The Free Software Foundation Speaks Out Against Microsoft
WITH about 25 hours left (Boston time) till the extended 'soft' deadline is reached, the FSF now has 181 new members (the goal was 200). Yesterday or just over a day ago Greg Farough from the FSF wrote about Windows failing, as we pointed out a couple of hours ago. It's good to see this. Farough said: "In a cunning PR spin, it appears that Microsoft has started blaming the incident on third-party firms' access to kernel source and documentation. Translated out of Redmond-ese, the point they are trying to make amounts to "if only we'd been allowed to be more secretive, this wouldn't have happened!" Anyone with so much as a basic understanding of software development can see that this argument doesn't hold water, just as anyone with a basic understanding of rhetoric can appreciate the irony that the same company that develops Copilot is whinging about the need to keep code secret from others. At this very minute, Copilot is ingesting free software on Microsoft's proprietary platform, GitHub, with little respect for each program's license."
Further down he also said: "The Free Software Foundation is often accused of being utopian, but we are well aware that moving airlines, libraries, and every other institution affected by the CrowdStrike outage to free software is a tremendous undertaking. Given free software's distinct ethical advantage, not to mention the embarrassing damage control underway from both Microsoft and CrowdStrike, we think the move is a necessary one. The more public an institution, the more vitally it needs to be running free software."
As we said before, the problem is bigger than Microsoft and in the long run - seeing Microsoft's demise - we'll need to emphasise Software Freedom. Otherwise people might end up thinking that using "a Mac" or "Android smartphone" is the goal. █
