06.03.15
Only Months After Microsoft’s Ramji Enters the Linux Foundation Microsoft Gradually Joins Him
“Gates looks at everything as something that should be his. He acts in any way he can to make it his. It can be an idea, market share, or a contract. There is not an ounce of conscientiousness or compassion in him. The notion of fairness means nothing to him. The only thing he understands is leverage.”
–Philippe Kahn, Founder and former CEO of Borland
Photo from a Microsoft marketing site
Summary: Sam Ramji is doing to Linux what Stephen Elop did to Nokia
WE continue to be a wee bit disturbed by just how apathetic the Linux Foundation has become towards the company which constantly attacks Linux (usually behind closed doors). Ramji entered the Linux Foundation and only 3 months later we already saw Microsoft too crashing at the place, serving to make FOSS more Windows-leaning and even proprietary. Stephen Elop also waited several months at Nokia before he signed a Microsoft deal (left Microsoft in late 2010 in order to join Nokia, only to hand Nokia over to Microsoft around 4 or 5 months later, pick up a huge bonus for the move, and then return to Microsoft, in which he had shares, as per our timelines). We are not suggesting that the severity will be equal in both cases (huge difference in magnitude), but the patterns do fit. Ramji is no friend of GNU/Linux and it was Microsoft that paid him handsomely.
“Borland and Sun (if they still existed) could tell what Microsoft’s involvement in imperative and object-oriented programming had done to them.”Sam Dean, who is an apologist that accepts the ‘new Microsoft’ myth and Nadella as its ‘leader’ (the abusive Bill Gates is still the leader of the company, to which he officially returned) welcomed Microsoft and so did Microsoft’s booster Maria Deutscher (always openwashing Microsoft), who says that the Ramji (Microsoft)-led Cloud Foundry coming to NSA PRISM (Azure) is a “win for open-source” (it’s actually proprietary with a lot of surveillance, not even “open-source” with a dash).
Deutscher goes further with the openwashing. She sounds like a Microsoft PR agent when she says: “That strategy has previously seen Redmond contribute the source code for its .NET application framework to the public domain and acquire Revolution Analytics, Inc., a distributor of the world’s most popular open statistical programming language. The addition of support for Cloud Foundry is no less significant.”
Revolution Analytics is definitely not FOSS and .NET is still a patent trap and mostly proprietary [1, 2, 3], so this Silicon Angle piece is a great example of Microsoft puff pieces in action, courtesy of ‘journalists’ who would print every lie from Microsoft in an effort to reshape consensus.
What we see in the Linux Foundation is reminiscent of entryism, much like Jo Shields joining Xamarin (Microsoft proxy) after he spent a lot of time pushing Mono into Debian and Ubuntu (they have since then learned to avoid this plague). He currently delivers the latest Trojan horse, hoping that misinformed GNU/Linux users might install it and developers might foolishly develop with it. It’s all about the API. If the Linux Foundation does not guard its own open standards and APIs, then Microsoft will easily pull its infamous “embrace, extend, extinguish” (EEE) trick on various elements in GNU/Linux, little by little, one step at a time. Borland and Sun (if they still existed) could tell what Microsoft’s involvement in imperative and object-oriented programming had done to them. Thinking that Microsoft has changed has historically been a fatal mistake. █
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