Hilf Claims Free Software Movement Dead

moe1975 writes to mention that Bill Hilf has taken a rather aggressive stance with regard to the status of the Free Software movement. With claims like; "The Free Software movement is dead. Linux doesn't exist in 2007. Even Linus has got a job today" it would certainly seem that the next offensive is going to be sponsored by denial. "For the desktop, Hilf sees a new frontier in terms of rich client programming. With more and more services by Amazon, Google, Yahoo and, of course, Microsoft being run as services rather than as software installed locally, it will be up to the desktop to provide richer functionality."

Comments

Re:Huh?

[aichpvee]

From TFA: "The Free Software movement is dead. Linux doesn't exist in 2007. Even Linus has got a job today." Controversial statements from the head of Microsoft's Linux Labs, Bill Hilf.

They purposefully left the last sentence out of the summary to drive hits. This guy's just another paid microsoft shill. Nothing to see here, move along.

Microsoft hurting?

[PineHall]

This person at InfoWorld thinks Microsoft must really be hurting for them to be saying these things.

Who Bill Hilf is

[Anonymous Coward]

Bill Hilf is General Manager of Platform Strategy at Microsoft. This guy:
http://www.microsoft.com/technet/community/tnradio /bio/billhilf.mspx

Slashdot interviewed him about two years ago. The first question is possibly the best.
http://interviews.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/0 8/08/1247220&tid=109&tid=11&tid=106

Viva Libre!

[Jeremiah Cornelius]

You can go Hilf yourself, over the Gratis part.

Verdict? Obfuscation, misdirection and deliberate misinformation. Linux has ad a day job since he left University.

One of my favorite statements

[natet]

"Standards is the first thing you go to in the competitive strategy playbook. Of course, IBM and Sun won't say that on the record. You create a problem that didn't exist and use standards to force a problem," he said.

I have short stories and essays I created using Microsoft Word 10-15 years ago that I can't open with Word today. None of these used any fancier formatting than double spacing and varying font sizes. That is why standards are important. We can't apparently expect Microsoft to keep the formats backwards compatible, so it is up to us as consumers to seek standards that will ensure that the information we create today will be just as accessible tomorrow.