01.14.08
The Microsoft Lock-in Stack Comes Under Fire in Europe; Is Greece a Microsoft Victim Already?
“There won’t be anything we won’t say to people to try and convince them that our way is the way to go.”
–Bill Gates (Microsoft’s CEO at the time)
The following development was by all means expected. It’s the progression of an ongoing investigation led by Mr. Vinje and others. We wrote about it on several occasions in the past.
Those who do not know why Microsoft uses (as in “exploits”) Novell for Mono, Moonlight, OOXML and so forth ought to pay closer attention. Novell does a great disservice to Free software by facilitating Microsoft’s framework and making it more prevalent rather than reject it for what it is and what it is intended to achieve in the long term.
Anyway, here is the news, in case you missed it.
European antitrust regulators are kicking off two new Microsoft antitrust investigations, one of which involves products and technologies for which Microsoft allegedly is withholding interoperability information, including its .Net framework, Office Open XML (OOXML) document format and various server products.
More disturbing to the mind, however, was the find that comes from noooxml.org at the moment. Have a look at their analysis of a proposal that is being pushed in Greece.
Microsoft Hellas proposes a contract that will take over control of the sovereign European state. Greece would lose the right to speak about other products its government uses and gain the right to support the business interests of the vendor and its policy goals.
[…]
Nice proposal, Microsoft will help Greece to spy on its ICT infrastructure in order to weaken the procurement power of Greece for the benefit of the supplier. Win-Win, right?
Watch the video which is contained in this post about the way Microsoft ‘buys’ Europe. It is about Greece and it shows some contract signing with accompanying context. Do follow the link if you wish to understand the degree of manipulation and its associated dangers. █
Highlight: Novell was the first to acknowledge that Microsoft FUD tactics had substance. Novell then used anti-Linux FUD to market itself. 
Highlight: Xandros let Microsoft make patent claims and brag about (paid-for) OOXML support. 
Highlight: Linspire's CEO not only fell into Microsoft arms, but he also assisted the company's attack on GNU/Linux. 
Highlight: Microsoft craves pseudo (proprietary) standards and gets its way using proxies and influence which it buys. 
Highlight: The invasion into the open source world is intended to leave Linux companies neglected, due to financial incentives from Microsoft. 
Analysis: Xen, an open source hypervisor, possibly fell victim to Microsoft's aggressive (and stealthy) acquisition-by-proxy strategy.