02.07.15
The Latest Microsoft Strategy: Embrace, Extend, Deceive, Abuse and Diffuse
“Analysts sell out – that’s their business model… But they are very concerned that they never look like they are selling out, so that makes them very prickly to work with.”
–Microsoft, internal document [PDF]
Summary: Microsoft’s final plan/plot against software that everyone can share is infiltration and interference
SOME bribed journalists and so-called ‘analysts’ would try hard to make us believe that Microsoft is now an “Open Source company” (or something along those lines). This helps damage Free/Open Source software (FOSS) because it devalues the OSI-controlled brand and confuses less technical people who often make big decisions regarding procurement. We wrote many articles about it last year, e.g. when the UK decided to adopt FOSS and ODF; Microsoft tries to masquerade as both [1, 2, 3] — a chameleon seeking to warp its perceived identity so as to never lose a contract.
“This helps damage Free/Open Source software (FOSS) because it devalues the OSI-controlled brand and confuses less technical people who often make big decisions regarding procurement.”A couple of months ago Microsoft openwashed .NET, which remains a vector of patent lawsuits and is not even Open Source (only parts of it were to be made available at some later date). Microsoft is really trying hard to squeeze PR out of these lies, including a repetition of the lies as in this new puff piece that revolves around Gianugo Rabellino and uses Microsoft’s “Open Tech” proxy as the mouthpiece. Microsoft apologist Adrian Bridgwater added his contribution to this PR (not news, just rehash) and to clarify, “CoreCLR is the execution engine for .NET apps and performs compilation to machine code, garbage collection, and other core functionality to .NET,” Phoronix wrote, echoing Microsoft’s own words rather than check the facts. The Microsoft-friendly media said that “The vision is for .NET Core to be truly cross-platform, and while it’s not quite there yet, Microsoft intends to add Linux and Mac implementations of components for these platforms in coming months, just like with its .NET open source efforts.”
.NET is neither Open Source nor cross-platform, but these lies continue to be disseminated in the media based on some provisions that are yet to be evaluated. Moreover, .NET is about spreading Microsoft to everything, it’s not about FOSS. Labeling it “FOSS” is intended to help it spread into departments with FOSS-centric policies. It’s an “embrace and extend” strategy, just as we saw recently in Raspberry Pi (see [1] below for a good explanation) and also in Android (through Cyanogen as an external proxy and provocateur). Here is what Microsoft really has in mind. Microsoft is hoping hijack Android in an embrace-and-extend fashion, as Microsoft attempted to do with Java in the 90s. “Do encourage fragmentation of the Java classlib space,” said Ben Slivka from Microsoft. They sought to destroy Java by embracing and fragmenting it, much like the Microsoft-funded Cyanogen does right now. Using another (indirectly) Microsoft-funded proxy, Xamarin, Microsoft hopes to make Android .NET-dependent. █
Related/contextual items from the news:
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Should Linux users worry about no-cost Windows 10 for Raspberry Pi?
Gone are the days when Linux users tried to run their free and open source operating system on Microsoft-controlled hardware: PCs. As Microsoft’s OS and Office market share is declining, and with an (almost) failed mobile platform, the company is now looking at open source for its survival.
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