Comments

• twitter

  2010-06-19 13:18:38

  Microsoft's alliance with China is not surprising and the two giants have a lot in common. The smearing of free software as a Communist dictatorship is preposterous. Free software, though "ownerless", creates a real free market where users own their computers and anyone can offer their services in a scientific and transparent way. Non free software computers are owned and controlled by incompetent, abusive central planning agencies at Apple and Microsoft. Users and developers alike are free to do as Microsoft and Apple please with the limited set of tools provided, a world that resembles the former Soviet Union. The FSF's use of the terms "free" and "non-free" intentionally invoke US cold war insight.
  
  The results of the lack of freedom are nowhere more apparent than on the desktop. After ten years of free software on my desktop, using Windows for any extended time is like moving into an East German apartment block. The system is restricted, confining, drab, featureless, and bare of utilities and luxuries I'm used to. The owners are intrusive and the place is filled with their propaganda. My neighbors often suffer dissaster and perform many paranoid but futile rituals. The owners watch the tenant's every move and communications in a way that's surpasses the Stasi's wildest dreams and George Orwell's worst nightmares. All that I can think while I'm using Windows is how nice freedom is and how sad it is that my neighbors are so mislead and abused. It's creepy to me that I can't escape non free software propaganda by simply avoiding Windows because it is carried by the increasingly consolidated and partially owned by Microsoft media, even on state owned public TV.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-06-19 17:35:39

  See this old article titled "Making Microsoft Safe for Capitalism"
  
  "Before he installed Windows 95, John Dodge connected to the Internet using software from a Microsoft competitor, CompuServe's Internet in a Box. Not anymore—Windows 95 silently disabled a key piece of his setup and made it too difficult for him to reinstall it. €  "Dodge is no novice. He is senior executive editor of the trade journal PC Week and so had access to the highest-level support engineers. But life is short and even software professionals learn to take the path of least resistance—in this case, the path leading to Microsoft. He has become a regular user of the new Microsoft Network, though he has trouble with its Internet features.
  
  "Still, he believes Microsoft executives when they deny trying to gain market share by sabotaging competitors' software. He just wonders whether Microsoft "has a full appreciation of its actions in the market place." €  "There is reason to believe that Microsoft does." €  [...] €  "Accusations that Microsoft's people lie, cheat and steal information are as much a part of the company's lore as its cadre of millionaires with FYIFV (". . . I'm fully vested") buttons. Microsoft knows it has clout, and it uses what it has: to pressure small competitors, trade-show operators, journalists, retailers (shelf space for non-Microsoft software will be at a premium this Christmas) and everyone else. €  ""Can you name anybody that's happy about being in the same industry with Microsoft?" Mitchell Kapor asks. €  "Microsoft lives according to a "thin ethics," as he sees it: "Anything not a direct lie or clearly illegal is O.K. to do and should be done if it advances Microsoft's tribal cause. This licenses the worst sorts of manipulations, lies, tortured self-justification and so on." Microsoft is hardly alone, of course; plenty of its competitors would play as rough, if they only could. Others in the industry suggest that Microsoft's small-company scrappiness has kept it from facing the issue of corporate ethics: behavior that people will forgive, or at least understand, in a start-up looks considerably less attractive when David grows into Goliath."

• Needs Sunlight

  2010-06-19 18:26:34

  Microsoft is about as communist as it is possible to be: myopic, top-down, centrally steered, command economy, propaganda engine that broaches no competition, quality or technology.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-06-19 18:52:36

  "There’s no company called Linux, there’s barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it’s free."

  --Steve Ballmer

  
  
  "Thanks to Mr. Gates, we now know that an open Internet with protocols anyone can implement is communism; it was set up by that famous communist agent, the US Department of Defense."

  --Richard Stallman

  
  
  "A common danger tends to concord. Communism is the exploitation of the strong by the weak. In Communism, inequality comes from placing mediocrity on a level with excellence."

  --Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

  
  
  "Communism is inequality, but not as property is. Property is exploitation of the weak by the strong. Communism is exploitation of the strong by the weak."

  --Pierre-Joseph Proudhon

• twitter

  2010-06-19 21:51:17

  In practice, Communist leaders are strong people who exploit the weak and strong alike by total control of all resources, careers and property. Non free software has that kind of control over computers and networks that use it. Everything from Microsoft ultimately answers to it's major owner, Bill Gates. That is as top down and authoritarian as a business can be.

• Dr. Roy Schestowitz

  2010-06-19 22:08:10

  Roughly Drafted has this good article on the subject.