08.08.20
Techrights is Not Against Microsoft
Or: Techrights is against injustice and monopoly abuse
Microsoft UK executives taking top positions at the BBC and Bill Gates bribing the BBC is a matter of public record. It’s just one of many (countless other publishers receive bribes from Gates and advertising money from Microsoft). As a former Microsoft employee told me some hours ago (this was specifically about MJF/ZDNet): “It’s like, was being blacklisted for two years just a shot across her bow and punishment for a journalist who makes a living off of covering Microsoft and maintaining access to them? Given how she fell in line, it seems like a perfect example of how Microsoft and other tech companies can silence journalists and even get them fired if they’re exclusively on that company’s beat. What’s a news outlet to do with a journalist that they hired to cover Microsoft if Microsoft has blacklisted them? Fire/hire a new one that isn’t blacklisted? What do you think journalists are going to do in such situations besides play ball, drink the wine, enjoy the swag, and do little else than promote the technology industry, especially when the world is blind to the offense otherwise. It’s just their little secret…” (IBM tried doing this to me)
Summary: It may be a suitable time to explain why Microsoft is mentioned so much and why it’s not a fixation but a reactionary priority
THERE seems to be a misunderstanding. This site began as a reaction to Novell, not Microsoft. It’s against software patents, it is against corruption, and it stands for many things (rights are a positive, not a negative). If Microsoft is mentioned here a lot, it is because Microsoft is by far the biggest offender — worse than IBM has even been in its entire history. Look no further than the whole TikTok thing. Shades of what Microsoft did to Novell, Yahoo, and Nokia…
If Microsoft keeps hijacking and then destroying companies, who’s to say Microsoft deserves any respect whatsoever? They ruin more than they create and they render many people jobless (unemployment is a growing problem worldwide).
“Look no further than the whole TikTok thing. Shades of what Microsoft did to Novell, Yahoo, and Nokia…”This point really ought to be stressed again; lately we’ve been reacting to a bunch of bad things from IBM, which seems to be firing a growing number of Red Hat employees. Only days ago we saw “Fedora Infrastructure Status: Major service disruption,” alluding again to “Service ‘Account System’ now has status: major: id and fas issues being investigated” — something we’ve seen a lot of lately. The uptime of Fedora services has been rather appalling lately, both for migration reasons (we don’t know the reason and nature of these migrations) and technical failures. People at Red Hat might be in denial about it and Fedora volunteers, whom we reached out to in recent days, refuse to talk about it; but something just isn’t right. As we noted yesterday, they don't view Microsoft as a rival anymore. Yesterday Red Hat promoted .NET again. This is not normal. I’ve used Red Hat since I was 18 and Fedora since the project started (I was a doctoral student at the time, way back when it was still “Fedora Core”). Planet Fedora is something I’ve followed closely for years. What’s happening right now is not normal by any stretch of imagination.
“People at Red Hat might be in denial about it and Fedora volunteers, whom we reached out to in recent days, refuse to talk about it; but something just isn’t right.”Yours truly, on behalf of the Techrights team, just wishes to clarify that Microsoft is mentioned here a lot (mostly negatively) because Microsoft earned that. Microsoft deserves that. But threats to software freedom and users’ rights extend well beyond Microsoft — a matter we shall have to deal with a lot more often in the coming years. As somebody put it in Pleroma/Fediverse the other day (replying to something I said): “Silicon Valley was built on Pentagon money and every single corporate social media platform has been dutifully serving the role of a state contractor in controlled narrative management since Occupy Wall Street. It is literally impossible by design for any political dissent to go viral on the modern web.
“Normally these are things Trump leads from behind on by “opposing” it, in order to manufacture consent for his administration’s actual pro-war pro-surveillance accelerationism.”
“The title of this post does not imply that we shall take our eyes off Microsoft; it’s just to remind everyone that Microsoft merely receives flak proportional to the harms it is still doing.”Over the years I’ve seen citations that serve to support this assertion and we’ve occasionally complained about social control media giants and their impact on people’s minds.
The title of this post does not imply that we shall take our eyes off Microsoft; it’s just to remind everyone that Microsoft merely receives flak proportional to the harms it is still doing. That includes attempts to hijack social control media giants of other countries. We made a meme about that as recently as yesterday. █
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