Bonum Certa Men Certa

What Lies Inside...

Because people are sometimes loyal to their former employer and former colleagues

A reader as suggested that we post a summary of previous posts presenting possible Microsoft 'plants' -- employees put inside its rivals, that is.



It's an old and classic tactic for battling competition, turning one from a competitor into a partner; at least having it surrender or distracted. Here is a quick and partial list:

XenSource (Citrix). The first example may be XenSource, which moved to Redmond and also accepted a General Manager from Microsoft into its ranks. It later let itself be acquired by Microsoft's Partner of the Year, Citrix.

VMWare. See our interpretation of the appointment of Maritz. It's a series of posts.

Novell. Miguel and Nat went on the radar before. Then Ron Hovsepian turned up as "suspicious" after a disclosure.

Corel. See this recent summary.

Google. We touched on this in here, as well as in other places.

Nokia. Discussed here. Nokia has deals with Microsoft and it houses the former Microsoft employee who 'killed' Ogg in HTML5.

BBC. See this video and the accompanying links.

Vodafone. Covered here.

ISO. Here is just one among a set of incidents.

ODF. Discussed recently. Also see this.

Yahoo. Icahn is inside Yahoo now. Evidence exists to suggest that he was with Microsoft all along. It's breach of the law, if true.

Apple. Similar to Novell.

As a side note, on the issue of threat watching inside Open Source, Fortify is now spreading FOSS FUD to boost its business, OpenLogic shouts about 'mixed-source' in its latest press release on the Microsoft-sponsored 'Open' Source 'Census' [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6] (with friends like these on top of GNOME [1, 2], who needs enemies?) and Black Duck, a proprietary software company headed by a former Microsoft employee, gives some FOSS code (none of which it produces) to Koders, which too is a case of a proprietary company exploiting FOSS as 'raw data'.

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