03.08.08
Hard to Trust Publication When Microsoft Spreads Its Money
New case study…
A reader has informed us of a somewhat suspicious new publication. “You’re there in the UK, aren’t you?” he asked. “If so, do you have way of finding out what if any ties a PhD student (or recent graduate) Evangelia Berdou has with Microsoft? Is her work or research funded by Microsoft or a Microsoft partner?” he then continued.
“She is or was at the London School of Economics and Political Science in the department for Media and Communications.” Since we don’t typically approach personal issues my reply was simple: “I’d be careful launching smears against a single individual. And by the way, yes, Microsoft does such things. In France, it is becoming normal. We covered this before.”
The reader then responded:
I am not interested in smearing anyone, even less in bringing the dissertation to light. I simply read a few dozen pages of the dissertation and took issue with the Microsoft language in document and what appeared to be a large number of factual errors regarding among other things licensing and copyright. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire.
At this stage, it is worth emphasising that Microsoft did pay at least one academic researcher in order to generate GPLv3 smears (without explicit disclosure). We covered this in here, among other posts.
“…Microsoft did pay at least one academic researcher in order to generate GPLv3 smears (without explicit disclosure).”The reader then suggested that it might be best let it languish. “It cannot be unpublished,” he said.
We have done some googling on her, attempting to find a Microsoft link. We were not very successful, but we make this conversation available out there for the public to access, just in case someone wishes to find a connection (it will be at least indexed in Google). We didn’t explore this properly.
Evidence of LSE-Microsoft connections would be handy and our reader believes that this is something I could find out at one of the libraries. Again, we won’t go this far. How can one approach this? Does the thesis state no funding sources under Acknoledgement? Mine has the EPSRC listed, among others.
Readers’ feedback would be appreciated. You can help us hugely by pushing more details about this, even about the London School of Economics. Raising suspicion is not slander. █
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.