Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft Obeys Neither Open Standards Nor Open Source Software Doctrine

Image: stuffing-capable ISO



Summary: Microsoft is preaching about standards and open source again, having just had managers vilify both (sometimes resorting to outright corruption); IE9 another new example of harming Web standards and snubbing Open Source

IDG's pseudo-open source blog has a new hit today. It's Microsoft's Walli [1, 2] again and he wants to educate us dumb communists, explaining to us what "Open Source" really means. "Please Don’t Confuse Standards with Open Source Software" says his headline and one can imagine the rest of those Microsoft talking points. Microsoft loves proprietary software development methods and when it comes to standards, it loves labeling its own proprietary APIs/protocols "standards" (recall what Microsoft did to ISO).



"They call it open source for marketing purposes," explained to us gnufreex a couple of hours ago, "but they are doing business by GNU manifesto." [update 18/9/2010: gnufreex asked to emphasise he referred to Red Hat here]

As we showed earlier today, Microsoft pretty much admits that it hates Open Source (not just Free software). It's good that the technology press has been paying attention to it. "Microsoft slags off Open Sauce" says the headline from TechEye:

While software giant Microsoft has been trying to tell the world plus dog that it really loves Open Sauce, there are signs that some company executives did not get the memo.

Hernan Rincon, president of Microsoft Latin America, has been hitting the press claiming that "open" really is a way of saying "incompetent":

He claimed when software companies cannot compete they are declaring their product to be "open". This apparently "masks incompetence".

"When convenient, the companies say they are open and they they use it for your own benefit, " he added in our Babelfish translator.


It's not just Open Source that Microsoft is clearly hostile towards (to the point of violating licences repeatedly after exploitation). At Microsoft there is still hostility towards the Web, with obvious examples like Silverlight (very anti-Web standards) and even Internet Explorer 9 (IE9), which Microsoft boosters say will fracture of the Web. We wrote about the subject earlier today and Swapnil Bhartiya says more by claiming that IE9 is a Chrome and Firefox "rip-off" (his own headline).

The browser seems to an obese boy, unlike lean Chrome and Firefox. The setup file itself was twice the file size of Mozilla Firefox 4.

Firefox was smaller in size (10MB), almost half the size of IE9. It installed fast and was up and running while IE was still installing.

Typical of Microsoft's flint-stone age approach, you have to 're-start' your machine in order for IE 9 to work. Doesn't matter how much important work you are doing, you have to restart.


IE9 is bad for other reasons [1, 2, 3] and no component of it is available for code audit, let alone for sharing. Just about any other Web browser -- Opera and Safari included -- has at least something that's Free software inside it. Microsoft loves Open Source? Don't bet on it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5].

Comments

Recent Techrights' Posts

[Meme] Plagiarism Does Not Eliminate Jobs by Replacing Humans, It Replaces Human Knowledge With False Cruft
We need to boycott sites that fake their output
[Meme] Doing Dog's Job (Not God's Job)
The FSF did not advertise the talk by RMS (its founder), who spoke in France almost exactly 23 hours ago
[Meme] Free Software and Socially-Engineered Groupthink (to Serve Big Sponsors Like Google and Microsoft)
They do this to RMS all the time
 
Gemini Links 21/01/2025: Media Provocations and Nazis Not Tolerated
Links for the day
Slopwatch: BetaNews Plagiarism and LLM Slop by UNIXMen
"state-of-the-art" plagiarism
What Fedora, OpenSUSE, and Debian Elections Teach Us About the State of Weak (or Fake) Communities
They show a total lack of trust in these communities
Links 21/01/2025: Mass Layoffs in "Security" at Microsoft (Despite Microsoft Promising It Would Improve After Many Megabreaches), Skype is Dead (Quietly)
Links for the day
Alternate Version of Daniel Pocock's 2024 Talk, "Technology in European Parliament Election Campaign"
There's loud ovation at the end of the talk
Gemini Links 21/01/2025: London Library, Kobo Sage, and Beyerdynamic DT 48 E
Links for the day
The January 20 Public Talk by Richard Stallman (Around Midday ET), Livestream 'Assassinated' by Google's YouTube
our guess is that the 'cancel mob' sabotaged it, possibly by making a lot of false reports to YouTube
[Video] Daniel Pocock's Public Talk About Free Software Politics, Social Engineering, Debian Deaths and Suicides, Coercion and Exploitation of Women
took many months to get
BetaNews Cannot Survive If Its Fake Articles Are Just SPAM for Companies Like AOHi and Aren't Even Composed by Humans
This is what domains or former "news" sites do when they die and look very desperately for "another way"
Pocock shot in the face, shot in the back, shot on Hitler's birthday saving France, Belgium and FOSDEM
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Dr Richard Stallman in Montpellier, Robert Edward Ernest Pocock in France
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, January 20, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, January 20, 2025
Links 20/01/2025: Conflict, Climate, and More
Links for the day
Gemini Links 20/01/2025: Conflicted Feelings and Politics
Links for the day
Daniel Pocock's ClueCon 2024 Presentation Was Also Streamed Live in YouTube and Later Removed by Google, Citing "Copyrights". Now It's Back.
The talk covers social control media, Debian, politics, and more
Google 'Cancels' RMS
Is the talk happening?
Microsoft Revisionism Debunked by Microsoft's Own Words About “the Failure of OS/2”
The Register on “the failure of OS/2”
Improving Daily Links by Culling Spam, Chaff, and LLM Slop
the Web is getting worse
Links 20/01/2025: Indonesia to Prevents Kids' Access to Social Control Media (Addiction and Worse), Climate News Catchuo
Links for the day
[Meme] EPO Targets
Targets mean nothing if or when you measure the wrong thing
EPO Union Says Monopoly-Granting Targets at EPO "Difficult to Achieve Without Compromising [Staff] Health, Personal Time or the Quality of the Final Products" (Products as in Monopolies, Not Real Products)
To those of us (over 99.999% of people impacted by this) who do not work at the EPO the misuse of words like "products" (monopolies are not products) should be disturbing
The EPO is Nowadays Trying to Trick Staff Into Settling Instead of Solving the Underlying Problems of Corruption and Injustice
This seems like a classic case of "divide-and-rule" or using misled/weak people to harm the whole group (or "the village")
Links 20/01/2025: More PR Stunts by ByteDance and MLK’s Legacy Disrespected
Links for the day
Gemini Links 20/01/2025: Magnetic Fields, NixOS, and Pleroma
Links for the day
BetaNews Spreads Donald Trump Propaganda, Promotes Scams, and Publishes Fake 'Articles' About "Linux"
This is typical BetaNews
Richard Stallman 'Unveils' His January 20 Talk in Montpellier, France
It's free (gratis)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, January 19, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, January 19, 2025
Links 19/01/2025: Gaza Ceasefire and PR Stunt by Fentanylware (TikTok), Faking It by "Going Dark" to Incite American Addicts (Users)
Links for the day
[Meme] Hardware RAID and Hardware Raid
We're expecting attacks on the press in Trump's second term (no need to impress anyone for another election cycle) to be far worse than the first
What's Running on the Laptops
12 months have passed
They Won't Buy Vista 11 PCs or "Hey Hi" Copilot+++++++ PCs of Microsoft (With TPM)
Windows at 8%
No Time Left for President Biden to Pardon Julian Assange
At least they tried
[Meme] 404, Not Found
Kuhn: I'd like to interject for a moment, we made an alliance with the Microsoft-dominated LF to outsource projects to Microsoft GitHub and rich people gave us money to do this
Total Lock-down Ambitions - Part IV - The Latest Examples and the Perils (in Summary)
For further reading take a look at Musial's nice outline
FOSDEM is Called "FOSDEM" Because of Richard Stallman (RMS)
The overlap there seems timely; yesterday RMS spoke in French-speaking (in part) Switzerland where questions in French were accepted
Links 19/01/2025: TikTok (Fentanylware) Now Banned in the US, Convicted Felon Talks to Fentanylware CEO and Pooh-Tin About Undoing the Ban Despite the Supreme Court Unanimously Upholding It
Links for the day
FTC Realises Microsoft Buying Fake 'Clients' to Fake "Revenue" (Microsoft 'Buying' Services and Products From Itself!)
Ponzi scheme
Total Lock-down Ambitions - Part III - The Web Browser as DRM Pusher
A lot of "streaming" stuff is DRM
Video: University in Peru Honours Richard Stallman
Tomorrow, January 20, Richard Stallman speaks in France
IBM Termination Story and Information From Microsoft About Mass Layoffs
In 2 weeks of 2025 Microsoft already had 2 waves of layoffs
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, January 18, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, January 18, 2025