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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.
First off, this isn't news, which is glaringly obvious. If I said something along the same lines, would I get my own slashdot article? Probably not If I were, however, a little girl who felt betrayed by my corporate overlords making a deal with one of the most reliable companies on the planet, thus giving me and my fellow employees more job security, so I quit and start yelling WAHHH THE BIG BAD MICROSOFT MONSTER IS MEAN AND SO IS MY FORMER EMPLOYER AND MICROSOFT IS AN ELEPHANT RAWWWWR!, I probably would get this article.
How about something important and interesting, like the pork meat being created from stem cells? That's pretty fucking cool right there. Delicious progress.
Instead, we're fed this bullshit. I know we all love open source, theres nothing wrong with that. This, however, is NOT news, nor is it IMPORTANT to anyone, and as I'm about to present my case, it's not TRUE either.
"Oh, but wait, roAm, what about the fact that Microsoft is doing all these naughty things to threaten the open source community?"
FUD -- and as we all know, Microsoft's special brand of FUD only really works for promoting their products, not squashing the competition.
OSS is the elephant in this situation. A docile, elegant creature that never forgets. Microsoft is more like an annoying horsefly buzzing around the truck of said elephant, incessantly annoying the elephant, which can't quite seem to smash the annoying bug, but at the same time this is irrelevant because the bug has a limited lifespan compared to the near-immortality of the elephant.
Scale-wise, I know this comparison is skewed, but that doesn't make it any less true.
~The roAm
I think the headline looks more like "Pro-FOSS nobody doesn't like Microsoft." You know, just like all the other headlines.
Whale
How is SAMBA copying anybody here? (if we assume that a Windows NFS client had been made available by Microsoft, SAMBA would never have been popular).
You mean other than cloning Microsoft stuff like Active Directory? And that's not the only thing they've cloned from Microsoft's SMB implementation.
ten problems with the new Moonlight Covenant
...
Novell-Only, OS limitiations, the Killswitch, overlapping Promises, Novell-Only, Novell-Only, Platform Limited, GPL-Hostile, expiration Date
If Microsoft has deliberately set out to harm open source then the open source community should set out to harm Microsoft. Perhaps a contest could be run with a prize going to the person doing the greatest harm. Hacking, law suits, interesting illegal acts should all be judged for creativity and harm done.