Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft Gets Into Board of Open Source Business Foundation

Preluded by the discomforting subject line "Microsoft infiltrating into open source world," we have just received a headsup from an anonymous reader. On the face of it, Microsoft continues to exploit the flexibility in the term "open source" to render the whole 'movement' rather pointless with its anti-FOSS conditions that essentially lock Free software out of the "open source" umbrella and make everything taxable, using software patents.

“We also saw how the company essentially hijacks and redefines the term "open source".”We recently saw Microsoft's stubborn attempts to become part of the Open Solutions Alliance, having been repeatedly rejected to obey its existing members' demands. We also saw how the company essentially hijacks and redefines the term "open source". This bring us to the message from our reader, which is quoted below, verbatim:

"Microsoft keeps insisting on their infiltrate-divide-and-conquer strategy injecting themselves and their marketing mindset (in the form of useless "interoperability" -taxation of compatibility through bogus patent rights claims and fearmongering-)

"This is why it is most important to highlight the prevalence of "freedom" over just "openness" of FLOSS:

"There is an article in German. It says that Microsoft has now a sit on the board of the "Open Source Business Foundation" and is responsible for interoperability.

"No, it is not a joke. I wonder what kind of Open Source Business Foundation this one is. Does anyone have more info?"

"There's free software and then there’s open source... there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

--Bill Gates, April 2008



Gates on SUSE

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