Microsoft is Still Waging a War on GNU/Linux (at the OEM Level), It Loves Windows
16 years ago we covered secret - as in internal and confidential - documents from Microsoft showing how Microsoft had attacked GNU/Linux at Walmart (Microsoft Antitrust: “The Linux Threat on the Desktop” (2006) and Predatory Response). For the "channel" to help spread GNU/Linux is a very serious offence, according to Microsoft. That article was viewed by a huge number of people and had great impact at the time*.
It's important to understand that Microsoft isn't some ordinary GAFAM "club member". Microsoft is a criminal entity full of criminals (that it happily hires and eggs on). As the FSF put it very recently, Microsoft is a company we must "keep putting pressure on" because: "Grassroots organization against a corporation as large as Microsoft is never easy. They have the advertising budget to claim that they "love Linux" (sic), not to mention the money and political willpower to corral free software developers from around the world on their nonfree platform Microsoft GitHub. This year's IDAD took aim at one specific injustice: their requiring a hardware TPM module for users being forced to "upgrade" to Windows 11. As Windows 10 will soon stop receiving security updates, this is a (Microsoft-manufactured) problem for users still on this operating system. Normally, offloading cryptography to a different hardware module could be seen as a good thing -- but with nonfree software, it can only spell trouble for the user."
Microsofters rushed to attack the FSF for saying that.
It would be nice if the OEM situation was also covered by the FSF. Microsoft has various ways of bribing OEMs (or taking over them via Silver Lake; see WP Engine). It goes a long way back [1, 2] and we wrote a lot about it (see the section "Microsoft's Fight Against Sub-notebooks and GNU/Linux at ASUS (2008-09)" with all the links in it).
There's this new article from a veteran Linux writer and user. He used an image from CG bot, but his text is assessed to be only "29% AI". "We are uncertain about this document. If we had to classify it, it would likely be considered human," said an LLM slop detector. It feels or seems like a lot of his output now is LLM slop, but it takes effort to prove this so let's just assume he wrote the whole thing. It's just a little shallow and his colleague Sam Varghese vanished last June.
The article focuses on a bunch of things that seem like chaff and regurgitated statements. Nothing is said about the "OEM factor". It dodges the question of the OEM monopoly.
The problem is so big that another decade will make the situation worse, not better, as TPM3 apparently locks (or may lock) x86 systems into specific editions of Microsoft Windows.
"It's chaff going by the content," one person said of the article (which my wife had read and added).
We've been reminded of the Asus EEE 701 story (covered a lot in the links above). Microsoft attacked the OEM to prevent it distributing GNU/Linux more than 15 years ago. I still remember an OSI chief (before it was corrupted and taken over by Microsoft) contacting me about it to complain, asking me to document what Microsoft had done.
The FSF would be wise to remind people of the "OEM factor". █
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* The site is a lot more active now, has far better access to sources and documents, and assigns topics based on importance (as time and resources are limited, so the site must triage and turn down less urgent matters). The site attracted nearly a million hits yesterday, but many bots are among those (this does not slow the site down because it's purely static now).