--Steve Ballmer, Microsoft's CEO a decade ago (when he said that)

WITH various factors like the demise of software patents (e.g. 35 U.S.C. €§ 101 at the USPTO and US courts) and the OIN situation, not to mention IBM's takeover of Red Hat (IBM strongly opposes €§ 101 -- a position it reaffirmed 3 days ago at Watchtroll), we must consider the growing threat that is proprietary software companies simply devouring Free software. Under the guise of 'cloud' they lock down the code and with purchases like that of GitHub they look to assert more control over it and spy on private code (repositories that will be accessible to the NSA over PRISM). In yesterday's daily links we included over half a dozen articles about Microsoft's purchase of Citus (it's still in the news [1, 2]). A decade or so ago we realigned to focus not only on Novell but also Microsoft entryism at large. Things have changed since then because several more large companies (e.g. Amazon) emerged as threats to the freedom of Free software, so we'd rather not return to a focus on Microsoft. In case it's not obvious, Microsoft is currently just trying to control (or 'become') the competition; this assimilation strategy isn't new and we resisted it even more than a decade ago when the likes of Sam Ramji were assigned the responsibilities. A reader of ours has been researching the prospect/likelihood Microsoft might take over -- or at least try to take over -- Canonical. We might revisit that in the future. At the moment it looks as though Microsoft, boosted by the GitHub takeover, infiltrated Python (its board/foundation). They basically bought staff in key positions. ⬆