Summary: Another look at Richard Steel's blunder; Moskin refuses to be identified as "a shill"; Microsoft cracks down on UK shops

Newham has a real problem in its hands. Having gotten caught engaging in what can be described as "corruption" (depending on one's mood or Moody), Newham must bury the evidence [1, 2, 3, 4, 5] or at least silence the witnesses.

A gentleman called Richard Steel got caught red-handed by The Inquirer on several occasions [1, 2, 3], so several peers and journalists are intimately familiar with his follies. He sells out the United Kingdom (or at least a portion of it) to Microsoft Corporation from Redmond, Washington. He does not even assess Free/libre alternatives where they are obviously superior (e.g. Apache, Firefox, GNU/Linux); instead he subscribes to Microsoft's Project Marshall, which is a mechanism for blocking competition (publicly known as "MOU").

Newham's bad behaviour is already known to many, so what can Newham do? It invites a prominent critic for some negotiation. Carlos Hawes tells the reporter who visited Newham:

Be careful Mr. Moody in visiting Richard Steel's IT shoppe. To paraphrase Boromir in the LOTR movies, "One does not simply walk into a Windows shoppe. There is an evil there that does not sleep."

From the actual report:

Striking, too, were the serried ranks of LCD screens in Richard's department – although the effect was rather spoiled by the fact that they were all running Windows, mostly XP. One interesting fact that emerged from our meeting was that future plans include skipping Windows Vista for most users, and moving straight to Windows 7 – just like most of the saner part of the Windows computing world.

Nothing in this report suggests that Newham will change its ways and actually work for the public rather than work for Microsoft.

Speaking of Microsoft "shills", here is one who currently denies being one.

An attorney insists he wasn't acting as a "shill" for Microsoft in bringing the new breed of lawsuits to greater light.

[...]

During an interview with Betanews, Moskin contended that after the article with Wettan was published, he was accused by one tech publication of "being some sort of a shill" for Microsoft. "But nothing was further from my mind," Betanews was told. Moskin said that instead, he'd simply wanted to warn users and their own lawyers about some new legal risks stemming from open source code.

Moskin was not criticised for his Microsoft connection, which does exist by the way. Groklaw has already shown serious factual errors and told off Law.com for publishing Moskin's lies uncritically. Moreover, it's not only such a tie and a lie which make Moskin a suspect/target; he and/or his colleagues also attacked an open source-centric reporter and this pattern of FUD almost always comes from the likes of Fortify, who have an alliance of some sort with Microsoft [1, 2].

How come almost no lawyer ever speaks about the huge dangers of proprietary software licences? Here is something from the news in the UK this week:

Microsoft reaches settlements with traders caught selling illegal software

[...]

Settlements have successfully been reached with 12 resellers, who all admitted to hard disk loading and selling software illegally.

The sellers were named as: Charisma Computers of Manchester; 1Hr Computers of Denton; Boss Systems of Duns; Annecto Computers of Droylsden; Computer Warehouse of Manchester; Hi-Tec of Cheadle; Intellect Computers of Whitefield; Swift Computers of Wellington; Comp-u-Tel of Thatcham; ICN Computers of Newbury; PWRTech of Nottingham; and Unique Computers (UK) of Leicester.

It is clear to see that Microsoft still sends partners to prison or at least rips them off for doing exactly what Microsoft wanted. ⬆

"It's easier for our software to compete with Linux when there's piracy than when there's not."

--Bill Gates (2007)