb.org/esr/halloween/

Again, take your pick - Get The FUD, whatever you choose. It's all there. Then there's Ballmer's "Linux is cancer" etc.

Yeah, yeah sure, I'm off my rocker, this was all years ago etc. But it's not - Microsoft HATES Linux, this will NEVER change! Again, the only thing that has change is the CEO and as a result, the PR. You'll probably find that Nadella has internally said to everyone "publicly, we LOVE Linux and FLOSS, internally it's still business as usual"; and changed the PR machine as a result.

Now I don't know what Shuttleworth and Canonical are playing at or what benefit they may get from the deal they made, perhaps more Ubuntu market share (and money). But don't let your guard down - Microsoft will ALWAYS hate Linux, even if you can't directly see it.

Do you really think Bill Gates, while no longer chairman or CEO (he still works there tho), would really let his company, his ways, his wants and direction etc all go down the toilet and have someone else come in and take it all in a new direction? No... Gates is very smart and ruthless. MUCH smarter than that. His / the "old Microsoft" dirty business ways are fully entrenched in the company. No single change of CEO will fix the ways of the "old Microsoft".

The "old Microsoft" is still the "new Microsoft", only the face of the company has changed - CEO and PR. That's it. Microsoft, if they could, would press a button and kill Linux and FLOSS over night.

Remember the "patents" they have that they will use to threaten our ways, even if not directly. Microsoft will always be hostile to Linux and free software. Remember that!

IDG's Paul Venezia has a reasonably good article (he's pro-UNIX/Linux and always was), which he published this morning at InfoWorld. To quote one bit of it: "The fact that Microsoft now supports SQL Server on Linux isn’t really a technical development -- it’s a business move. Fortunately for Microsoft, the Ballmer blinders are gone, and the company can see that Linux is the OS of choice for our cloud future, not Windows. Microsoft lost that battle a long time ago. Not surprisingly, the Azure cloud folks have taken the lead in pushing Microsoft toward supporting Linux (and other open source cloud-related technologies, including Docker, Kubernetes, and various NoSQL databases)."

"Microsoft isn't loving or embracing GNU/Linux, except in the E.E.E. sense (remember what the first E stands for)."A roundup by Jim Lynch of IDG (also InfoWorld) later said (citing the above) that "Microsoft has recently made some moves toward accepting Linux in a prominent way, but has the company taken too long to do this? One writer at InfoWorld thinks Microsoft's embrace of Linux might be far too little, and far too late."

As we explained a day ago, there's just a lot of rhetoric and provocative lying. Microsoft isn't loving or embracing GNU/Linux, except in the E.E.E. sense (remember what the first E stands for).

Speaking of E.E.E., CSO (IDG) reposts and then expands on Maria Korolov’s Black Duck marketing FUD against FOSS by saying in the language of rhetoric (right there in the headline!) that there's something wrong with "open source code quality". Black Duck (it came from a Microsoft marketing guy) is advertised as follows:

As more open source software is created, the number of vulnerabilities goes up as well. Black Duck Software is currently tracking 1.5 million open source projects.

Open source vulnerabilities can be particularly dangerous, according to Black Ducks' Vice President of Security Strategy Mike Pittenger. Open source software can be ubiquitous, he said, and typically has no process where patches are automatically pushed out to users.

Black Duck is somewhat similar to Xamarin in the sense that it acts a little bit like a Microsoft proxy. It would not be possible without the "embrace" (as in E.E.E.) of FOSS. Black Duck is a proprietary software company which merely exploits FOSS for marketing. See the long message at the top and realise that these tactics aren't entirely new. Why make the same errors all over again? Learn from history. ⬆

"Don’t encourage new, cross-platform Java classes, especially don’t help get great Win 32 implementations written/deployed. [...] Do encourage fragmentation of the Java classlib space."

--Ben Slivka, Microsoft