Summary: Tim, Gordon, and Roy catch up with GNU/Linux vs Microsoft (or vice versa) news and then drift further away into some other topics
TONIGHT'S scheduled-not-so-planned-but-spontaneous show covered mostly GNU/Linux-related issues like Microsoft sponsorship of Linux and FOSS events, the situation at Nokia, Microsoft MVPs, Windows versus GNU/Linux at work, Debian's new release, Linux Mint, uniformity across GNU/Linux environments, filesharing-based business models, Anonymous, and a few more issues. Corresponding articles will be linked very shortly in OpenBytes' show notes. (Update: they're up now)
All signs indicate that Microsoft wants to "exit" the XBox business (not brand), but it does not want to publicly admit this as it would alarm staff and shareholders
Considering the huge proportion of Web requests that come from LLM bots (more so this past year or two), statCounter may struggle to justify the operating costs
The corporate media is projecting or signalling its own dishonesty when it tells us that Microsoft is a very "valuable" company while the data shows Microsoft is also a "market leader" in layoffs
For those of us who turned down those propositions there was a struggle; we needed to justify not having skinnerboxes or "social" accounts in some site run by a private company
In a lot of ways, so-called 'Vibe Coding' is already considered vapourware or a passing fad promoted in the media by managers who try to justify mass layoffs, especially ridding companies of "very expensive" software engineers