07.16.19
Gemini version available ♊︎Microsoft is ‘Doing Kamikaze’ (神風) on Linux
“Karate is a form of marital arts in which people who have had years and years of training can, using only their hands and feet, make some of the worst movies in the history of the world.”
–Dave Barry
Summary: An analogy for what the Linux (only in name!) Foundation and Microsoft mean to Linux — or by extension to GNU/Linux and Free software whose largest repository Microsoft took control of
THERE are many fitting analogies by which to describe Microsoft’s real relationship with Linux; “love” isn't even close to it. A famous and classic scenario is trying to drown oneself with somebody else, or driving a car off the cliff with someone else inside the car. In Japan, with its generally cruel history and nihilistic culture (whaling, babies on bayonets, massacres of Chinese, sexual enslavement of Koreans, Kamikaze flights and so on), several fitting analogies come to mind. Linux distrusts Microsoft for the same reason the Chinese don’t trust Japan (and probably never will). But Imperial Microsoft is in denial about its atrocities, so it’s characterising its victims (of abuse/crime/corruption/doxing) as intolerant haters who need to be shunned and/or disciplined further.
“…Imperial Microsoft is in denial about its atrocities, so it’s characterising its victims (of abuse/crime/corruption/doxing) as intolerant haters who need to be shunned and/or disciplined further.”Does anyone know how or why Jim Zemlin, the $10,000,000 man who never wrote code, understands Japanese? Darl McBride from SCO knows it because he promoted his cult in Japan (as a missionary), but we fail to see the connection in the Zemlins. Either way, Zemlin rules “Linux” (the brand) like a Japanese Emperor and he’s willing to totally destroy GNU/Linux on the desktop (or even LINUX.com) just to suppress criticism of his Empire. This is perhaps the best analogy I can come up at this moment in time.
I’m generally against cancer analogies, but Microsoft is a company and not a person (and one cannot cause “offense” to a corporation). So to use an analogy, Microsoft is to Linux like an ovarian cancer. It’s big, you know it’s there, but it’s not simple to get it out once it settles there and expands, stifling distribution and eventually killing the ‘host’. What host? The Linux Foundation. It seems to be terminal. █
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