[LAU] Some disturbing news

Louigi Verona louigi.verona at gmail.com
Sat Jun 2 13:40:31 CEST 2018


According to Wikipedia, Skype was thinking of making its traffic available
to the NSA before the acquisition.

So, I am making two points right now:

1. All large IT companies are approached at some point by governments all
over the world. So it is not Microsoft which is specifically evil, it is
the way the society is structured now. I see no reason to single out
Microsoft as a problem. You don't know what GitHub is doing now either.

2. As a separate point - large businesses are not "evil". They are
comprised of normal people who want to do good. I know many people who work
in Microsoft, Apple and Google, including some pretty high in management.
None of them are evil. And I doubt the founders of these companies are evil
too. The behavior of these companies is explained by an interaction of
their business success and the current structure of society. In
authoritarian societies this is much worse news than in the democratic
societies.

The reason I bring these points up is because I feel that Microsoft is
singled out unfairly. It is not a bad company and it has a lot of pretty
good products, and its behavior is not governed by evil intent, but rather
by a complex interaction of business incentives, government regulation and
corporate structure that is necessary to manage a large company. That does
not mean this mix of incentives does not create negative results - it does
sometimes - but I feel that in the FLOSS community many see it as almost a
conspiracy by someone in Microsoft to destroy the world. Which is just
untrue.




Louigi.


On Sat, Jun 2, 2018 at 1:09 PM, Peter P. <peterparker at fastmail.com> wrote:

> * David Kastrup <dak at gnu.org> [2018-06-02 10:49]:
> > Will Godfrey <willgodfrey at musically.me.uk> writes:
> >
> > > I've just read on The Register that there are discussions between
> > > GitHub and Microsoft, with a possible buy-out by Microsoft. I really
> > > can't think of a worse possibility :(
> >
> > I can.  A buyout by Oracle.  Though Oracle tends to kill projects fast
> > enough not to take everyone's enthusiasm with them and so replacements
> > pop up.  Microsoft tends to just sap all joy out and eventually people
> > don't know why they ever cared and are too tired to create something
> > new.
> >
> > But basically that's what startups and venture capital are for: build a
> > business until it's large and robust convincing enough that one of the
> > established big players will pay big money in order to never hear of it
> > again.
>
> I am surprised people saw something different in github than it being a
> buisness.
> If you want independence set up your own gitlab servers. Linuxaudio.org
> would be a cool spot for it.
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> Linux-audio-user at lists.linuxaudio.org
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>



-- 
Louigi Verona
https://www.patreon.com/droning
https://louigiverona.com/
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