Summary: Remarks on particular reports that deceive the public this week
POOR journalism helps show why alternative news sites are truly needed. Right now, for example, a Microsoft MVP is spreading pro-Microsoft messages in IDG, without any disclosures of course. We saw this sort of stuff before, in other news networks.
Over at ZDNet, rather scary headlines are appearing which are hinged upon a Samba flaw alone (like the many flaws that appear in Windows all the time). When one configures Microsoft Linux to serve Microsoft protocols, then it’s debatable if that too should count as Microsoft’s fault. The bottom line is, reporting on those subjects is flawed, sometimes by design (as in the case where Microsoft folks are assigned to report on Microsoft).
Since we’ve mentioned SUSE, watch how the post-acquisition VAR Guy is advertising SUSE:
Red Hat (NYSE: RHT) recently became the world’s first $1 billion open source company. Now, the folks at SUSE, promoter of the rival Linux distribution, are seeking bragging rights of their own. Indeed, SUSE says it now has more than 9,200 certified third-party applications and supports over 13,500 hardware, storage and networking devices. Impressive. But is SUSE in growth mode?
The VAR Guy’s educated hunch: Absolutely yes. Attachmate acquired Novell and its SUSE business roughly a year ago. Over the past year, SUSE has been freed from Novell branding, and SUSE is once again run from its own European headquarters.
Customer Base
And then he proceeds to parroting Novell PR talking points which we debunked years ago. They make up some numbers by aggregating useless metrics and then make themselves look big. If one wants just a rewritten press release, then the above meets the standards. But will someone please verify those bogus numbers before reporting? PR is the art of making things look different from what they actually are. █
From a football club in Spain to a convicted monopolist from Redmond
Summary: How Microsoft uses some certain Germans to serve the Microsoft propaganda machine
THE Microsoft version of GNU/Linux is developed in Germany now (SUSE, not Novell). It claims to have just turned 20, but we have already explained why that’s technically not the case. It’s a bit of a deception. Generally speaking, SUSE’s purpose is now to help Microsoft tax GNU/Linux, especially in servers; that’s what Microsoft keeps SUSE going for. It deceives the public and traps ignorant managers.
There is another thing going on in Germany and it acts as a Microsoft proxy. Some journalists are citing a Microsoft lobbyist in articles about Microsoft (reports on patents quote a Microsoft patents lobbyist without disclosure). They don’t seem to understand that Florian Müller is paid directly by Microsoft to produce spin. Right now that AOL (filled with former Microsoft managers [1, 2, 3, 4]) gives its patents to Microsoft, IDG quotes the lobbyist:
Marking the latest escalation in the technology industry’s intellectual-property arms race, Microsoft is paying AOL a shade over $1 billion for 800 patents, the cream of which AOL CEO Tim Armstrong has described as “beachfront property in East Hampton.”
And the corporate press also quotes the Microsoft lobbyist, calling him “blogger”. Here is CNN:
AOL walks away with some much-needed cash for patents it was no longer using. Microsoft gets to take home some of the first social networking patents ever granted, and Facebook — a Microsoft partner — is insulated from the legal attacks those patents could have aided had they ended up in enemy hands.
The system enables passing patents around like weapons, to be used for litigation and deterrence. It is indicative of an inherently broken system. Fernando Cassia says:
How many FOSS/Linux projs will be at risk w Microsoft acquiring t entire AOL patent portfolio? (remember AOL incl Netscape)
I used to work for them, too (back while I was doing my Ph.D.). Soon I might be moving to London, but the days of AOL/Netscape are remembered fondly, going back to times when the company was not just a Microsoft puppet of sorts. It still had a Web browser back then. The news about AOL is not shocking because we wrote about AOL’s Microsoft leanings before. It seemed like entryism, too. █
Summary: How Microsoft gave the illusion of putting many lines of code inside Linux and what this code really does
THERE were many stupid ‘reports’ recently — so-called “news reports” about new statistics from the Linux Foundation. We link to the original reports but ignore as a matter of principles the poor news coverage. Many journalists got it wrong. Many of them were spinning the real report and painting is with the “Microsoft” brush (Novell too played a role)– something along the lines of Microsoft as a top “contributor”. Putting aside all that we wrote before about what those patches are and what they achieve, let it be noted that Microsoft stole he thunder from real Linux contributors for reasons that people who blog fail to mention. As Joab Jackson explains, “Microsoft tallied so many code contributions to Linux due to fact that its original Hyper-V code needed fixing,” Here is a proper report about it:
In the latest study by the Linux Foundation, Microsoft only just misses out on a spot among the top 20 groups and companies contributing to the Linux kernel. It has, however, achieved this only by dint of delivering bad code and then slowly improving it.
Summary: A look at the machinations of Bill Gates in education, or rather, the privatisation of the education system
THE Gates Foundation continues to tell teachers what to do, going all the way up to the managerial level with bribes, AstroTurfing, propaganda films, and whatnot.
Teachers in Seattle, essentially neighbours of Mr. Gates, are very upset and they have a popular blog where they express their anger towards Gates’ tyranny in education:
To follow is the strategy that the folks who are basically paid for by Bill Gates are planning to do in January to take over our public school system. The organizations that will represent the 1% are the League of Education Voters(LEV) led by Chris Korsmo and Kelly Munn, Stand for Children (SFC), the Excellent Schools Now Coalition (a brand new astro turf organization) and unfortunately, the Washington State PTA that has lost its’ way under the tutelage of LEV and SFC and with loads of money from Bill Gates and Boeing.
Boeing and Microsoft have been funding LEV and working with them on two “megabills” as they are termed by Korsmo of LEV. When I say “working with them”, I mean that Microsoft and Boeing are lending them their “corporate lobbying power” (LEV’s term, not mine) for the bills that will be put forth by certain legislative representatives. Keep in mind that the two school board members who were able to hold onto their positions in the last school board election in Seattle, Harium and Carr, both are employees of Boeing. I am not implying that they will consciously go with what their employer is spending major cash and “man hours” on, but it can be a psychological influence, so I would watch for that and remind them that they are to be representing the rest of us and not the 1%.
The Nation has a massive article titled “How Online Learning Companies Bought America’s Schools”. Gates is mentioned too:
But Levesque wasn’t delivering her hardball advice to her lobbying clients. She was giving it to a group of education philanthropists at a conference sponsored by notable charities like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation. Indeed, Levesque serves at the helm of two education charities, the Foundation for Excellence in Education, a national organization, and the Foundation for Florida’s Future, a state-specific nonprofit, both of which are chaired by Jeb Bush. A press release from her national group says that it fights to “advance policies that will create a high quality digital learning environment.”
[...]
Like other digital reform advocates, the Bush nonprofit is also supported by Microsoft founder Bill Gates’s foundation. The fact that a nonprofit that receives funding from both the Gates Foundation and Microsoft pressures states to adopt for-profit education reforms may raise red flags with some in the philanthropy community, as Microsoft, too, has moved into the education field. The company has tapped into the K-12 privatization expansion by supplying a range of products, from traditional Windows programs to servers and online coursework platforms. It also contracts with Florida Virtual School to provide cloud computer solutions. Similarly, Dell is seeking new opportunities in the K-12 market for its range of desktop products, while the Michael and Susan Dell Foundation, the charitable nonprofit founded by Dell’s CEO, promotes neoliberal education reforms.
This new study released in Friday’s news dump, entitled “Charter-School Management Organization: Diverse Strategies and Diverse Student Impacts,” has more bad news for school privatizers who prefer the charter route. Even though a swarm of urban school colonizers from Gates, Walton, and the New Schools Venture Fund helped set up the parameters for this study in order to get the most favorable outcome, and even though the Gates “research” hothouse, the Center for Reinventing Public Education co-authored the study, there’s enough bad news for charter proponents that mirrors years of previous research on charters that this study, too, has been ignored by the corporate media. Ed Week had a piece on the new study entitled “Academic Gains Vary Widely for Charter Networks,” and Time had a pre-release gloss by corporate spinner extraordinaire, Andy Rotherham. That was it for coverage, except for a misleading and dissembling press release by Jim Peyser at the New Schools Venture Fund. And only one of the national charter school associations offered a press release on this big event. And most telling, the Gates “research” hothouse that co-authored the study, the Center for Reinventing Public Education, does not even mention it anywhere on its website. Shhhh.
Mathematica led the study, and as their Press Release indicates, the study “was commissioned by NewSchools Venture Fund, with the generous support of the Bill Melinda Gates Foundation and the Walton Family Foundation.” An undisclosed number of the sludge-tank “thought leaders,” including Andy Rotherham, carefully set up the parameters for the sample to pump the corporate welfare Charter Management Organizations (CMOs). These are the corporate non-profit tax sponges preferred by the vulture philanthropy movement.
This is the sort of ‘study’ that the lobbyists — groups like League of Education Voters and Stand for Children — use as ammunition later on when they strive to change policy for their paymasters. █
The BBC, which has been Microsoft’s UK propaganda division since 2006, recently aired a programme that declares Nokia’s Symbian OS is “not long for this world” because, according to BBC reporter Marc Cieslak, the market is allegedly “dominated” by, amongst other platforms, Windows Phone.
“While its camera is impressive, Nokia’s choice of operating system is less so. The 808 is powered by Nokia’s Symbian OS, an operating system that, in a landscape dominated by iOS, Android and even Windows Phone devices, is not long for this world.”
Exactly in what sense could Windows Phone, a platform with just a 1.9% global market share, be said to “dominate”?
Cieslak also “forgot” to mention that Symbian OS, which he alleges is “not long for this world”, has a global market share of 11.7%, more than six times greater than Windows Phone, and yet apparently Windows Phone is worthy of being categorised as “dominant”, in Cieslak’s biased opinion, yet Symbian OS isn’t.
Summary: “Learning Matters” too is confirmed to be in the pocket of the Gates Foundation with its insidious, self-serving, for-profit agenda
THE Gates Foundation is trying to control all channels of communication in particular areas where it operates (for profit). It is routinely bribing the media to warp perceptions and make a profit this way. We gave many examples from several fields.
Of course it is coincidental that Learning Matters, Inc. has received hundreds of thousands of dollars from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, most recently:
2009: $325,000
2007: $308,000
In my final paragraph they substituted “among others” for my “acting in concert with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.”
Summary: Truth (or poison) leaks out amid PR campaigns from Apple and its allies
THE APPLE whitewash that we wrote about some days ago did not succeed entirely. This new report speaks of a lesser known problem: “Do you know what it is like to suffer neurological damage from toxins? I do not. I am grateful I don’t suffer from such toxicological poisoning. The Chinese workers employed at an Apple supplier factory did not expect to be poisoned. They did not expect to be suffering neurological damage when they signed on for long hours. They only wanted to improve their lives. The opposite happened and now, for some, it appears too late to reverse the damage.”
In recent days I had chats with someone who worked in such conditions. The grievances of such people are rarely heard. It’s implicitly assumed that their lives are of lower value. Apple is not the sole culprit, but Apple blatantly refused to look into the complaints, so it’s being singled out. █
Open Source Think Tank is to FOSS what Microsoft lobbyist Florian Müller is to FOSS
Summary: The “think tank” which claims to speak on behalf of Open Source is in fact organised and partly funded by foes of Open Source
CONTROLLING one’s opposition or competition is extremely powerful a tactic. In some industries, such as the beverages sector, companies use fake brands to make their own look more appealing or to drive up the prices, Sometimes a company might create or buy the anti-self so that even its opponents will become its own clients. In some circles, fake opposition is consciously used to make the opposed-to side look reasonable and reach an audience that otherwise would reject it as a matter of principle.
When Microsoft says that it “reaches out” to Open Source what it means to say is that it tries to change options that are “not proprietary” or “not Microsoft” to be both proprietary and Microsoft (or ‘open’ on top of proprietary). When Microsoft signed a deal with Novell it turned SUSE, a GNU/Linux distribution, into Ballnux, a distribution that makes Microsoft money. OpenSUSE is the marketing angle of this product (always less reliable and not suitable for production).
Last year we explained that something called a think tank for open source is in fact controlled by Black Duck with additional help from Microsoft. Those who promote it should be aware of it and perhaps add a cautionary disclaimer. Not that anyone does, as there are proxies at play:
Black Duck Software’s Olliance Group and DLA Piper have now announced core sponsors for the upcoming Open Source Think Tank 2012 conference. Adobe, Global Inventures, HP, Motorola, SAP and SugarCRM are all among the sponsors of the seventh annual conference, which promises to have some interesting keynotes and sessions. What’s more the event takes place in April, in Napa, California–one of the more beautiful locations for a conference. Interested attendees need to apply for invitations, which you can do here.
The “Open Source Think Tank” is not an Open Source event. It should not be treated as such, either. The name is deceiving.
Speaking of the hijacking of the term “Open Source”, recall what Microsoft didinside OpenStack and watch the Microsoft booster trying to promote proprietary Microsoft software inside this “Open” stack. They are polluting Open Source by means of deception and sooner or later we are left without a side — as the one that once existed is now occupied by FOSS foes. This way they win. They conquer both sides of the debate. █
