Amplifying the lies
"Mind Control: To control mental output you have to control mental input. Take control of the channels by which developers receive information, then they can only think about the things you tell them. Thus, you control mindshare!"
--Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
Summary: Seeding a lie in the press, or confusing readers by means of semantics, still a top skill championed by Microsoft and its PR agencies
MICROSOFT places more emphasis on PR and AstroTurfing than it does on technical work. One former Microsoft marketer created a firm that manages Microsoft-friendly think tanks (Black Duck, his proprietary software firm, is speaking 'for' FOSS this month [1]). Microsoft has been very effective when it comes to perception distortion (they call it "perception management"), so we need to counter this.
Just as
Microsoft was openwashing Azure and is
still openwashing it in the Microsoft media (trying to make it synonymous with openness although it is proprietary with surveillance),
the company is now openwashing .NET. We decided to research this and find out how and why the press played along with this charade of PR, so we ended up with a sort of 'post mortem' of how it all came about. Simon Phipps, the President of the OSI (and hence an authority when it comes to classifying real Open Source), has
already chastised Microsoft numerous times in recent weeks. Not only did he rebut claims that Microsoft DOS and other abandoned Microsoft products were open-sourced (they were not) but he also wrote about
Microsoft's serious abuses of privacy in Hotmail, connecting that to the
latest deceiving charade from Microsoft. Phipps writes: "it emerged that Microsoft, in pursuit of a copyright misuse mediated by an employee, discovered some of the evidence was to be obtained in someone else's Hotmail account. Since the terms of use allow the company to read whatever mail it wishes, it went in to the mailbox and took a look. But many people felt "legal" was not equivalent to "ethical," especially from a company trying to frame a competitor for the same attitude with its "Scroogled" campaign."
So it's clear that the OSI (or at least its President) was not particularly impressed by any of Microsoft's latest PR stunts. Microsoft's software is not just proprietary software but also
spyware by design (in collusion with the NSA). We can assume that .NET inherits those same issues.
Phipps, who used to work at Sun (and hence promoted Java) writes: "Open-sourcing Java gave it a new lease on life. Why, then, did Microsoft insist on keeping .Net closed? My guess is it was a matter of leadership philosophy. Plenty of staff in Microsoft understood the power of open source to harness developer passion. It had to be a senior hand holding them back."
The more important question is, why did a lot of the press call this move open-sourcing? We did a thorough search, going back in time, attempting to pinpoint where it all started; we have reviewed dozens of reports and sorting the reports chronologically (e.g. [2-12]), it's easier to see how it's basically seeded by Microsoft-friendly sites with deceiving headlines. It was more like a PR campaign where gratis gets equated with libre, components and the whole get blurred (there is no clarification to that effect), and platform dependence (Windows only) is not even discussed. As Phipps
put it in his personal blog: "The caution relates to the news that Windows for mobile will be free of charge. Whilst unarguably a big move, it’s not open source — the license terms still restrict how you can use the software. This is important, as whilst a “first hit is free” approach to getting people using mobile Windows might bring some results, the key to sustained innovation and therefore sustained increase in the user base comes from removing the need to ask for permission before you can innovate."
Therein lies another source of confusion. Some exploited the simultaneous announcement of gratis and libre to bamboozle readers -- a tactic championed by
Microsoft boosters posing as reporters,
.NET-oriented news sites (there is not even an illusion of objectivity
in Gates-funded papers and
sites edited/managed by longtime friends of Microsoft), and
dubious people like Brian Fagioli (writing for an historically Microsoft-friendly site), who appears not to know that Android has Linux in it but has started covering FOSS some months ago (and not done so well). This is the same guy who, based on our analysis at the early stages of the controversy, started pushing the "Mozilla CEO is anti-gay" line (we had seen no such coverage before he did that, just positive coverage about Eich becoming the CEO). Later we saw Microsoft-friendly news sites amplifying the same message, discrediting the Mozilla Foundation and also rewriting history of Netscape, not just Mozilla (we omit all the links which relate to this as we don't wish to feed them). Never mind if those who were most vocal against Eich were themselves notably (if not extremely) anti-gay rights [13]. Microsoft itself is notoriously homophobic (
against lesbians and
gay males, not just marriages of them) -- to the point of being
sued by
its own staff.
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Related/contextual items from the news:
OkCupid received a clear benefit, media attention, for trashing Eich. But their co-founder and ultimate CEO has shown strong anti-gay tendencies in the past. That’s hypocrisy, and worse.
