06.27.09

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OSCON Sells Out to Convicted Monopolist Microsoft, Again

Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, Microsoft, Windows at 1:56 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: OSCON 2009 has already sold out to Microsoft, as Microsoft bought itself a keynote spot

OSCON continues its tradition of facilitating Microsoft's embrace & extend of "open source". It was the same in OSCON 2007 and OSCON 2008 [1, 2, 3]. In OSCON 2009, a keynote will come from the company which is suing open source using software patents. O’Reilly et al have no qualm about inviting anyone who puts money on the table. Maybe they should also invite Stalin for some great bucks.

It is truly a shame that ethics and freedom are given away in exchange for money, so what everyone ends up with looks like this:

Here are some of the slated keynote presentations:

[...]

Tony Hey, Microsoft–Enabling Academic Research– Open Tools and Services on Microsoft Platforms

OSCON seems to be controlled by Wintel. Microsoft is a Diamond sponsor, making it more than Sun or Google or any of those other companies. It is more about money than about deeds.

“They accept more money and give Microsoft more control over the event.”it gets worse every year for O’Reilly. They accept more money and give Microsoft more control over the event. They really should learn that it is about ruining conferences by hijacking them and putting off the crowd, by Microsoft’s own admission.

A lot could also said about Intel, which is a convicted monopolist that viciously attacked OLPC, funded SCO, funded Linux-hostile initiatives and so on.

OSCON is not run by open source. It is run by whoever pays to pretend to be part of it, including those who want to destroy it. One reader told us last night: “Microsoft is trying to fool people into thinking that they support open source While making it dependent on proprietary software. So far, they successfully fooled O’Reilly and SourceForge, which is dangerous. As I said before, FSF warned about traps like this many times, including the now open source Java and Motif.” To quote from the GNU Web site, “That doesn’t mean it is a good idea to write the program so that it only runs on Windows. Doing so results in a program that is free software but “trapped” by Windows.” █

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A Single Comment

  1. Yuhong Bao said,

    June 27, 2009 at 2:59 am

    Gravatar

    You misordered my quote.
    Here is a better one that makes more sense:
    “Microsoft is trying to fool people into thinking that they support open source while making it dependent on proprietary software, which is dangerous. So far, they successfully fooled O’Reilly and SourceForge. As I said before, FSF warned about traps like this many times, including the now open source Java and Motif.”

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