Summary: Caution is needed when it comes to Microsoft-affiliated Web sites which present themselves as "Open Source"

AT IDG, something that's labeled "Open Source" is not necessarily favouring Open Source (let alone software freedom). In fact, the authors rarely even use Open Source and it's the same in ZDNet, as we pointed out very many times in the past. Let's look at some recent examples rather than revisit old ones.

Black Duck's Phil Odence [1, 2] is spreading some more fear of Free software licences so that he can sell proprietary software with his employer. This FUD has been spread to Slashdot by Julie188. Julie188 is Julie Bort from the Microsoft Subnet at NetworkWorld (she is originally from the Microsoft folks although the subnets expanded to other areas).

“Black Duck's Phil Odence is spreading some more fear of Free software licences so that he can sell proprietary software with his employer.”Recently we found out that IDG also recruited Dustin Puryear as a blogger. He is not only a Novell apologist; Microsoft has groomed Mr. Puryear for years now as can be seen by his late defense of Novell and current recommendations of products like Exchange as something people need. His new blog is called "See Through the Windows" and he was invited by IDG to become a blogger. Here he is mentioning but not exactly marketing Peppermint OS by promoting Microsoft's proprietary protocols/products.

"If I'm right about Peppermint," said one person to us, "there will be a wave of hype for it like there was for Xandros, Suse and several other Microsoft doctored releases.

"I suspect that part of Microsoft's Linux strategy is changing favored distributions and encouraging non free fractionation in each. This forces people to have more than one distribution for each non free purpose and forces painful distro hopping between solutions that never do everything. The easy way around this, of course, is to stick with one free software distribution and avoid non free additions to it. Microsoft would like GNU/Linux distributions to make the proprietary Unix fragmentation mistake where none of them cooperated, competed to build their own value center. This force Unix distributions to rebuild a lot of common wheels and all suffered from it. Windows developers also wasted a lot of time and effort reinventing common wheels but they all did it under Microsoft's umbrella, so Windows users felt like they had more choices.

"You should look into this Peppermint OS as the next Suse."

This seems like a far-fetched assertion but only time will tell. ⬆