08.08.11

IRC Proceedings: August 6th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 5:13 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Enter the IRC channels now

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IRC Proceedings: August 5th, 2011

Posted in IRC Logs at 5:09 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Enter the IRC channels now

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Google Validates Techrights’ Assertion That Microsoft and Apple Are Part of a Cartel Against Linux

Posted in Apple, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents at 4:45 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: When Microsoft and Apple “get into bed together you have to start wondering what’s going on,” claims a Senior Vice President from Google, furthermore stressing that there is a “hostile, organized campaign” against the Linux-powered Android

THE patent attacks on Google are more or less coordinated as those who sue over Android are aware of other lawsuits and also speak about them. Microsoft, for example, implicitly congratulated Apple on its lawsuits against Android. These two companies also pool money together in order to form patent cartels (e.g. Nortel, CPTN) at the cost of billions. The US DOJ is investigating the Nortel sale based on numerous sources including Microsoft boosters who say:

The $4.5 billion Nortel patent sale to Microsoft, Research in Motion and Apple is reportedly the focus of a deeper investigation by U.S. antitrust regulators. The Wall Street Journal reports that the Justice Department is trying to determine whether the purchase would unfairly hurt smartphone makers that use Google’s Android operating system.

The consortium of businesses out-bid Google for the patent portfolio auctioned off by the bankrupt Nortel Networks last month. The extensive patent portfolio — 6,000 in total — touches nearly every aspect of telecommunications and additional markets as well, including Internet search and social networking.

There are some other notable pieces on the subject and Microsoft boosters try to either predict doom for Android or daemonise Google for buying IBM patents as recently found out and explained by one blogger:

Yesterday I noticed a very large number of new patents listed in the USPTO assignment records for Google from IBM, and made note of them in a post, Google Acquires Over 1,000 IBM Patents in July.

I didn’t expect or anticipate the interest that my post would stir up, though I probably should have, given what seems to be an increased amount of litigation directed at Google involving patent infringement claims, with Apple taking on HTC and Google, Oracle and Google disputing use of Java in Android, Purple Leaf taking exception to Checkout, and other suits.

Given the interest in the IBM patents in a number of places on the web and some conversations I had, I thought it might be a good idea to provide the list of patents that Google acquired earlier this month. Google acquired a number of additional patents from IBM earlier this year and last year as well. I included those in my February post, Google Patents, Updated and Google Self Driving Cars Get Jumpstart from IBM Patents.

Groklaw, which is very IBM-friendly, has a lot to say not only about the patent sale (remember what Professor Webbink does for a living) but also about the Oracle vs. Google case [1, 2, 3] which it helps suppress. It does seem likely that Oracle will be disappointed at the end.

Google calls patents the same as Richard Stallman calls them, based on the headline “Google On The Nortel Loss, Patents As Government-Granted Monopolies, And Plates Of Spaghetti” (source)

There is a lot of coverage linking back to Bloomberg. “Bloomberg reports that Google General Counsel Kent Walker likened patent purchases, and their resulting use, as a battlefield and added that it was hard to find a way through the “mess” of litigation,” says one news site.

“Google calls patents the same as Richard Stallman calls them…”Google claims that “It’s hard to find what’s the best path – there’s so much litigation [...] We’re exploring a variety of different things.”

The seminal report is here and there are second-hand accounts too, coming from many directions [1, 2, 3, 4]:

“I have worked in the tech sector for over two decades. Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what’s going on,” writes David Drummond, SVP and chief legal officer.

Drummond said that Android was becoming more and more popular and winning more and more users, however he added that its successes were being tarnished.

That latest claim is mentioned in this audiocast

“Google Responds To Microsoft’s “Gotcha”: They’re Diverting Attention With A Trick That Failed,” says the Washington Post headline. To quote:

Yesterday, Google wrote a post calling out Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and others for using “bogus” patents to try to kill Android. Some of the patents Google’s Chief Legal Officer David Drummond mentioned included the ones Microsoft acquired from Novell (not to be confused with Nortel, which happened later). When Microsoft saw this, two senior officials took to Twitter to effectively pants Google. You see, Microsoft had tried to get Google to partner with them to buy the Novell patents — Google turned them down. And Microsoft had the email to prove it.

This diversion/controversy is hinged upon Google’s post which validates an interesting take from Muktware:

Microsoft seems to be the favorite disciple of the Indian Guru. I have been covering Microsoft since the days it made bogus claims that Linux infringes on it patents and then the way they got their OOXML approved as an ISO standard by by hook or by crook. Ever since I take everything that this monopoly say with a grain of salt.

Yesterday when Google blogged about how Apple and Microsoft are piling up software patents to intensify attack on Android, I was certain of any confusion statement from Microsoft’s. It happened, we covered it here. We were expecting a response from Google and it came.

Daring Fireball: an Apple fan’s assessment of the situation
What’s more exciting to see is that Apple fanboys cum blogger are all excited about Microsoft’s ambiguous statement. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber writes, “So if Google had acquired the rights to these patents, that would have been OK. But when others acquired them, it’s a ‘hostile, organized campaign’.”

What more evidence does he need than the fact that Apple has sued almost every Android player in the market over patent issues because the company doesn’t know what the healthy competition is. And Microsoft, like an extortion gang, is going after Android players demanding $15 per unit which is far more than the licence of Microsoft’s own WP 7. Still Mr Gruber doesn’t see any hostility here?

He goes on to say, “It’s OK for Google to undermine Microsoft’s for-pay OS licensing business by giving Android away for free, but it’s not OK for Microsoft to undermine Google’s attempts to give away for free an OS that violates patents belonging to Microsoft?”

Dr. Glyn Moody makes another call to abolish software patents:

As long-suffering readers will know, I’ve been warning about the growing problem of patent thickets in the field of software for some time now. Until relatively recently, I and a few others have been voices crying in the wilderness: the general consensus has been that patents are good, and more patents are better. But in the last few weeks, the first hopeful signs have appeared that at least some people are beginning to realise that software patents not only do not promote innovation, they actually throttle it.

Here is the part where Moody mentions Google while also taking note of these comments:

Finally, a very interesting interview with Google’s Senior Vice President & General Counsel appeared yesterday, in which he said:

“Patents are government-granted monopolies,” Walker then says quite matter-of-factly. “We have them to reward innovation, but that’s not happening here,” he says.

So, as you might expect, I’m pleased that people are finally waking up to the seriousness of the situation. More and more are beginning to talk about abolishing software patents altogether – something I have been advocating for years now. But I don’t think that goes far enough: we need to abolish all patents, for everything.

From Google’s point of view, there is a cartel in action:

Google chief legal officer David Drummond has claimed that Apple, Microsoft, Oracle, and other companies have waged a “hostile, organized campaign” against Google’s Android operating system using “bogus patents”.

“I have worked in the tech sector for over two decades. Microsoft and Apple have always been at each other’s throats, so when they get into bed together you have to start wondering what’s going on,” Drummond said on Wednesday in a blog post.

CNET did cover this because when the cartel strikes, ignoring it would lead to allegation of bias. As more and more reports give room for Google’s plea, more members of the public will perhaps be incited against patents.

Pamela Jones is meanwhile back to blogging and she says that Microsoft breaks antitrust rules:

The trouble with FUD is at first it sounds correct, or at least plausible. So when Google complained about the Apple-Microsoft partnership and the deliberate patent policy against Google, Microsoft’s first response sounded like a killer blow. It said it had asked Google to join them. But… let’s take a little bit closer look, because in doing so, it let slip a fact that we did not know until now — that Google tried to get the 800 or so Novell patents that CPTN, an entity Microsoft set up with Oracle, Apple and EMC, eventually won.

That revelation tells us the most fundamental fact about patent law in the US today — namely that even if you have as much money as Google, you can’t freely innovate and provide fabulous products because the patent thicket is so dense already and the Proprietary Patent Club is joining hands to keep any newcomer out of the competition. And that’s exactly why articles about Google “whining” or viewing this as just a verbal war are missing the point Google was making, namely pointing out that it can be *illegal* to use patents for an anticompetitive purpose. There’s a line, and Google is indicating that it thinks that line has been crossed.

As we saw in the Novell patent scenario, the Department of Justice agreed that the deal was not acceptable, intervening to protect the Open Source community, so it understood the danger and altered what Microsoft in particular was allowed to do with the patents it arranged to buy.

So Google isn’t dreaming. This is antitrust reality and that may be why Microsoft took Google’s initial complaint seriously enough to respond.

This isn’t about patents. It’s about antitrust.

Microsoft’s booster Josh Lowensohn plays ball for Microsoft using CNET as the platform, leading to the illusion of balance (Microsoft is the aggressor really, not a victim)

Another audiocast from CNET touches the subject, but it is too conformist. As it is sponsored by Apple and Microsoft as key advertisers, it is also filled with conflicts of interest. In any event, Google wastes more money on this whole patent bureaucracy while HTC too finds itself needing to put up a fight against Apple, having surrendered to Microsoft. Here is an interesting take on it:

HTC Develops Workaround To Bypass Apple Patent Attacks

[...]

If the workaround are suitable HTC may share them with other partners of the Open Handset Alliance to help boost the deployment of Android.

MPEG-LA and Microsoft booster have posted a silly headline echoing MPEG-LA’s allegations against Google. One of them is in our IRC channel supporting the cartel known as MPEG-LA while the other previously spammed us with MPEG-LA promotion. Google would hate to depend on MPEG-LA as Ubuntu is already extorted by MEPG-LA (the main proponents of MPEG-LA are Microsoft, Apple, and Nokia). One reader wrote to us to say: “The [Ubuntu Forums] thread doesn’t really go anywhere but it does raise the interesting issue of whether any technology is safely imported into and used in the US these days.”

It is worth noting that Rick F., the Patent Troll Tracker, has just had his blog abducted by some cricket spammer. We really need more reporters to expose the shady workings of trolls like MPEG-LA (headed by a patent troll who hides behind a separate entity), which sometimes work at the behest of a "criminal enterprise” using them as a proxy. Thankfully, people are starting to realise how this whole industry of patents really works. It’s repellent. █

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Myhrvold’s “Criminal Enterprise”, Detkin’s Criticism of Extortionists and Terrorists (Which He Himself Became)

Posted in Patents at 4:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Leading patent trolls come under massive pressure and the political system too, having permitted such trolls to survive and thrive

IN OUR previous coverage about the masochist (Microsoft’s patent troll) we highlighted the fact that his racketeering operation is finally coming under fire from the mass media. “Podcast exposes Myhrvold’s criminal enterprise,” summarises it Homer, stressing that: “This is the full one-hour podcast of the investigative report conducted by Laura Sydell and Alex Blumberg into the patent terrorist known as Nathan Myhrvold, as transcribed on NPR and This American Life. Consider it essential listening for anyone wishing to understand the patent threat in the US, and in particular the seedy, underground world of patent extortionists like Nathan Myhrvold. It goes into a lot more depth than the articles.”

“I was rather surprised to discover that the term “patent troll” was actually coined by one of Intel’s lawyers, Peter Detkin, who also referred to such people as extortionists and terrorists. Ironically, he’s since sold his soul to the devil, and become one of those patent terrorists, as a “managing partner” for Intellectual Ventures … the heart of Myhrvold’s criminal empire,” concludes Homer.

Well, based upon another NPR report, the money given to them by Bill Gates has not been enough for self censorship. Many sites have linked to NPR and put more pressure to pull the plug on those blackmail operations. Even Dilbert is having fun with the subject right now. Techdirt has many posts on the subject, such as this one, this one, and one titled “When Patents Attack: How Patents Are Destroying Innovation In Silicon Valley”. That third one can be found here and it says:

This week’s episode of This American Life is absolutely worth listening to. The TAL team has been doing more and more amazing investigative reporting work in the past year or so, and this week’s episode is called, “When Patents Attack!” which was apparently a last minute change from the much more bland and misleading “Invention Peddlers.” The episode was done by Planet Money’s Alex Blumberg and NPR’s Laura Sydell and there’s a written version of the story on the Planet Money blog, which covers most, but not all, of what’s on the audio version (and, yes, it’s nice that the story refers to Techdirt as an “influential blog,” though it looks like they may have only done that in order to have someone they could “quote” calling Intellectual Ventures a “patent troll”).

This debate has grown rather heated recently, with this and this type of opinion pieces calling for a political reform. Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry puts that in highly syndicated sites and so has Klint Finley, who set up a poll for readers to participate.

Timothy B. Lee, a longtime critic of the patent system as a whole and individually Nathan the patent troll, has unleashed a string of three posts onto Forbes, wherein he too calls for political reform (through SCOTUS):

Last weekend I was thrilled to hear one of my favorite radio programs, This American Life, take up the issue of software patents. Computer programmers have been sounding the alarm about this problem for two decades, and it’s great to see mainstream media outlets finally start to give the issue the kind of attention it deserves. TAL devoted a full hour to the subject, focusing on Intellectual Ventures (which I’ve written about at length) and did an absolutely spectacular job.

Another one from Lee says more on the same subject and additionally he makes the same point we have been making for years and pressured Google on. He asks Google to publicly oppose software patents:

Google, whose Android operating system is currently on the business end of dozens of patent lawsuits, has a combative post accusing its competitors of ganging up on it with “bogus patents.”

We are going to write on this subject separately. Google is following the wrong route at this moment — that which helps Google but not the public from which it craves support. We will address that point in the next post.

Some of the attacks on Google also come from Microsoft’s patent troll, Nathan, whose proxies include Lodsys. While we wrote about it many times before (whereas pro-Microsoft lobbyists kept rather quiet about this), it is only now that Charles Arthur pushes it into The Guardian, asking: “Why won’t Intellectual Ventures answer questions about its relationship with Lodsys?”

Is ex-Microsoftie Nathan Myrhvold’s company getting shell companies like Lodsys to demand payment for software patents? And is there any evidence those patents help innovation in software?

Microsoft boosters at GeekWire and Xconomy defend the Washington-based patent troll that helps Microsoft. No surprise there.

Well, as covered here before, products that people love and care about are being hit by Nathan’s satellite proxies, so the public opinion will inevitably change. Gizmodo shows where the trolls are located (sometimes at the same address as other shells, of which Nathan is said to have over 1,300 right now, in order to hide his tracks).

The backlash is everywhere and the FSF thanks NPR for the piece exposing the bad guys:

‘This American Life’ did some great reporting about software patents. Ask them to help solve these problems and offer the show in patent-free formats.

This American Life is a radio show that airs weekly on public stations throughout the United States. Their most recent episode, “When Patents Attack!”, covers a story that’s familiar to many of us. In an hour-long show, they explain what patent trolls do, illustrate how patent litigation and threats hamper software development, and investigate the inner workings of one particularly notorious troll company, Intellectual Ventures.

We already have a detailed wiki page about IV and about other patent trolls from Microsoft (Paul Allen’s patent troll is still suing), but some of them use proxies like Lodsys while Groklaw makes an attempt to keep track [1, 2, 3, 4].

The Economist, fuelled by the wide exposure of disturbing news, starts criticising patents:

AMERICA is still in denial, but among economists and wonks I think the hard truth is settling in: we’re not as rich as we thought we were and our prospects for future high growth rates aren’t looking so great. America’s last best hope for breaking free from what Tyler Cowen has called “the great stagnation” is the discovery of new “disruptive” technologies that would transform the possibilities of economic production in the way the fossil-fuel-powered engine did. As it stands, growth, such as it is, depends largely on many thousands of small innovations increasing efficiency incrementally along many thousands of margins. Innovation and invention is the key to continuing gains in prosperity.

Zero-sum “win the future” rhetoric notwithstanding, it doesn’t much matter whether the advances in new technology occur in China, India or America. Nevertheless, it remains that America is the world’s leader in technical invention, and continues to attract many of the world’s most inventive minds. That’s why it is so important that America remain especially conducive to innovation. And that’s why America’s intellectual-property system is a travesty which threatens the wealth and welfare of the whole world. It may seem a recondite subject, but the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Mainstream and corporate media backlash against patents is already here. Will this catalyse change? Will software patents be eradicated or just patent trolls? Given that IV staff like Peter Detkin criticised people like himself, they too know that their activities are very much unjust. █

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US Moves Towards Limiting Software Patenting, Germany Remains Confused About EU Patent Laws

Posted in Europe, Patents at 3:35 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: In Re Bilski continues to serve as a basis for invalidating some software patents, whereas in Germany, lack of clarify remains, despite the Federal Court getting involved

SOME weeks ago we saw new evidence that In Re Bilski still helped eliminate at least some software patents. This was not exactly unprecedented, but the cumulative evidence was new. Now there is this:

Lots of folks were upset with how the Supreme Court ruled so narrowly in the Bilski case and how they refused to make a clear statement on the patentability of software. It did seem clear that some judges didn’t believe that software should be patentable, and we were just discussing how the Supreme Court might still invalidate software patents, if given a good case on the subject. In the meantime, though, as a small silver lining, it does appear that the Bilski ruling has resulted in at least some software patents tossed.

This might be a step in the right direction, but it is far from enough. Meanwhile, in Europe for example, some software patents mistakenly get approved (Microsoft's FAT in Germany for instance), which requires clarifications that arrive from the Federal Court. The patent lawyers rave about being able to patent software, linking to conclusions from biased interpretations like this one:

By this decision, the German two-stage approach to examination patent-eligibility of software-related inventions can be considered as established. Even though it resembles the corresponding EPO approach, it is not identical with it, since above step 2 (solving a technical problem by technical means, § 1 III, IV PatG) represents an additional step as compared to the EPO approach. Step 2 is, like step 1, an a-priori step not considering prior art. It thus represents a kind of coarse screening (“Grobsichtung”) to enable that only such claims are examined as to their novelty/inventiveness (above step 3) that go beyond trivial technical features.

This difference between the German and the EPO approaches might be best illustrated by the fact that a pure business method implemented on a conventional computer or computer network would in Germany be excluded as a “computer program as such” without even considering prior art, while the EPO would rejected this method for lack of inventive step since its differences over prior art only involve non-technical features.

In Germany, applicants of software-implemented methods will now be on the safe side as regards technicality issues, if the invention is claimed within an embedded system framework, i.e. as a method controlling a technical apparatus or collecting, evaluating and processing (technical) data by means of a technical apparatus.

The recent development of case law in Germany is to be considered positive for applicants of software inventions, as it overcomes the earlier investigation of the individual case and thus creates legal certainty due to an easier-to-understand and thus easier-to-adopt examination systematics.

This is what they would hope. The source has a financial agenda. The H says that “Siemens had asked the German Patent Office for patent protection (DE 101 15 895 C1) for a method of displaying a recognition feature for previously visited web sites. For deep links leading to other web sites to be depicted, users would first have to be registered on the online information site visited. The patent application refers to a client program that accesses cookies set by the server.” Can the EU authorities step up and remind Germany that patents “as such” are verboten? █

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Attachmate’s First Milestone: Sign Another Patent Deal With Microsoft, Pay Microsoft a ‘Linux Tax’ on SUSE

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, OpenSUSE, Scalix, SLES/SLED, Xandros at 3:14 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Buying Novell to shake Microsoft’s hands on patents in GNU/Linux (and validate malicious allegations)

Summary: Reiteration of the foolishness seen in the latest Microsoft deal (sellout) of Attachmate, which put its men in charge of SUSE

Nearly 5 years after signing a patent deal with Microsoft, Novell is no more. Attachmate took over the company, whose Web domain is mostly inactive except when new faces appear as in this case:

It’s been about 2.5 months that I have been in the role of President and General Manager of Novell, and since joining The Attachmate Group, Novell has taken many steps towards defining the next great chapter in its evolution and history.

What has Attachmate actually accomplished so far? It recently renewed the patent deal with Microsoft, which only leaves OpenSUSE in more of a scandalous scenario. The project is mostly idle, much like some Tumbleweed in the wind (there is a new article about it).

Christine Hall further solidifies the stance that we should keep the same attitude towards SUSE. She writes:

Indeed, it did seem that Boycott Novell had outlived it’s usefulness, until Monday’s announcement that Microsoft had renewed their deal with SUSE and would be putting $100 million into the Linux distro’s coffers. Although the announcement on the SUSE web site made no mention of patents, tech news sites like InformationWeek have indicated that it’ll be business as usual, with MS’s patent FUD being given the perception of legitimacy through SUSE..

[...]

Techrights is probably right, even after this development. Really, nothing has changed, it’s just the same old deal extended for another four years. There may be nothing about this deal that doesn’t stink, and stink badly, but there’s nothing new here. Sadly, the Microsoft/SUSE connection would seem to have become a legacy with which we are doomed to live for as long as both companies are viable.

This is a real shame. There was a time when SUSE was considered by many to be the Rolls Royce of distros. Now it’s basically “Windows for Linux.” All they need to do now is add a “Start” button, a registry, and put it on a file system that’s prone to rapid fragmentation.

Like we said before, people should strongly urge other people to boycott SUSE and choose other distributions instead. It’s very feasible and the boycott does work. The only use left for Novell is its case against SCO (which Pamela Jones continues to cover), but just like any company that falls into Microsoft’s hand, there is no future left. Former Novell employee Dr. Bill gets it wrong about how Novell got SUSE and how Attachmate gets SUSE in the following new video. Basically, he wrongly asserts that Novell bought SUSE from SUSE and that Attachmate bought SUSE from Novell rather than just buy the whole of Novell.

Novell was bad news for SUSE all along, especially after the Microsoft deal. Now that SUSE is in Microsoft-friendly hands, there is no reason to feel loyal to SUSE based on its old self. The move back to Germany is not a sign of independence or self-liberation, it is the increased dependence on Microsoft under leadership from Attachmate (previous SUSE leaders left or got nudged out). Let this entire affair teach us that Microsoft deals are suicide. Another sign of this is that, as we covered before, Xandros recently sold Scalix — a piece of news that even the Canadian press has covered a while later:

Fresco Microchip, a Toronto company with Ottawa operations that develop television imaging technology, has raised $9 million in new financing. Celtic House Venture Partners, Ventures West and others put the money into Fresco which previously raised $39.3 million Xandros, a New York company which develops Linux business software in Ottawa, has sold a Scalix Linus email product line for $12 million in cash and stock to Sebring Software of Sarasota, Florida.

They too break the company into pieces as though it gets liquidated (Attachmate’s deal was hinged upon given Novell’s patents to Microsoft). It wasn’t long ago that Xandros actually bought Scalix. █

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White House is Microsoft’s House

Posted in America, Microsoft at 2:48 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft manages to have a mole put in charge as the CIO of the White House

A person previously chosen to head technology for the Obama administration was embracing Google, Drupal (GPL), GNU/Linux etc. But it was too good to last and as we noted last year, there was something mysterious about his departure, almost as though someone was trying to topple him (we wrote about him on many past occasions).

Just like in the FCC, the White House is falling back into Microsoft’s hands. Gates and Ballmer are already frequent White House visitors, so the match seems like it was made in Heaven and the connection Microsoft has to the US government is a subject we have an entire wiki page about.

Microsoft must be opening a bottle of champagne right about now. The White House CIO who was a Microsoft-hostile one is out, a mole is in, based on this report:

Steven VanRoekel, a former Microsoft executive, will become the next chief information officer for the federal government — a bigger, more policy-oriented technology job than any he held at the software giant.

This comes from the New York Times. “Here is an article with a bait title” from the New York Times, alerts us a regular reader. This relates to reports like this or even this, but its message is opposite in the sense that it is a bit of a whitewash. “Microsoft needs to concentrate on a different kind of search: finding a buyer for Bing, its online search business,” say original claims, but who would be interested in a business that loses billions per year? All Bing brings are big losses without signs of reversal (amid growing debt). It’s the same with Windows phones at 1% market share and “abysmal” revenue which is “probably income from Microsoft’s Android shake-downs,” says one GNU/Linux advocate. Moreover, it is one of those silly articles that call profit — not userbase — “market share”. But anyway, that’s another story for another post. Going back to the issue at hand, Fernando Cassia tells us that:

Great, after appointing a trojan at Nokia, the Evil Empire of Redmondia now has one at the White House

“Oh no,” writes one of our readers, “Steven VanRoekel, who worked at Microsoft from 1994 to 2009, replaces Vivek Kundra, who is stepping down as federal chief information officer to take up a fellowship at Harvard University. As CIO, VanRoekel will direct policy and strategic planning for government information technology and will be responsible for the $80 billion in annual federal technology spending. At Microsoft, VanRoekel was an assistant to Bill Gates…”

“The US Federal Government is totally screwed,” he adds, and “NYT is stupid.”

It says that: “The federal government spends about $80 billion a year on information technology, more than any corporation. But the government, analysts agree, has not achieved the kind of productivity gains from its technology investment that is evident in the private sector.”

“That would be the “productivity gain” had by firing lots of workers in the private sector,” says our reader. “It would be good if the Feds don’t get “productive” like that but Republicans want to fire everyone but DHS subcontractors.

“Great, after appointing a trojan at Nokia, the Evil Empire of Redmondia now has one at the White House”
      –Fernando Cassia“Government work does not pay well but it’s one of the few places left that a person might hope to work a 40 hour week, have vacations and a pension.

“Wow, Roy has a lot of excellent research on the man. [..] and what happened at the FCC.”

Concluding the above, he quotes: “While VanRoekel worked with the FCC, one of his primary jobs was to redesign their basic website and primary web-based face. Below you’ll be able to see before and after screenshots of the site improved by VanRoekel. He furthermore added a vastly improved commenting system to the new site as well.”

Further, he adds: “So, that’s his primary FCC achievement according to Slashgear. Roy documented a few other accomplishments, like the FCC going after Apple.

“Kundra’s IT dashboard had a lot of Microsoft contracts on the cutting block. This guy will probably push OOXML on everyone instead.”

The problem with VanRoekel’s appointment is now just that he is likely to make IT more expensive (at burden to taxpayers). He is also putting national security at risk considering cyberattacks from China, which based on Wikileaks/Cablegate are due to Windows and Microsoft’s collaboration with Chinese crackers. Look what we have in the news now…

IDG: China Denies Any Involvement in ‘Shady RAT’

Slashdot: Black Hat Talk Demonstrates New Document Exploits

To quote: “Remember the days of the viruses embedded in email attachments? They’re coming back, according to a pair of researcher talking at Black Hat this week: ‘”If you have installed all Microsoft Office patches and there are no 0 day vulnerabilities, will it be safe to open a Word or Excel document?” TT asked the audience. “The answer is no.”‘”

Remember what Microsoft’s E-mail management previously did in the White House.

A Microsoft mole in the White House is bad for the same two reasons we explained yesterday in relation to European procurement. It makes everything more expensive to the public and also provides an inferior service to the public. The American citizenry deserves better than that. █

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08.07.11

Gianugo Rabellino Helps the Attack on Software Freedom

Posted in Free/Libre Software, Microsoft at 11:34 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Microsoft’s Gianugo Rabellino joins the attempts to cheapen “Open Source” and portray the thug as a friend of the victim

Microsoft’s participation in OSCON was tackled by our team over a week ago, but a couple of important links on the subject ought to be added here as these are self explanatory:

1. Microsoft: Cloud need only be open surface, not open source

   Microsoft is more open — at least on the surface — and that’s all that matters in the cloud era, one company exec maintains.

2. Microsoft Further Dilutes The Term Open Source, Coins Open Surface

   One of the reasons I prefer the term Free Software instead of Open Source is the way mega corporations like Microsoft have diluted the meaning of Open Source to suit their agenda.

   Now, Microsoft is coining yet another term to further confuse users — Open Surface. Senior Director for Open Source Communities at Microsoft, Gianugo Rabellino, said at Oscon 2011 that “customer don’t care about the underlying platform as long as the APIs, protocols and standards for the cloud are open.” That’s when he threw the term ‘open surface’.

Microsoft: attack by entryism. They become their own ‘opposition’, therefore they win even if they lose. Rejecting Microsoft is defensive, it’s not intolerant. The company filing patent lawsuits and secret blackmail operations is worse than intolerant; it’s borderline criminal, but it wants the police (or antitrust regulators) to stay away, so it needs to be seen as a friend of the victim. Those who cooperate in this posturing are worse than passive; they are the opposite of peacemakers because they make aggression acceptable. █

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