10.11.20
GitHub’s Nat Friedman Defended Proprietary Software at Novell, So Why Not at Microsoft?
“So there’s no one point that Microsoft can attack…” except GitHub (centralisation and lock-in followed by absorption)
Summary: GitHub’s modus operandi explained by Nat Friedman one and a half decades ago; Microsoft’s occupation (in the siege sense) against Free software has come a long way since
THIS part of the interview from Novell’s Nat Friedman (now the chief saboteur of Microsoft at GitHub’s helm) says “there are some areas where proprietary software makes sense” (he names some things where Free software should be rejected, saying that back end stuff “seems like a good place for proprietary software”). Like GitHub?
“This is like straight out of the Halloween Documents or the playbook we keep seeing in Bill Gates deposition tapes.”He keeps referring to Free software as “commodity” (or ‘free’ stuff to build proprietary systems with) and this is the sort of guiding vision of Microsoft at GitHub. They try to capture and control all the ‘free’ stuff (gratis) while GitHub itself remains proprietary software and almost everything at Microsoft is still proprietary software (even the browser, but it uses ‘free’ stuff like the rendering engine). This is antithetical to the objectives of Free software. It’s reduced to one-way (not reciprocal) exploitation, which is why Microsoft discourages copyleft licences such as the GPL.
Over a decade ago we kept condemning Novell for pushing lots of proprietary systems while pretending that Novell was “open source” and we still see the same thing at Microsoft. It’s just blatant openwashing. Was this what the Open Source ‘movement’ (an attack on the actual movement, Free software) destined to achieve? Is this what Open Source was all about all along? At the time of this interview he was still aggressively pushing Microsoft stuff like Mono and later Moonlight (proprietary blobs for Web browsers, akin to DRM/EME).
These people are not allies of Free software but of Microsoft. Friedman had worked for Microsoft before this interview and Miguel de Icaza also attempted to work for Microsoft around the time he began pushing GNOME. They both work directly for Microsoft now, receiving massive salaries to help Microsoft absorb the competition. This is like straight out of the Halloween Documents or the playbook we keep seeing in Bill Gates deposition tapes. Those are the holy warriors who fight Bill's "Jihad" for him.
Gates started Microsoft by stealing other people’s work. That’s what Microsoft still does. █
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