Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft Dictatorship Divides and Conquers Linux With Novell, Red Hat, and Ubuntu

Road divided



Summary: How and why Microsoft has turned to increased disruption of the competition rather than any technical merit

MICROSOFT recently announced a loss [1, 2, 3], even though there was spin from Microsoft (trying to claim record profit while in fact reporting a loss). Katherine Noyes calls it "Microsoft's bad quarter" as though it's the exception; in reality, after pressure from the SEC [1, 2] Microsoft was probably just forced to tell the public some truth, not hiding the sources of losses. Noyes quotes a lawyer: '"A near monopoly is like a dictator," said Roberto Lim, a lawyer and blogger on Mobile Raptor. "Even a benign dictator runs the risk of failing to respond to the needs of the people, and how many people would called Microsoft benign? "What Microsoft forgot is that sooner or later, the masses do rebel."' Just like in most empires, Microsoft relies on occupied countries mobilising their own people for the benefit of the dictator (e.g. the Germans using the Poles for production, the British using India for spice, Rome using warriors/police abroad). Right now we see Microsoft doing this inside the Linux and FOSS world, fracturing it.

Microsoft recently resorted to anti-competitive methods (e.g. UEFI), motivating this reminder that merely because Canonical and Red Hat found some way to play with Microsoft (just as Novell had done in 2006) doesn't mean we're safe:



"First they came for Gentoo.

And I did not speak up because I don't use Gentoo.

Then they came for Arch Linux

and I said nothing because I don't use Arch Linux.


And on it goes. Divisive and exclusionary arrangements for UEFI are not solutions, they are impediments. The point is, Microsoft is trying a divide-and-conquer approach and we must resist it. Using the Novell tie Microsoft continues to pollute Linux, the kernel, with proprietary addons and obscenities [1, 2]. Microsoft is rightly shamed for it in news sites and IDG spins it as an apology:

We hate the term "brogrammer," and so should you. However, a recent gaffe by some Microsoft coder somewhere gives a bit more evidence to the idea that a wee bit of immaturity might be lurking in the company's coding rank and file.

According to a message posted by Paolo Bonzini to the (unofficial) Linux Kernel Mailing List, a small snippet of code found in Microsoft's Hyper-V – a virtualization server – was used every time a user loaded Linux within the virtual environment.

The joke? The code itself, written in hexadecimal, was the string, "0xB16B00B5." Get it? "Big Boobs."

"At the most basic level it's just straightforward childish humour, and the use of vaguely-English strings in magic hex constants is hardly uncommon. But it's also specifically male childish humour. Puerile sniggering at breasts contributes to the continuing impression that software development is a boys club where girls aren't welcome. It's especially irritating in this case because Azure may depend on this constant, so changing it will break things," wrote Linux developer and Red Hat employee Dr. Matthew Garrett in a blog post.


Microsoft was not even original, based on this writeup:

While the prank is certainly very funny, it is not original. 0xB16B00B5 is a common L337 expression, or ‘Hexpression’, in the technical community. It is also noted on Wikipedia‘s wiki entry as a “Notable Magic Number”, required of Linux guests running in Microsoft’s Hyper-V Hypervisor Virtualizer. That said, the discovery of these Big Boobs should not come as a surprise as it has been hiding in plain sight, awaiting public scrutiny since 2011.


For all we know, they did not sack the person who did this. At Microsoft, sexism is fine [1, 2, 3, 4], suggest past stories.

If it wasn't for Novell, Microsoft would not have had access to Linux source code in the first place. Microsoft wants this whole affair to be marketed as "peace"; to those who are realists, "peace" with a sociopath is merely seen as a trap.

Recent Techrights' Posts

KillerStartups.com is an LLM Spam Site That Sometimes Covers 'Linux' (Spams the Term)
It only serves to distract from real articles
 
Gemini Links 21/11/2024: Alphabetising 400 Books and Giving the Internet up
Links for the day
Links 21/11/2024: TikTok Fighting Bans, Bluesky Failing Users
Links for the day
Links 21/11/2024: SpaceX Repeatedly Failing (Taxpayers Fund Failure), Russian Disinformation Spreading
Links for the day
Richard Stallman Earned Two More Honorary Doctorates Last Month
Two more doctorate degrees
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, November 20, 2024
IRC logs for Wednesday, November 20, 2024
Gemini Links 20/11/2024: Game Recommendations, Schizo Language
Links for the day
Growing Older and Signs of the Site's Maturity
The EPO material remains our top priority
Did Microsoft 'Buy' Red Hat Without Paying for It? Does It Tell Canonical What to Do Now?
This is what Linus Torvalds once dubbed a "dick-sucking" competition or contest (alluding to Red Hat's promotion of UEFI 'secure boot')
Links 20/11/2024: Politics, Toolkits, and Gemini Journals
Links for the day
Links 20/11/2024: 'The Open Source Definition' and Further Escalations in Ukraine/Russia Battles
Links for the day
[Meme] Many Old Gemini Capsules Go Offline, But So Do Entire Web Sites
Problems cannot be addressed and resolved if merely talking about these problems isn't allowed
Links 20/11/2024: Standing Desks, Broken Cables, and Journalists Attacked Some More
Links for the day
Links 20/11/2024: Debt Issues and Fentanylware (TikTok) Ban
Links for the day
Jérémy Bobbio (Lunar), Magna Carta and Debian Freedoms: RIP
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Jérémy Bobbio (Lunar) & Debian: from Frans Pop to Euthanasia
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
This Article About "AI-Powered" is Itself LLM-Generated Junk
Trying to meet quotas by making fake 'articles' that are - in effect - based on plagiarism?
Recognizing invalid legal judgments: rogue Debianists sought to deceive one of Europe's most neglected regions, Midlands-North-West
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Google-funded group distributed invalid Swiss judgment to deceive Midlands-North-West
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Gemini Links 20/11/2024: BeagleBone Black and Suicide Rates in Switzerland
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, November 19, 2024
IRC logs for Tuesday, November 19, 2024
Links 19/11/2024: War on Cables?
Links for the day
Gemini Links 19/11/2024: Private Journals Online and Spirituality
Links for the day
Drew's Development Mailing Lists and Patches to 'Refine' His Attack Pieces Against the FSF's Founder
Way to bury oneself in one's own grave...
The Free Software Foundation is Looking to Raise Nearly Half a Million Dollars by Year's End
And it really needs the money, unlike the EFF which sits on a humongous pile of oligarchs' and GAFAM cash
What IBMers Say About IBM Causing IBMers to Resign (by Making Life Hard/Impossible) and Why Red Hat Was a Waste of Money to Buy
partnering with GAFAM
In Some Countries, Desktop/Laptop Usage Has Fallen to the Point Where Microsoft and Windows (and Intel) Barely Matter Anymore
Microsoft is the next Intel basically
[Meme] The Web Wasn't Always Proprietary Computer Programs Disguised as 'Web Pages'
The Web is getting worse each year
Re-de-centralisation Should Be Our Goal
Put the users in charge, not governments and corporations in charge of users
Gemini Links 19/11/2024: Rain Music, ClockworkPi DevTerm, and More
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, November 18, 2024
IRC logs for Monday, November 18, 2024