Here Come the Anti-FSF Shills, Gartner
- Dr. Roy Schestowitz
- 2009-10-09 14:57:35 UTC
- Modified: 2009-10-09 14:57:35 UTC
Summary: Freedom of expression met by freedom of suppression and the Gartner Group carries on setting the agenda
THE
FSF's latest motion is
one that we wrote about yesterday. To quote the
official press release:
The Free Software Foundation (FSF) today launched the next stage of its "Windows 7 Sins" campaign at http://windows7sins.org, making the case against Microsoft and proprietary software by writing to 500 leaders of the most influential nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) worldwide, asking them to make the switch to freedom-respecting free software, and to help foster awareness of the ethical importance of computer user freedom.
As usual, resistance to the ethical goals mentioned above mostly comes from the Microsoft crowd. We saw this when the campaign was first launched and gave examples in posts on the subject, e.g.:
The FSF speaks about Microsoft's crimes (moral of technical) almost exclusively, yet opposition to the FSF never comes directly from Microsoft. This is the expected behaviour and
a known Microsoft "shill", Andrew Thomas, is the latest to be mocking the FSF with a daemonising photo and
rude headline.
Speaking of "shills", Roughly Drafted Magazine has
this brilliant new exposé of the Gartner Group. It presents evidence (some of which extracted from Boycott Novell) and concludes as follows:
Had Gartner not served as Microsoft’s mouthpiece in badmouthing OS/2, NCs, Macs, and everything open source-related (or just not Microsoft-related) to enterprise users all these years, perhaps the company’s analysts wouldn’t be blown away by “technological advances” that happen every year. Of course, had it not done all that damage, the company wouldn’t have ever got all those millions of shill dollars for keeping Microsoft’s terrible products in the headlines.
The above article was published in response to Gartner on Android. In another
new article, the same site explains the obvious -- that
Windows Mobile is a dead end.
This strategy pitted Android against Microsoft’s Windows Mobile in a defensive play to prevent Microsoft from leveraging its smartphone hardware partnerships to block Google’s entry into the mobile search and ads business. Insiders have referred to Android as “Danger 2.0,” as the Android project builds upon Danger’s general architecture of using a Unix-like kernel (Android uses Linux) with a Java-like application runtime (Android’s Dalvik virtual machine).
Overall, this is an exclusive and fascinating analysis.
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More on the Gartner Group:
"David Smith commented that Gartner will not bash MS if MS chooses to slip Vista."
--Jamin Spilzer, Microsoft
