A COUPLE of days ago we wrote about Miguel de Icaza's smear against Richard Stallman. The news has made it into the front page of Slashdot and some other Web sites. The responses to this at Linux Today were uniformly in favour of Richard Stallman, without exception.
Why keep pretending? Just join your master.
Ultimately Stallman is right and de Icaza is wrong.
There is nothing of benefit to OSS/FOSS and Linux to be gained from what de Icaza and friends are doing. Their efforts, as well intentioned as they might be, are wasted until the Ballmer's and Gate's at Microsoft come out and publicly state their support for Open Source and Linux and prove it with real visible actions such as ordering their workerbees to make it an official company policy to support Open Source and Linux.
This reminds me of what a Microosft insider told be about when there was this big Microsoft managers meeting on Java and Microsofts Visual J++. That's the one where everyone was talking about how they could do a great Java platform and Java IDE and then Bill Gates makes some loud noise and exclaims 'does anyone remember Windows?'.
The result of that meeting is when started Microsoft down the road to an incompatible Java, into court, and to put massive efforts into what would become MS .Net. All because Microsoft executive(s) decided the policy.
He's naive, all right. He's been seduced by what, money? Fame? Perceived power? The dude that said Microsoft is not a democracy is right. I know, 'cause I used to work there.
Microsoft executives are hell-bent on one thing: total domination of the computing space. They were when I was there, and they haven't changed a bit.
Miguel de Icaza somehow reminds me of my old spanish hairdresser. The average hairdressing session more or less went like this. After a silent minute, the first sentence began invariably: "You know, me, I'm a democrat!" By this, I had to understand that my hairdresser was perfectly aware of his democratic right to vote for the French Front National, located far right on the political spectrum. And then, off he went in one of his rantings about unemployed Arabs, Social Security, and so on. Until one day I got fed up and went to look for another hairdresser. Now we're talking motorbikes, and everyone's happy. So, although my hairdresser desperately tried to prove it's possible to be a democrat AND a fascist, I guess you just can't be an open source advocate AND a Microsoft fan. Given this company's track record, there's just no way.