"I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. [...] by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this?"

--Microsoft's chief evangelist

Summary: SCALE 8x has Microsoft content "injected" into it by Microsoft; Silver Lie content that excludes GNU/Linux from the Web is still being spread by Microsoft using the illusion of it being “Open Source” (which it's not)

FOR quite some time now, Microsoft has put its fingers in every pie. It entered a lot of conferences where it was not welcomed, even conferences that are explicitly about GNU/Linux (not “Open Source”). Microsoft has all sorts of outposts, occupied by CodePlex Foundation's Miguel de Icaza and Hunter [1, 2, 3, 4], for example. The last one (4) is a link which also mentions “charm offensives”; that's where Microsoft is trying to "charm" its competition in order to destroy it without arousing suspicion (as Microsoft has done time after time for decades). According to this report from Linux Weekly News, Microsoft also hacked SCALE, the Southern California Linux Expo. Once again it's a “charm offensive” from CodePlex Foundation people:

Mark Stone, deputy director of the new Microsoft-backed CodePlex Foundation, showed up at the Southern California Linux Expo (SCALE) with a laptop running Puppy Linux, complete with adorable desktop puppy logo.

Let's remember that the company that he serves commits acts of extortion against GNU/Linux (consider last week's patent deal with Amazon for example [1, 2, 3]). He is paid to suppress criticism and pretend to be a friend while the company he represents breaks the law and changes the law to illegalise or at least suppress GNU/Linux. Apathy is not always an option.

Here is Microsoft exploiting “Open Source” and CodePlex to spread its own proprietary stuff for Windows, which it has been masquerading as "open" (this is a familiar programming scam for Silver Lie, which is what makes it a lie).

Microsoft has made available for download an updated version of the Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) Toolkit, bringing to the table new features and bug fixes. The WPF Toolkit February 2010 Release is up for grabs on CodePlex, the Redmond company’s repository for open source projects. As is the case with a plethora of Microsoft projects on CodePlex, the WPF Toolkit is offered to developers under Microsoft Public License (Ms-PL), which is an open source license. In this context, devs can access not only the binaries for the WPF Toolkit but also the actual source code. Of course, all contributions to the projects are welcome.

This is supposed to give the illusion that WPF has something “Open Source” about it. It couldn't be farther from the truth; the very opposite is true.

Also in the news, we've found evidence that Microsoft is still dumping proprietary software to prevent web standards and LAMP from spreading. The monopoly wants to spread Silver Lie on the Web with this programme called WebSiteSpark [1, 2] and as the article points out:

There is already a plethora of free, popular Open-Source tools and technologies available that are already widely used by the web community so WebSiteSpark is expected to face steep competition from day 1.

This is not about empowering people. It's about empowering Microsoft by using people's ignorance to put more Silver Lie content on the Web, in turn blocking GNU/Linux users from Web sites. And later on Microsoft pretends to be a friend of GNU/Linux. That really take some nerve. ⬆