Shotgun wedding

Summary: 'Former' Microsoft staff is shaping opinions, controlling messages, and disseminating its own version of the data about FOSS

Microsoft has been indirectly funding the development of Mono for a number of years. Mono is about promoting .NET, not promoting FOSS (just targeting FOSS developers). Mono is a thing of the past as far as GNU/Linux desktops are concerned. Xamarin will try to spread it to Android, but so far there has been little progress on this. Developers who appreciate FOSS learned to antagonise this Microsoft technology.

Richard Hillesley explains in his new column that in the FOSS world people have ostracised this bit of Trojan horse/infiltration tactic. To quote the ending paragraph which cites Richard Stallman:

According to Stallman, the problem was “not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn’t make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.”

Juniper, in the mean time, having also become full of Microsoft people (we lost count of how many, but here are some examples [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]), has no made Executive VP out of Microsoft's Bob Muglia, who in turn can infiltrate Microsoft threats. It's a familiar pattern of conduct. Just see other companies that got hijacked by Microsoft veterans.

In other news, notice how FOSS events which groom Black Duck actually have Microsoft as a top sponsor (these are partners which promote one another), based on the official Web site. It's not a coincidence. The funding controls these events. They are controlling messages, controlling data, and basically doing what Microsoft wants them to do.

"Resistance to this ongoing assimilation attempt is vital for the survival of FOSS as a meaningful distinguisher."OpenLogic, which is run by a Microsoft veteran, promotes Azure and openwashes it, giving us yet another example of Microsoft's infiltrations in FOSS.

Over at the 'Microsoft press', the booster Kurt Mackie uses promotional language to characterise the Microsoft-sponsored SUSE and Microsoft proxy "Microsoft Open Technologies Inc."

These are only some of the many examples where Microsoft-affiliated folks try to distort the views of FOSS. Resistance to this ongoing assimilation attempt is vital for the survival of FOSS as a meaningful distinguisher. It's not about intolerance, it's about defending ourselves from what Microsoft knows too well to be a charm offence. It's offensive. ⬆

"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