06.19.08
Whispers from Former Microsoft Employees Inside the Open Source World
It’s important to know who is who
We apologise in advance for being a tad repetitive, but we continue to discover some little nuggets of information which are worth exploring in another post that touches on this subject.
We wrote about OpenLogic a few times so far this week [1]. We discovered also the history of the man who runs this one particular company [1].
“IDC is another warning sign.”At the moment, they only track over 1,000 People (largely GNU/Linux users), but they use the black art of statistics to over-inflate these figures and share numbers at the scale of hundreds of thousands. That’s a bad sign. It’s like “Microsoft statistics” (recall the market share lie), which are about dishonesty at best and gaming (mischievous intervention) at worst.
The company is also run by a Microsoftie (former nonetheless). It makes you wonder it’s a monitoring/spying project for self-serving ’studies’ (follow the money, i.e. sponsorship) or polite software patents claims. Some bloggers say that it’s safer to ignore OpenLogic and shun its census at this stage. In fact, watch this newer article on this subject:
The Census, started in April by OpenLogic with help from IDC and other sponsors, relies on anonymous scans of computers to count open source installations with software called OSS Discovery.
Mind the inclusion of IDC in there. It is another renowned motor — with extensive history by all means –of pro-Microsoft propaganda [1, 2, 3]. IDC is another warning sign.
OpenLogic is not our sole concern. Consider another former Microsoft employee, whose business runs and develops proprietary software. He wants to tell us all about GPLv3 with this new press release. Remember that Black Duck is a proprietary software company in every sense of the word. I wrote about this a long time ago.
What’s the interest, you ask? They are often looking to make money out of fear associated with popular Free software licences (if not create fear too). We wrote about this yesterday as well. Little confidence can be earned by the fact that Black Duck sort of ’stole’ Palamida’s database, as we mentioned a month ago. Trust just isn’t there, so we’ll continue to watch carefully. █
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.