Jeremy Allison Calls Microsoft Dangerous Elephant

oranghutan writes "At the annual Linux.conf.au event being held in Wellington, NZ, one of the lead developers for the Samba Team (and Google employee) Jeremy Allison described Microsoft as 'an elephant that needs to be turned to stop it trampling the open source community.' Allison has been an outspoken critic of the vendor since he quit Novell over a deal it did with Microsoft that he saw as dangerous to open source intentions. And now he has evolved his argument to incorporate new case studies to explain why Microsoft's use of patents and its general tactics on free software are harmful.

Comments

Flamebait of a story

[elloGov]

This demagogue is appealing to a cult of automated Microsoft haters as a Google employee. How do you moderate a story Flamebait?

Re:Flamebait of a story

[jzhos]

How proprietary the specification is when you can read the specification freely (not all ISO standards are available that way) and implement it freely? Don't tell me "it is a trap", openoffice has implemented it for long time. Has MS sued them yet?

SNORE

[endeavour31]

Ho hum - another anti-MS rant by another Stallman butt-puppet. When something new comes along - then let me know. Slashdot hopefully has more to offer than just a repository for negative sentiment regarding MS and commercial software. The world is big - let MS and open source slug it out in the marketplace.

Microsoft hater hates on Microsoft

[DaveV1.0]

Film at 11! /sarcasm

Really, is this actually news?

Call Wine One One and get a wambulance

[Twillerror]

Look this is the real world. If Linux wants respect you can't do it by crying about MS, Google, or any other company.

Just take the high road, fight the good fight, and take care of business. If open source is truely great it will work out. Don't try and take on MS just write better code and better systems.

The truth of Linux's and OS adoption is less about MS, and more about the little tweeks to make Linux easier not only for your grandma, but even for techs. Instead of some arbitrary command line arguments to change a driver option...make a check box on a dialog...both side wins. Make a GUI tool to configure Apache. The truth is many technical folks actually want that.

Let me write a few more... ...You want some wine with that cheese? ...You need some open source vagisil ( can a women please come up with the equivalent for men...).

Seriuosly can we a baby crying icon for these stories?

This just in - teachers can be assholes

[ClosedSource]

Yes, like many academics you like to demonstrate to your students that you are superior and in charge. There's no significant difference between you and the other guy who won't accept anything from his students that isn't in Word format.

Re:Random anecdote

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, that doesn't work in the real world, in F100 companies.

F100 companies don't have to worry about mathematical equations, chemical formulas, very long documents with various ((sub-)sub-)sections, indexing / cross-referencing, or bibliographies. Having proper typesetting (e.g. ligatures) is just a nice bonus.

Perhaps you should to ask around R&D of your organization to see what they use to publish their papers in (at my $WORK the research department uses LaTeX).

Re:It wouldn't be a problem

[Blakey Rat]

Until I see some evidence, I'm not calling this anything other than a paranoid conspiracy theory. I don't know if you've noticed, but conspiracy theories are pretty popular among Microsoft-haters, and there's nothing here concrete that you can really grasp on to. No company names, no dates, no documents.