Summary: The press is awash with Microsoft propaganda that negates truths, such as Microsoft as having "warmth towards open source" (like lawsuits), Microsoft having big share in virtualisation (based on revenue/sales alone), and Microsoft "continu[ing] Android push" (actually, extorting and derailing Android)

EVERY now and then we see some Microsoft openwashing that we are urged to respond to. There are some propaganda agents out there (some working directly for Microsoft) whose aim is to portray Microsoft as privacy-respecting, Open Source-friendly, law-obeying/abiding, and competition-respecting. Earlier today we saw a pro-Microsoft site saying that "Microsoft Refuses To Open Source VB6", then issuing the following revisionist nonesense: "With Microsoft's new warmth towards open source it seems a small thing to ask for VB6 to be open sourced."

There is no "new warmth towards open source", there is openwashing and propaganda, that's all. Microsoft pretended to have open-sourced some very old software a few months ago, but that was a sheer lie, promoted for the most part by Microsoft-friendly sites that disregard facts. We need to keep track of such lies, which usually come from sites that have historically been linked to Microsoft (sometimes their writers come from Microsoft).

Here is the MSN-connected (Microsoft, and Microsoft Windows-run) Fool.com belittling Red Hat by warping the way one counts share in virtualisation (they count sales, but Free software is rarely actually sold). It's the same propaganda line that Gartner and IDC use when it comes to servers share. They give the illusion that proprietary software dominates virtualisation, but that's nonsense. VMware is linked to the NSA through RSA, and it is run by people from Microsoft (the NSA's #1 PRISM partner and more). Like Hyper-V, VMware is proprietary and it probably facilitates back door access like Hyper-V does (Hyper-V runs on Windows, which has back doors, hence Hyper-V and every guest VM under it has an NSA back door). We need to find back against disinformation that belittles the share of GNU/Linux and Free software by framing it as a purely financial question.

The third example for today comes from an Android-hostile site. It now gives the illusion (again) that Microsoft supports Android rather than what it actually does. Microsoft extorts Android and derails it by trying to turn a portion of it into a Microsoft surveillance platform.

All the examples above show us not journalism but agenda disguised as reporting. Please report such coverage to us so that we can counter it. ⬆