08.08.10
Media Spin Watch: Internet Explorer 9 Promotion, MS-PL Defence, GPL Scare, and SAP as an ‘Open Source’ Company
“You’re getting very dizzy…”
Summary: An aggregation of nonsense from news sites, ranging from Microsoft boosting to FUD about its competition, notably software which respects the users’ freedom
THIS post is an assortment of observations about very recent news which we gathered. We start with Internet Explorer 9 (IE 9) because Microsoft deceives about its speed and about its security. Here is yet another criticism of what Microsoft does through its boosters, people who function like the company’s PR appendage while trying to seem independent:
I saw Microsoft spammer extraordinaire, Paul Thurrott, talking about IE 9…
Apparently IE 9 is the Microsoft browser that will solve world hunger, cure AIDS, and bring lasting peace to the middle east.
The spin:
IE 9 is fast, real fast.
IE 9 is standards compliant.
IE 9 will be more secure.
The truth:
IE 9 so far is not that much faster than Firefox 3.0, it loses to Firefox 3.5, is is half the speed of Firefox 4 development builds in the synthetic Peacekeeper benchmarks, and manages to give a similar spread on Sunspider. IE 9 will have hardware accelerated canvas and video playback, but so will Firefox 4, and that launches months ahead of IE 9 even if Microsoft releases on time. Opera already has production level support for hardware acceleration, today. IE 9′s pre-beta speed benefits over existing versions of Firefox is questionable, its benefits over Firefox 4 are non-existent, and when you compare IE to Opera, it is laughable.
Another writer whom we criticised here before is seemingly promoting Microsoft licences that it controls. “The MS-PL is not a bad license as far as things go,” he says in order to justify the “all licences are equal” mode of thinking. We have already written a great deal about what’s wrong with MS-PL (parts of Mono will soon be MS-PL-licensed).
“It’s essentially licensing FUD and it’s working out well for OpenLogic, at least financially.”Another company which cares a lot about licences is OpenLogic, which makes money from scanning proprietary code (for the most part) for violations. It’s essentially licensing FUD and it’s working out well for OpenLogic, at least financially [1, 2]. Phil Odence (Black Duck) does pretty much the same thing and he is marketing his company in blog comments and blog posts in IDG’s ‘open source’ blog (Black Duck is a proprietary software company) after his colleague from IDG created some GPL scare (watch the picture he chose). It is worth remembering that Black Duck recently promoted SAP with its parasitical approach towards "Open Source" (attacking it while exploiting it, pretty much like Microsoft) and this gets promoted by Savio Rodrigues, not surprisingly at all. The whole episode seems like a mutual advertisement or endorsement. It is more of an advertisement for Black Duck in places, but for SAP too it’s a form of reputation laundering (pretending that a proprietary software company is somehow “open”). █
“[A]fter analysing a five-day working week in the media, across 10 hard-copy papers, ACIJ and Crikey found that nearly 55% of stories analysed were driven by some form of public relations. The Daily Telegraph came out on top of the league ladder with 70% of stories analysed triggered by public relations. The Sydney Morning Herald gets the wooden spoon with (only) 42% PR-driven stories for that week.”
–“Over half your news is spin”
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