[LAU] Some disturbing news

Will Godfrey willgodfrey at musically.me.uk
Sat Jun 2 14:54:36 CEST 2018


On Sat, 2 Jun 2018 13:40:31 +0200
Louigi Verona <louigi.verona at gmail.com> wrote:
<snip>
>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.

I'm sorry but I completely disagree.

Microsoft is a company founded on theft, and has used every dirty trick in the
book ever since.

It provided an api to Wordperfect, that was slow and buggy, but used something
much quicker for MSword. It also waited till the last minute then changed the
official api, leaving WP high and dry. I'm not saying WP was all innocence and
unicorns, but certainly didn't deserve that.

What about the 200 or so patents that Microsoft claimed Linux infringed, yet
when anyone asked what they were so they could code round them, it refused to
say. Why?

How about the way it funded SCO, volunteering to 'buy' Unix licenses, a fairly
tranparent attempt to both fund the campaign as well as legitimise SCOs claims.

And now with their apparent change of heart it seems they've added a new 'E' to
the classic three.

Embrace
*Encapsulate*
Extend
Extinguish

www.groklaw.net atchive is still up - but sadly no longer functioning, and is a
(heavy going) wealth of information about dodgy practices, and Microsoft seems
to appear there more than any other company - part from SCO.


If it walks like a duck...

-- 
Will J Godfrey
http://www.musically.me.uk
Say you have a poem and I have a tune.
Exchange them and we can both have a poem, a tune, and a song.


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