[Video] No, Phoronix, Microsoft is Not an Acceptable Participant But a Snake (But Microsoft Gives Phoronix 'Gifts') and Heather Meeker Acts Like a Microsoft 'Asset', Professional Revisionist
Video download link | md5sum ffb194d0eaf6f5ab2b28028b0decc9ec
Question of Interests
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
The Microsoft-loving Phoronix is not a new subject here. As noted the other night in a quick post about Mr. Larabel (of Phoronix), he is doing a disservice by being so soft. I say this as someone who used to be the #1 source of traffic to his site, according to Alexa.com. Things have only changed in the attitudinal (virtual) sense and eventually Microsoft apologists - including Mr. Larabel - will all eat crow because Microsoft has not changed and more people recognise what the company is really doing, not what it merely claims to do. The fraud Nadella may have fooled (or paid) the media for the whole "Microsoft loves Linux" lie, but people aren't buying it.
Here's a pair of examples of what Phoronix published in recent days:
Our regular readers probably need no explanation of what's wrong with this, but Microsoft attacking Mesa with WSL E.E.E. is a longstanding problem. However, Nr. Larabel is in the pockets of the x86 camp, hence he cannot cover this properly and objectively, for fear of severing some business connections. The second of the two says: "Hours after writing about Microsoft's Direct3D 12 back-end for Mesa seeing OpenGL 4.4 support, the in-review OpenGL 4.5 code mentioned in that article happened to land in Mesa..."
Covering this even once is too much. Twice in a row is... worrisome and troublesome. Mr. Larabel holds wooden horse on a leash, bringing it past the gate for traffic and ad clicks... and we're meant to be joyful? Only about a day ago he said we can "enjoy hardware acceleration of various crypto and compression algorithms". Yes, enjoy back doors using proprietary hardware you can neither audit nor change. Joy!
The majority of the above video, however, speaks of Heather Meeker, whom we mentioned in passing yesterday. Due to a lack of time we failed at explaining what she is and does (we did this before). She is mostly a revisionist and her supposed relation to FOSS is rather weak.
One reader presumed she is some random MBA working for Microsoft in Redmond "but cannot be sure."
As noted in the video above, she seems to be trying to hide past connections to Microsoft or GAFAM. The headline is wordplay because her latest book, which is looking at Free software from a greedy person's perspective, not a community angle. As an invited guest (by Microsoft), according to our reader, it seems she's "say-for-pay" and involved in "open-washing as a service, I presume."
To me, as somewhat who has closely watched and covered these issues for over 2 decades, what's most conspicuous is how she seemingly came almost out of nowhere as "authority" and is now entrusted to write the history of "Open Source". I say a lot more in the video and would rather not do it as text (people like to quote out of context with gender-baiting).
Imagine Microsoft trying to lecture us on its competition, claiming to be speaking for it. █