Stormy Peters, whom we mentioned here quite recently, had an exchange of words with Roberto Galoppini the other day. There was also a response to Microsoft's notorious participation in the Open Source 'Census' [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6], which is run by OpenLogic where Peters works.Her response seems very reasonable.

Any comment about the reaction to news of Microsoft’s Support of Open Source Census?

From the beginning, we knew that we wanted The Open Source Census to be a collaborative effort – not just specific to OpenLogic. We felt that collaboration was critical to making The Open Source Census successful. Prior to launching The Open Source Census, we began the process of reaching out to a wide variety of participants in the open source community and ecosystem. The list included large platform vendors, commercial open source vendors, open source communities and organizations, law firms and analysts. Because this is an open project, we did not limit or exclude anyone from sponsoring or participating – as long as they agreed with the goals and process for The Open Source Census. We welcome all sponsors who might want to participate and help make The Open Source Census successful.

The existent Stormy Peters-Miguel de Icaza connection should not be a serious issue because she appears to have condemned 'the' deal recently -- however cautiously (see the link at the top). However, now comes this:

Istanbul, Turkey, July 7, 2008: The GNOME Foundation today announced the hiring of Stormy Peters as Executive Director. Stormy, a well-known industry analyst with extensive experience at Hewlett Packard and OpenLogic, will work on accelerating the adoption of GNOME and strengthening the Foundation by attracting new industry members and community contributors. "Hiring Stormy represents a major step for GNOME", said Luis Villa, a Director of the GNOME Foundation. "With her unique background and experience, she'll be a natural at growing industry support for the project and connecting interested parties to our community."

That would be Hewlett Packard, the company that fought for Microsoft OOXML and participated in Vista collusions. OpenLogic is said to be headed by a former Microsoft employee, too. Need anyone reopen that can of worms that is GNOME's attitude towards OOXML? Miguel de Icaza was the President of GNOME until last year and it's very clear how he feels about his colleagues at Redmond.

This post needn't be misinterpreted. Many large companies have complex agendas. The same goes for IBM, to name just one example. IBM may have married Novell and Microsoft. In general, marrying Microsoft and the FOSS world is just a case of pulling the 'F' out of FOSS. That's the key concern here. ⬆