Microsoft-Funded IDG Seems to be 'Googlebombing' the Term Free Software to Promote Proprietary Spyware Too
Microsoft advocated along with other proprietary things, e.g.:
The world needs Free software - as in software that offers users and developers fundamental freedoms such as the freedom to share (hoarding in the context of software is particularly troubling and uniquely dangerous, both for technical and moral reasons). If people can freely share cooking recipes, why can't they share computer code in the same way? Oppressive copyright regimes? Software patents? How is computing different from cooking? The level of complexity? Formulations being imprecise?
Software that is offered free of charge but entraps its users often turns out to be a curse, sometimes sooner rather than late(r). The entrapment is unjust power waiting to be abused/misused. There are so many examples of this...
Sometimes people and organisations are offered something 'for free' and are later accused of "piracy" for using this 'free' stuff (because it might no longer be free). Here's a cautionary tale about the US Government (TorrentFreak story).
It's another case of "public money, public code -- or it should be..." (to quote an associate). Remember that Microsoft openly boasted about giving some stuff for 'free' in order to get people addicted. Bill Gates basically spoke like a drug lord (two weeks ago we published "Preserving Deleted Articles About Bill Gates Talking Like a Drug Dealer About Computer Users").
So we can all agree that sinister people (who love hanging out with 'fixers' of underage sex) see their software as an instrument of control, just like people who run some meth lab somewhere. That's Bill Gates in a nutshell. He wants you addicted... then he'll do things to you.
How about IDG, which obviously receives a lot of money from Microsoft in order to aggressively promote Office and OOXML or in other words addiction or lock-in or shackles (we've captured and documented many examples of this in recent months)? Well, there's this IDG article which "does contortions to avoid mentioning Freedom," as an associate put it.
This is mostly proprietary, right from the get-go:
Some of the things in this list aren't just proprietary but also keyloggers!
People see flaws in the list. "Kdenlive is a far superior video editor than Shotcut," one comment says. "No mention of darktable as a free alternative to Lightroom?"
There are other reasons to see the comments (the date is wrong, the above predates that article and we can therefore deduce that they re-date the page; it now says "by Eric Griffith Nov 07, 2024", but some comments go months earlier than that).
That list is basically full of 'free drugs'. Many of the entries in it are "first one's free!" rather than facilitators of the Four Freedoms (like GIMP).
When people search the Web for lists of "Free Software" they might end up finding, installing, then using proprietary keyloggers; the message of the FSF et al would thus evade them. █