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Summary: Looking back at the past couple of years, it seems like Microsoft staff and boosters were more than eager to steer developers away from freedom and into Microsoft's cage

THE Gemini mailing list archive of 2020 reveals something I wasn't aware of until earlier today. Apparently it had already been discussed in our IRC channels before, resembling some of the patterns we saw in Microsoft's "evangelism is war" document, resembling Taistoism and corporate cult tactics.

"Thankfully, right now in 2022 lots of Gemini code is Free software (almost everything is, certainly more than 90%) and the code is mostly self-hosted, some with front ends such as GitLab and and some with Gitea-based community-centric hosting."As explained in the video above, which intentionally omits names, in the earlier days of Gemini there were at least 2 people pushing Microsoft and/or Windows into the project, merely a year after it had started. The last thing a secure, elegant and freedom-respecting specification (to replace the World Wide Web for some things) needs is bloat like Windows, GitHub, and Visual Studio. They're all proprietary and we don't want Gemini developers to make projects dependant on proprietary stuff (components, software, hosting and so on). Visual Studio, GitHub etc. are all about Microsoft being in charge; Agate and Amfora, for example, still use GitHub and rely on Rust, which not only uses GitHub but also censors Microsoft critics. Thankfully, right now in 2022 lots of Gemini code is Free software (almost everything is, certainly more than 90%) and the code is mostly self-hosted, some with front ends such as GitLab and and some with Gitea-based community-centric hosting.

The curious thing is that the following year (in 2021) we once again saw people pushing Microsoft stuff for Gemini developers, despite an obvious lack of interest from the community. The people who came to the list to push Microsoft's proprietary garbage were using very promotional language and then vanished (not to be seen before the end of 2021 when the mailing list went offline, due to a hardware crash).

"The curious thing is that the following year (in 2021) we once again saw people pushing Microsoft stuff for Gemini developers, despite an obvious lack of interest from the community."Based on our understanding, Microsoft moreover 'censored' the list by marking the server/relay as "spam", preventing a flow of communication by merely having some gears in the global E-mail system.

While we refrain from going into the nitty-gritty details (we won't mention names), we do have the evidence. As Psydroid put it, it's "more about the coordination that must have happened behind the scenes" (at Microsoft).

Is Microsoft trying to undermine Gemini or take some control?

"It is common for Microsoft to mark mail services as spam and blacklist the domains," an associate has told us. Microsoft "does it a lot and it's common problem."

"Peter N M Hansteen wrote about Microsoft blacklisting site some years ago but the search engines don't index his site either," he said. Here are examples of his posts:

• A Life Lesson in Mishandling SMTP Sender Verification
• The Problem Isn't Email, It's Microsoft Exchange

The associate added: "I think the question is not if Microsoft is trying to undermine Gemini but how and on what priority?"

Another person asked, "don't they extort mail services to remove their blacklist? Like pay money to get whitelisted or nobody will email you..."

Here's an example from about 11 days ago:

• Email blocklisting: A Christmas gift from Microsoft that Linode can't seem to return
• Blocklisted: Microsoft puts some Linode IPs on naughty step

"Microsoft controls the Outlook users," a person said in IRC moments ago. "I tried to send an email to a Outlook address but it didn't go through because of Microsoft blacklist..."

"There should be a relevant document from Comes v Microsoft about crushing competitors while they are small," the associate concluded. ⬆

“Yes We're Talking About Knifing the Baby”

--Microsoft management

“AS LONG AS IT DOES NOT RUN ON Vl[R]GIN PCs I AM AT LEAST SEMI HAPPY”

--Microsoft management

“Cut Those F*ckers Off”

--Microsoft management

“...[C]ut off Netscape’s air supply.”

--Microsoft management

"This really isn't that hard. If you're going to kill someone there isn't much reason to get all worked up about it and angry -- you just pull the trigger. Angry discussions before hand are a waste of time. We need to smile at Novell while we pull the trigger."

--Microsoft management