Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft and Its Media Partner Lock #1 Competitor Out of the Olympics

"[If I ask you who is Microsoft's biggest competitor now, who would it be?] Open...Linux. I don't want to say open source. Linux, certainly have to go with that."

--Steve Ballmer, February 28th, 2008



GNOME WMVWe saw this coming a long time ago, but now arrive the specifics. Microsoft's former media partner, MS(NBC), which was criticised before due to biased reporting that favours the paymaster, turns out to be that who shall do the 'dirty job'. It's not alone by the way. The Microsoft-faithful Ina Friend from CNET has just come up with another very misleading headline, suggesting that "the Democrats vote for Microsoft," referring simply to the use of Silverlight in some new Web site. The media will continue to betray and deceive, but let's look at the technical problems at hand and not be distracted by dishonesty.

“XAML seems like another software patent trap which is most likely based on the RAND+OSP routine.”As we mentioned recently, it's very important for Microsoft to disrupt -- if not altogether eliminate -- the open fabric of the Web in order to hurt many rivals, from software companies to Web technologies and search engines. It even makes some subtle lies to deceive about the nature and purpose of its technology. Novell helps Microsoft a lot in that respect.

Watch the comments in the new article at ZDNet, with the usual fallacy that "Silverlight is available for OS X & Linux" (it's not!) and the boring Microsoft apologism that disguises this as "competition is good" (reminisce an insane case of OOXML versus ODF, pretending that competition between standards is the same as competing applications and vendors, with this most recent example coming from Microsoft Malaysia). Flash is not like Silverlight, for reasons that we mentioned before.

Who supports this charade inside the open source world? Probably the same guy (or group) who advocated OOXML and ActiveX. Be careful what you wish for, Novell. Oh wait! Novell has exclusive 'protection', unlike all those other 'mischievous' distros that don't pay 'Microsoft tax'.

XAML seems like another software patent trap which is most likely based on the RAND+OSP routine. Even Miguel de Icaza himself denounced this a couple of months ago.

Other comments in the new article include: "MS/NBC ties"; "Not a smart move by NBC" and some remarks from the usual Munchkin "No_Ax_to_Grind". Novell should protest against XAML, not endorse it. It's blindly in love with Microsoft and it harms many of those that surround the couple.

Silverlight puke, barf



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