06.02.21
Posted in Free/Libre Software, FSF, GNU/Linux, IBM, Law, Novell, Red Hat, SLES/SLED at 6:10 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Video download link
Summary: Coders who merge their work into the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) will no longer assign or surrender copyrights to the Free Software Foundation; it would be worth finding out how this outcome was reached and why as there’s lack of clarity on this
YESTERDAY there was a new release of GCC. Shortly after the release was announced we saw reports about the FSF loosening the Copyright Assignment (CA) requirements long imposed — to use a relatively harsh term — on GCC contributors. Why did this happen? Whose idea was it? We doubt the FSF just did this on its own volition. Was there pressure from the anti-RMS petitioners? Notice how many of them are from IBM and how many in that petition work on GCC. The corporate affiliation (employer) isn’t mentioned, but about a third of them were — and still are — IBM employees. IBM’s motivations and covert objectives are suspicious for a number of reasons (as mentioned in the video above).
The video above discusses what this situation means, but it remains uncertain how that came about. We’re not being told anything about the behind-the-scenes story. It’s not even clear whose decision it was (there are mutually-contradicting framings; some say the FSF did it, whereas some/most claim GCC did it). Maybe some meeting minutes can elucidate this whole thing. Maybe there’s already sufficient transparency to explain this, but currently the articles on this matter don’t go that deep.
“Clarity on this issue isn’t ‘small potatoes’ because it may represent a ‘soft coup’ or constitute another (new) wave of attempts to dethrone/weaken the FSF and take power (software freedom) away from Free software users/developers.”For completeness, all the links from the video are listed here — a page that will expand over time as new information arrives (we expect more material and investigations/follow-ups to come). Clarity on this issue isn’t ‘small potatoes’ because it may represent a ‘soft coup’ or constitute another (new) wave of attempts to dethrone/weaken the FSF and take power (software freedom) away from Free software users/developers. █
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07.28.19
Posted in Microsoft, Novell, Servers, SLES/SLED at 8:39 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: It certainly ‘feels’ like SAP ‘took over’ SUSE and it has been ‘long time coming’
A week ago the CEO of SUSE stepped down and there was a lot of media coverage about his successor, who had come from SAP, which is a Microsoft ally that was almost acquired by Microsoft at one point. The media, however, wasn’t paying any attention to what happened to SUSE’s official blog. Over the past couple of months it was almost ‘hijacked’ by SAP, as I pointed out repeatedly in social control media sites. I’d hate to use "tweets" as 'sources', but these mostly link to the originals from SUSE’s own site. Here we go, in chronological order: █
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03.31.17
Posted in America, GNU/Linux, Google, Microsoft, Patents, Samsung, SLES/SLED at 8:51 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Samsung was the largest Android OEM when it all started
Microsoft’s embrace and extend strategy with patents (for coercion under legal threats)
Summary: The ‘new’ Microsoft turns out to be the same old Microsoft, where software patents are used not just for extortion and extraction of ‘protection’ money but also to compel OEMs to use Microsoft’s own ‘version’ (or distribution) of Android
THE EPO scandals are certainly outrageous, but another outrageous thing which we have spent more than a decade covering is Microsoft’s patent blackmail against GNU/Linux. Recently, we took note of another wave of Microsoft patent attacks (albeit shrewdly marketed as “IP Advantage“) on GNU/Linux and Free software. For those who missed it, there is a listing of our articles about it [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11], which will soon be shelved in some Wiki page.
“Recently, we took note of another wave of Microsoft patent attacks (albeit shrewdly marketed as “IP Advantage“) on GNU/Linux and Free software.”In short, Microsoft is trying to divide the market into “safe” and “unsafe”, or “protected” (from Microsoft and its trolls) and “unprotected”. The former requires annual or monthly payments to Microsoft (subscription plus patent royalties, similar to Novell with SLES/SLED in 2006 onwards). In the mobile space, as one might expect, Microsoft is using a similar strategy. Microsoft will be Microsoft. It will continue to embrace and extend, then attempt to become an Android OEM while siccing patent trolls on all others. 3 years ago Microsoft sued Samsung, the biggest Android OEM at the time, using patents and then they settled, with the condition/provision of Samsung being Microsoft’s slave, preinstalling Microsoft malware (sends user data to Microsoft) on Samsung’s Android devices. We never forgot about that, but Mary Jo Foley seems to have conveniently left that out of her new article. She ought to know this because she covered the subject of the lawsuit pretty well 2 years ago (she was one of our primary sources at the time, hence we reproduce her article at the top). What is shown now is that “Microsoft touts Microsoft-customized edition of Samsung Galaxy S8″.
So Samsung’s ‘flagship’ product is becoming just a vessel or a carrier of Microsoft malware. Does Microsoft pay Samsung for this? No. That’s just part of the patent settlement we presume. And Microsoft is now selling these phones, i.e. making a profit as an Android OEM, where Android is not really Android but some ‘bastardised’ version of it which is dominated by Microsoft and designed to give Microsoft total control of everything (collecting input from the file system, cameras, microphone and so on).
“And Microsoft is now selling these phones, i.e. making a profit as an Android OEM, where Android is not really Android but some ‘bastardised’ version of it which is dominated by Microsoft and designed to give Microsoft total control of everything (collecting input from the file system, cameras, microphone and so on).”Is this justice? Is Samsung happy about this?
In the meantime, Florian Müller writes about another patent bully that victimised Samsung, namely Qualcomm with its software patents [1, 2]. To quote some relevant parts:
When routinely checking for Twitter news about Qualcomm’s antitrust issues, I found a job ad for an antitrust counsel at Qualcomm. Seriously, if you’re an antitrust lawyer looking for a job, this might be one of the most interesting places to be in the months and years ahead. While some secondary issues such as a case brought over oversight duties go away from time to time, various regulators on multiple continents are currently doing everything to provide job security for San Diego-based antitrust attorneys…
[...]
At first sight, that denial appears to be complete and clear, but at a closer look it doesn’t convince me. Apart from the fact that Qualcomm obviously could never admit to totally anticompetitive behavior (restriction of competition), in this case going back to an agreement signed in 1993 and failed negotiations a few years ago, the denial merely says that Samsung could somehow have sold chips to third parties, but not that Samsung could have sold, for example, CDMA-capable chips to third parties.
As AndroidAuthority notes, Qualcomm sued a Chinese Samsung customer (Meizu), which built some devices incorporating Samsung’s Exynos chipset, and I agree with AndroidAuthority that “we have to wonder why the Korean giant only sells its mobile SoCs to one small company in China” (in light of Samsung’s large customer base for other types of chipsets).
This is why phones have become so incredibly expensive (manufacturing of the underlying components is not expensive). It boils down to patent tax everywhere. That money one pays for an Android device ends up not entirely in the coffers of the OEM but all sorts of patent parasites, including Microsoft.
“That money one pays for an Android device ends up not entirely in the coffers of the OEM but all sorts of patent parasites, including Microsoft.”Microsoft does not want the patents challenged in a court, and it makes it so by strategically picking victims and throwing a huge number of dubious patents at them. In that regard, Microsoft operates much like a patent troll. Consider Erich Spangenberg. This is the crook who used a bogus (now invalidated!) patent to blackmail thousands of companies, eventually becoming a multi-millionaire from ‘protection’ money. It ended when he picked on a victim not sufficiently frail and vulnerable, namely Newegg, which chose to fight back again and again (and won repeatedly, in spite of all the expensive appeals). Now armless, Spangenberg seems to be walking away with his loot, based on this new article from trolls’ media. It says: “The current status of IPNav – the company founded by Spangenberg back in 2003 as one of his first major forays into patent monetisation – is unclear. Spangenberg stepped down as IPNav’s CEO in 2014 to dedicate time to other projects, handing over the reins to company president Deirdre Leane. Leane’s LinkedIn profile indicates she became vice president of licensing at Technicolor in December, while IPNav’s website is currently offline awaiting relaunch.”
Technicolor has itself become a patent troll, as we noted several times this year (in January and again in February). We certainly hope that the USPTO, together with the US courts, will help curb patent trolling. More action is also required when it comes to serial patent aggressors; antitrust action may be needed against Microsoft’s crooked modus operandi. █
“That’s extortion and we should call it what it is. To say, as Ballmer did, that there is undisclosed balance sheet liability, that’s just extortion and we should refuse to get drawn into that game.”
–Mark Shuttleworth
“Microsoft is asking people to pay them for patents, but they won’t say which ones. If a guy walks into a shop and says: “It’s an unsafe neighbourhood, why don’t you pay me 20 bucks and I’ll make sure you’re okay,” that’s illegal. It’s racketeering.”
–Mark Shuttleworth
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02.09.17
Posted in Deception, Novell, OpenSUSE, Security, Servers, SLES/SLED at 6:16 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
SUSE (or MicroFocus) won’t even tell customers when its systems are in fact compromised
Summary: The same old and very notorious behaviour we found in Novell persists at SUSE under MicroFocus leadership; security neglected and keeping up appearances more important than honesty
TECHRIGHTS wrote many thousands of articles about Novell. We know Novell extremely well and we have documented its terrible behaviour for over half a decade, well before we began focusing on the EPO for example. As we shall show later, in a separate post, Microsoft’s and Novell’s “IP Peace of Mind” is making a comeback (as of last night), but right now we wish to focus on the crack I first wrote about on Monday (it has since then generated some press coverage, e.g. [1-3] below).
“Remember that no evidence has been presented by SUSE and moreover the gross negligence here is a bad sign in general.”A lot of people still miss the key point. IDG even went ahead with a rather misleading headline, as did Softpedia; rather than state the actual news (that OpenSUSE got cracked) the title says or overstates the ‘damage control’ from SUSE, diverting attention to what was not affected rather than what was affected (a politician’s trick). We used to see lots of that kind of spin back in the Novell days and the 2 articles below, having sought comment from SUSE, give SUSE the benefit of the doubt here. Remember that no evidence has been presented by SUSE and moreover the gross negligence here is a bad sign in general. That’s just “faith-based” security. My article about it was so short that it was mostly a screenshot, yet we understand that further coverage is on its way. So let’s elaborate a little. “They were using an outdated version of WordPress and got zapped,” one person wrote to me after I had published my findings. “It was just the front-end, no code was touched.” But says who? SUSE? Can we believe them?
“Nobody has yet covered that issue as properly as we hoped (poor security practices at SUSE) and the fact that they COMPLETELY FAILED or refused to publicly acknowledge what had happened is a serious aspect of it.”Whatever caused the defacement, it shows that they lost control of their platform. They did get cracked. Softpedia reported that “openSUSE devs immediately restored the news.opensuse.org website from a recent backup” (so the back end too appears to have been compromised).
Nobody has yet covered that issue as properly as we hoped (poor security practices at SUSE) and the fact that they COMPLETELY FAILED or refused to publicly acknowledge what had happened is a serious aspect of it. We waited patiently to see if an announcement would be made by then, even a reassurance that users should not worry. But nothing came out! To this date (half a week later). They attempted to cover it up, which is BAD BAD BAD. For a so-called “Enterprise-Grade” thing which SUSE tries to market itself as (selling SLE*) this is a serious breach of trust. Who would trust SUSE now?
“If someone injected a back door inside SLED and SLES, SUSE would probably say not a thing, only belatedly removing it and then lying about the whole thing, just like Microsoft does.”3 news sites and my own site wrote about it, but not a single word has been uttered by SUSE. They know they got cracked and they are not telling anyone, except when journalists ask them for comment (and press them with evidence).
OpenSUSE has a history of security issues in its sites (see “openSUSE Forum Hacked; 79500 Users Data Compromised” from 2014). Where are the reporters who are willing to ask SUSE some tough questions? Don’t let this slide. If someone injected a back door inside SLED and SLES, SUSE would probably say not a thing, only belatedly removing it and then lying about the whole thing, just like Microsoft does. █
In the news:
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Softpedia was informed by Dr. Roy Schestowitz that the openSUSE News (news.opensuse.org) website got defaced by Kurdish hacker MuhmadEmad on the day of February 6, 2017.
It would appear that the server where the news.opensuse.org website is hosted is isolated from the rest of openSUSE’s infrastructure, which means that the hacker did not have access to any contributor data, such as email and passwords, nor to the ISO images of the openSUSE Linux operating system.
We already talked with openSUSE Chairman Richard Brown, who confirms for Softpedia that the offered openSUSE downloads remain safe and consistent, and users should not worry about anything. The vigilant openSUSE devs immediately restored the news.opensuse.org website from a recent backup, so everything is operating normally at this time.
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The openSUSE team acted quickly to restore the site. When I talked to Richard Brown, openSUSE chairman, he said that “the server that hosts ‘news.opensuse.org’ is isolated from the majority of openSUSE infrastructure by design, so there was no breach of any other part of openSUSEs infrastructure, especially our build, test and download systems. Our offered downloads remain safe and consistent and there was no breach of any openSUSE contributor data.”
The team is still investigating the reason for the breach so I don’t have much information. The site ran a WordPress install and it seems that WordPress was compromised.
This site is not managed by the SUSE or openSUSE team. It is handled by the IT team of MicroFocus. However, Brown said that SUSE management certainly doesn’t want any such incident to happen again and they are considering moving the site to the infrastructure managed by SUSE and openSUSE team.
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In the latest Linux news, the news.opensuse.org got hacked and displayed “KurDish HaCk3rS WaS Here” for a while Monday and while the site has been restored, no comment on the hack has been issued. Elsewhere, Debian 9.0 has entered its final freeze in the last steps in preparations for release. FOSS Force has named their winner for top distro of 2016 and Swapnil Bhartiya shared his picks for the best for 2017. Blogger DarkDuck said MX-16 Xfce is “very close to the ideal” and Alwan Rosyidi found Solus OS is giving Elementary OS a run for its money. Phoronix.com’s Michael Larabel explained why he uses Fedora and Jeremy Garcia announced the winners of the 2016 LinuxQuestions.org Members Choice Awards.
[...]
openSUSE’s news portal was compromised Monday by a hacker or group of hackers called MuhmadEmad, via the message left in its place. A Kurdish flag with the message “HaCkeD by MuhmadEmad – KurDish HaCk3rS WaS Here” was displayed for hours before it was taken down and the site’s content restored. Roy Schestowitz has a screen capture and said that openSUSE has not yet publicly acknowledged the hack. Swapnil Bhartiya spoke to Richard Brown, openSUSE chairman, who said that site was isolated from most SUSE infrastructure, especially the distribution code. There was no breach of any contributor data either. The site in question is run by MicroFocus, but all are investigating to make sure it’s an isolated incident.
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07.15.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, SLES/SLED, Ubuntu at 2:03 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Summary: Why running GNU/Linux distributions on top of Azure is begging not only to be taxed by Microsoft but also to be under surveillance by Microsoft and the NSA/CIA
OEMs should not preload Windows on PCs because they turn these PCs into spying devices right out of the box (there are NSA back doors in Windows) and no government should ever touch anything from Microsoft anymore (mind this silly promotion), especially knowing how the NSA spies on ‘ally’ governments. Everything has changes since Snowden put out there evidence to show what many of us already knew for years. Here is a bunch of new Windows back doors for those who believe it’s old news (the NSA gets prior notifications about those holes before they are plugged).
“Everything has changes since Snowden put out there evidence to show what many of us already knew for years.”A few days ago we got confirmation of Microsoft not only engaging in Skype spying/eavesdropping (in real-time) but also allowing others to do so. It’s not a design flaw, it’s intentional. Dan Gilmore said, “How can any business even begin to trust Microsoft now?”
When Dr. Glyn Moody, another occasional author who writes for The Guardian found out about NSA book doors, he wrote the article “How Can Any Company Ever Trust Microsoft Again?” This article went viral and also got some translations. It makes similar points to the ones above. Anybody foolish enough to still trust Microsoft is simply deserving of the Darwin Award.
The news about Microsoft-NSA collusion received a lot of press coverage, including some in pro-FOSS sites, even in numerous different languages (I saw over a hundred headlines while researching the subject). This is really hurting Microsoft, which is struggling to spin what it just cannot denied. Not only was Microsoft shown to be colluding with the NSA (PRISM lists Microsoft as the first partner) but it also got caught lying to the public.
“Given what we know, surveillance just ought to be the expectation, not a theory or an hypothesis.”At this stage, anybody foolish enough to host anything on Microsoft Azure just simply deserves to be spied on. Given what we know, surveillance just ought to be the expectation, not a theory or an hypothesis. Canonical was stupid enough to end up aiding the criminals when it signed a deal with the devil (Azure). Then again, it’s not as though Canonical cherishs users’ privacy; it gives Amazon (hence the NSA) some data about users’ local searches — something which even Microsoft is not doing just yet (although other reports which Richard Stallman speaks of say that this has been going on for many years). Knowing that Microsoft uses faux ‘encryption’ with back doors, expect nothing to be secure. It’s just not designed to be secure, it’s designed to serve US “national security”, which basically means US interests — whatever they may be.
Given SUSE’s financial dependence on Microsoft, it is not surprising to see it being hosted on Microsoft servers with surveillance. Watch this new interview with a SUSE official. Notice how almost the entire interview is about Microsoft and it says:
MS and Linux at Loggerheads is History: Peter Lees, Suse
[...]
SUSE Linux is in a great position of being the only enterprise Linux recommended for Microsoft and VMware.
Microsoft would like tax GNU/Linux through SUSE, with or without Azure in the underlying platform.
Gilmore and Moody are currently being joined by John Dvorak, who explains “Why We Can No Longer Trust Microsoft” (after the NSA revelations). To quote:
If anyone should be mad at the NSA for all the snooping that appears to be going on, it should be the Department of Commerce, not privacy advocates. The recent revelations are not a threat to national security so much as a threat to the national economy. And if I were Microsoft, I’d be having around-the-clock meetings to discuss how to fix what is about to happen.
Microsoft, despite denials, appears to be in bed with the NSA. Apparently all encryption and other methods to keep documents and discussions private are bypassed and accessible by the NSA and whomever it is working with. This means a third party, for whatever reason, can easily access confidential business deals, love letters, government classified memos, merger paperwork, financial transactions, intra-corporate schemes, and everything in between.
Anybody who puts GNU/Linux on top of Azure should not only expect to pay patent tax to Microsoft but should also expect government surveillance on everything. We know that storage servers as a whole, not just routers, have back doors. Free software and GNU/Linux are the way to go, provided there is no proprietary bug in the stack. █
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07.09.13
Posted in GNU/Linux, Novell, SLES/SLED at 4:24 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Further restrictions and obscurity in the age of NSA Fibre-tapping
Summary: How SUSE continues to show loyalty to Microsoft, which has paid on multiple occasions for its agenda to be served
Novell helped OOXML and Hyper-V after Microsoft had bribed Novell’s management (hundreds of millions of dollars which mostly benefited people like Ron Hovsepian and Jeff Jaffe, who currently ruins the Web) and later scooped Novell’s patents, too (via CPTN).
“Then again, SUSE has been endorsing and advertising Microsoft for almost seven years, having purged from its Web site any material critical of Microsoft (this mass destruction began in 2006, very shortly after the patent deal with Microsoft).”As we noted last year and earlier this year, much of the force for UEFI restricted boot in Linux can be attributed to developers from Novell [1, 2] (some no longer work directly on SUSE or OpenSUSE) and now that Microosft Linux (SUSE) has a new Service Pack, it is prominently marketed as sucking Microsoft's dick, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds on such matters. To quote Michael Larabel, who is by no means hostile towards SUSE, the “Nuremberg-based company calls this the first enterprise Linux distribution integrating UEFI Secure Boot support.”
Ubuntu and Fedora have already made releases for this and suffered delays as well. To focus on restricted boot in this case is merely to endorse or even advertise what Microsoft is doing. Then again, SUSE has been endorsing and advertising Microsoft for almost seven years, having purged from its Web site any material critical of Microsoft (this mass destruction began in 2006, very shortly after the patent deal with Microsoft).
Here is another take on the news, among several from longtime Novell/SUSE apologists [1, 2] and a corresponding press release from the Microsoft-funded SUSE.
“That is a rhetorical question because SUSE is the de facto Microsoft Linux and everyone should avoid it.”Sam Varghese, the “Open Sauce” writer at IT Wire and a longtime Novell sceptic, warns that SUSE now helps make restricted boot compulsory on servers. He asks: “Does the Germany-based GNU/Linux company SUSE know something about Microsoft’s secure boot plans that other Linux companies do not?”
That is a rhetorical question because SUSE is the de facto Microsoft Linux and everyone should avoid it. SUSE uses euphemisms like “secure boot” and “service pack” (secure pack?) to market what is essentially a Microsoft-taxed GNU/Linux distribution which Microsoft profits from and technically controls,
Varghese correctly notes that “[g]iven Windows 8 desktop take-up by businesss that can only be described as a disaster, one would have thought that Microsoft would think twice about making lockout mechanisms such as secure boot compulsory for its server range.”
But those lockout mechanisms are controlled by Microsoft keys, so they are only effective at blocking Microsoft’s competition, not Microsoft products. UEFI deserves more antitrust complaints and SUSE continues to deserve a stern objection, or a boycott. █
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05.09.13
Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Mono, SLES/SLED at 1:28 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Shotgun wedding
Summary: ‘Former’ Microsoft staff is shaping opinions, controlling messages, and disseminating its own version of the data about FOSS
Microsoft has been indirectly funding the development of Mono for a number of years. Mono is about promoting .NET, not promoting FOSS (just targeting FOSS developers). Mono is a thing of the past as far as GNU/Linux desktops are concerned. Xamarin will try to spread it to Android, but so far there has been little progress on this. Developers who appreciate FOSS learned to antagonise this Microsoft technology.
Richard Hillesley explains in his new column that in the FOSS world people have ostracised this bit of Trojan horse/infiltration tactic. To quote the ending paragraph which cites Richard Stallman:
According to Stallman, the problem was “not in the C# implementations, but rather in Tomboy and other applications written in C#. If we lose the use of C#, we will lose them too. That doesn’t make them unethical, but it means that writing them and using them is taking a gratuitous risk.”
Juniper, in the mean time, having also become full of Microsoft people (we lost count of how many, but here are some examples [1, 2, 3, 4, 5]), has no made Executive VP out of Microsoft’s Bob Muglia, who in turn can infiltrate Microsoft threats. It’s a familiar pattern of conduct. Just see other companies that got hijacked by Microsoft veterans.
In other news, notice how FOSS events which groom Black Duck actually have Microsoft as a top sponsor (these are partners which promote one another), based on the official Web site. It’s not a coincidence. The funding controls these events. They are controlling messages, controlling data, and basically doing what Microsoft wants them to do.
“Resistance to this ongoing assimilation attempt is vital for the survival of FOSS as a meaningful distinguisher.”OpenLogic, which is run by a Microsoft veteran, promotes Azure and openwashes it, giving us yet another example of Microsoft’s infiltrations in FOSS.
Over at the ‘Microsoft press’, the booster Kurt Mackie uses promotional language to characterise the Microsoft-sponsored SUSE and Microsoft proxy "Microsoft Open Technologies Inc."
These are only some of the many examples where Microsoft-affiliated folks try to distort the views of FOSS. Resistance to this ongoing assimilation attempt is vital for the survival of FOSS as a meaningful distinguisher. It’s not about intolerance, it’s about defending ourselves from what Microsoft knows too well to be a charm offence. It’s offensive. █
“There’s no company called Linux, there’s barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it’s free.”
–Steve Ballmer
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04.19.13
Posted in Dell, GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Patents, SLES/SLED, Ubuntu at 5:04 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Free lunch
Summary: The resemblance between Microsoft’s strategy against free Linux phones (Android) and against free GNU/Linux servers, two areas of FOSS domination
Microsoft is frantically trying to stop GNU/Linux by robbing it in the development sense. On the server side, the de facto operating system is not Windows and Microsoft would love to change that by striking deals with companies like BitNami. Here is the latest press release about it. Microsoft has been using a "man in the middle" style of attack against real FOSS (i.e. FOSS that is not tied to a proprietary stack) and the latest openwashing about it can be found here. It says: [hat tip: iophk]
Last week, Microsoft Open Technologies, Inc. quietly turned one year old. The birthday passed without fanfare, but next week, Microsoft plans to host a birthday party at its Silicon Valley campus.
More PR nonsense. It is not even news. All this thing should be considered to be is an attack on free systems like GNU/Linux and *BSD. Here we see, in another new press release, the Microsoft-sponsored SUSE. playing along. SUSE pays Microsoft for GNU/Linux and so does this new product from Amazon. Dell, which Microsoft is taking control of these days, favours Microsoft’s SUSE as well now.
Canonical, which has been aiding Microsoft as of late, does this too with Dell. To quote:
Dell’s (NASDAQ: DELL) not the only big-name channel partner with which Canonical, the company that develops Ubuntu Linux, has been forging closer ties lately. On Tuesday, as Microsoft (NASDAQ: MSFT) announced the general availability of Windows Azure Infrastructure Services, Canonical was also playing up Ubuntu’s seamless integration into the Azure cloud platform—a move that makes much more sense than it might at first seem.
All we are seeing here is Microsoft’s attempts to tax GNU/Linux servers, making them more expensive while offering the same applications under Windows. The same strategy is being used against Android. This is not some far-fetched theory. Microsoft has been very clear about that. █
“I would love to see all open source innovation happen on top of Windows.”
–Steve Ballmer, Microsoft CEO
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