Boiler room reunion?

Summary: Microsoft gets all diplomatic up north

MICROSOFT loves using programmes like EDGI in order to undermine competition. We wrote about this in reference to Kazakhstan a few months ago and Microsoft hopes for such tactics to derail GNU/Linux in Russia.

Looking around the same region -- and by no means pretending nations there are the same -- here is a new report that we find from Kyrgyzstan:

Microsoft Corporation offers cooperation to Kyrgyzstan. The delegation from corporation has met with the chief of the Kyrgyz Prime Minister's Apparat...

Steve Ballmer himself even went to Riga where he has just met the president.

President of Latvia Valdis Zatlers visited Microsoft headquarters yesterday, on May 19, to meet Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer and discuss future cooperation projects of Latvia and Microsoft, the President's Press Office informed LETA.

[...]

Minister of Culture Ints Dalderis (People's Party) and the State Language Committee member and the IT company Tilde head Andrejs Vasiljevs also participated in Zatlers' meeting with Ballmer.

Latvia recently made ODF its national standard and it has a GNU/Linux distribution called Austrumi. In addition, one year ago there was the following article about the public sector:

The city council of Ogre is providing free training for OpenOffice, an Open Source suite of office applications, to improve the competitiveness of the local businesses and boost the performance of the local government.

Ogre, a town with some 27,000 inhabitants is about 30 km southeast of Latvia's capital Riga.

There are other success stories of FOSS in Latvia. Is Ballmer visiting Latvia in order to derail these developments at the very root?

Steve Ballmer went to the Ukraine at the end of last year in order to sign an MOU and now we find the head of Microsoft Ukraine slamming Free/open source software in public. Someone has fortunately provided the translation:

Recently Ukraine government made another move toward an open source software. As anyone would expect Microsoft has something to say and something to offer.

I can’t help but translate some FUD by Microsoft Ukraine CEO Dmitry Shimkiv...

Microsoft does not like open source software. It's only pretending because pretending is better for its business. ⬆

"Open source is an intellectual-property destroyer [...] I can't imagine something that could be worse than this for the software business and the intellectual-property business. I'm an American; I believe in the American way, I worry if the government encourages open source, and I don't think we've done enough education of policymakers to understand the threat."

--Jim Allchin, President of Platforms & Services Division at Microsoft