06.15.20
Gemini version available ♊︎Microsoft Will Paint Everything It Doesn’t Control as Anarchy and Danger (or Terrorism)
“There are people who don’t like capitalism, and people who don’t like PCs. But there’s no-one who likes the PC who doesn’t like Microsoft.”
–Bill Gates
Summary: “I also expect a serious effort, backed by several billion dollars in bribe money (oops, excuse me, campaign contributions), to get [Free] open-source software outlawed on some kind of theory that it aids terrorists,” ESR wrote in 2004
Bill Gates, heir of a banking family (his mom’s side, which set him up for 'success'), likes capitalism. It has served him well, hasn’t it? It even got him out of jail several times (his father, the powerful lawyer, could pay bail a million times over!). Money and connections beget power. One doesn’t even need technical superiority (or else someone like Kildall would be a king of technology).
Richard Stallman was in the right place at the right time. As Gates slurred people who had been sharing code half a decade earlier there was clearly a desire and a need to keep hackers (geeks) collaborating. Many UNIX gurus were willing to defect to Stallman’s team, embracing copyleft to ensure their code wouldn’t get ‘stolen’ by the ‘pirates of Silicon Valley’.
“Wait for the liars and crooks from Microsoft to paint all those who reject its monopoly (which includes GitHub) as some sort of radicals who dislike capitalism, as if monopoly and capitalism are the same thing.”It worked! 30 years later GNU/Linux became the dominant platform in servers and many other machines/devices. But the moment it happened Microsoft looked for ways to hijack the movement, oust its leaders etc. Buying GitHub is one thing; just one of several. Right now they try to portray projects that lack GitHub ‘presence’ as if they don’t exist, don’t count, or must be some archaic bunch of ‘smelly hippies’… we wrote a bunch of articles to that effect, providing evidence of this trend.
This has long been a strategy… whenever monopolies looked to co-opt movements. Before Microsoft it was IBM that used F.U.D. tactics such as this (as if only IBM is “professional” and “nobody gets fired” for choosing monopoly). Wait for the liars and crooks from Microsoft to paint all those who reject its monopoly (which includes GitHub) as some sort of radicals who dislike capitalism, as if monopoly and capitalism are the same thing. That’s a repetition of the 1970s when Mr. Gates, a super rich boy since birth, demonised people who wrote better code than his as “thieves”. Inferiority complex and privilege don’t mix too well. Right now, and especially this weekend (because of worldwide protests against Gates), critics of his are collectively being painted as “conspiracy theorists”… █
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