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Microsoft Sponsors Linux Foundation Event
darthcamaro writes "There was a time when the Linux Foundation wouldn't take money from Microsoft. That time is not today — Microsoft is listed as a Gold Sponsor of the LinuxCon Europe event, paying $20,000 for the privilege and also getting a guaranteed speaking slot as a result."
Mitt Romney sponsors Obama's campaign victory. Seems anti-antithetical for MS to host anything involving Linux... what's the catch?
Nope, not April 1st. I'm curious what Microsoft has to say. No doubt it is to praise Microsoft, but I wonder if they are going to positively speak about Open Source and Linux
Hope they have chicken wire in front of the stage.
Admiral Ackbar
When is Winux coming out? LOL
Well, linux brings them alot of cash... Android-flavored
Just want to watch the world burn.
Visit my Forums?
Azure (the MS cloud) now supports Linux images. They probably want some attention for that.
0x or or snor perron?!
Join em.
Hey SlashDot, how about some "News for Nerds" sometime soon? This is two days in a row with an announcement about some large corporate entity throwing money into a marketing pot. If we wanted this kind of news, we'd be on the Businessweek site right now.
Microsoft understands they will loose dominating position forever. And why not sell Office on Linux?
MS has been an enemy of linux since the beginning. Taking their money now just shows that Linux can now be bought off.
Be seeing you...
One wonders how many people would switch from Macs to Linux if office was available for Linux. I know there's plenty of opensource folks who would loathe it. From a pragmatic gotta support it attitude (All the business folks use it) , it could mean less Macs.
I know piles of people who run Linux in a VM on Windows 7, or vice-versa and spend 99% of their time in Linux, 'shelling out' to Windows for stuff like Office and corporate windows stuff.
I personally hugely prefer Linux to a Mac. All our prod systems are on Linux or Unix at the company I work at.
if you can't 'em, join 'em... and sabotage from within.
Microsoft has been doing this for years andconstantly doing this to GNU/Linux and Free/open source software events. They know it gets people turned off and this act ruins the events for people.
I would take the money, but give Microsoft a hall in another hotel nearby
Linux Foundation is an organization of really large businesses. They currently pay the salary of Linux Torvalds and a handful of other programmers, but they are first and foremost an organization of really large businesses. Many of the businesses are not particularly friendly to Linux. Most of them don't deserve your trust. A number of them produce proprietary drivers which run in the kernel, against the licensing of Linux itself.
Bruce Perens.
I can see it now... a bright future for linux, walking side by side with MS.
Just ask Nokia how they became what they are now
Imagine all the suckers who live in an alternate universe where they joke "imagine a bizarre messed up alternate reality where Duke Nukem Forever is released, Microsoft would actually sponsor a Linux event, and so on".
link
We don't see the world as it is, we see it as we are.
-- Anais Nin
The fox is now in the chicken coop.
That's not a very "open" attitude to have.
It's A Trap!
"So you want to love those conferences to death. I’ve killed at least two Mac conferences. First there was the Mac App Developers Conference. I was on the Board of Directors of the Mac App Developers Association long ago, and after I left I worked to try to turn it into a cross-platform developers conference, and I did. I managed to make it.. their last conference was very cross-platforn, both Windows and Macintosh, which of course turned off their Macintosh audience; half of the conference was irrelevant to them. They didn’t care about Windows. They were a bunch of Mac guys. Which diluted the value of the conference. And they didn’t know how to advertise the Windows guys when the Windows guys showe dup. So they lost money that year and the group folded. Oh, well. One less channel of communication that Apple can use to reach its developers.
The other conference was called the Technology and Issues Conference. it had been going on for, like, ten years. It was an independent conference. it was by invitation only. They invited VPs and above at all the major Mac software companies. And they always held it in, like, Yosemite or Vienna or Hawaii. It was a big junket thing. And it was alwaysthey held the conference the last few days of the week before Fourth of July weekend, right, so it was just a junket trip. But Apple always hated this conference because, you know, all of their ISVs got together and received a message that they didn’t control as much as they would have liked. Well, I sponsored a dinner and I broughtbecause once you sponsor a dinner, right, you get to talk to them during dinner. You get to do a dinner presentation, OK, once the clatter of knives dies down. And we were there being so helpful. Apple was still nickel and diming its developers to death. And so we’re there handing out free software developers’ kits to everybody there, and free copies of the Explorer PD and other things like that for their kids, because, you know, they’d bring their wives and families along with us, and so we’d give them free games and stuff. And then I gave them this big presentation over dinner and so on. So it seemed like Microsoft dominated the conference. Well, Apple got so pissed off at this that they threatened the guy that ran the conference that they were never going to send anybody again, that they were going to schedule conferences that directly opposed it so that the VPs couldn’t go to his conference, they could only go to Apple’s conference and so forth. So by injecting Microsoft content into the conference, the conference got shut down. The guy who ran it said, why am I doing this? I’m losing money on it every year anyway. Screw Apple, they don’t need my help. And so the conference died, so that’s two. I’m working on two other Mac conferences now."
~ James Plamondon, Microsoft Technology Evangelist
Don't be so surprised. Microsoft has done more for open source than Apple ever has.
Of whom? Why not Apple. What have they done for anything open source (aside from commandeering parts of BSD for their own operating system)?
Apple was for a time a major contributor to GCC, and is currently the driving force behind llvm and clang.
Also, they improved kHTML and released the result as webkit, which they are still one of the main contributors to.
I can't wait to see them booed off stage
Apple's contributions to FreeBSD:
1) Removing giant kernel lock
2) Dramatically improved Wifi support
3) Much improved SMP scaling
4) D-Trace
5) Improved file system journeling
6) Improved scheduler
7) Super Pages
8) Some auditing framework needed for government systems
9) Full 64bit kernel
Apple didn't do all of the work, but the pioneered the required changes.
I thought MS has a Linux distro ... It was so forgettable.
What was it called?
They're porting surface to Linux w00t, it'll probably be on Ubuntu first though shux ;-)
Good leaders run toward problems, bad leaders hide from them.
I don't even think Microsoft looks at the events they sponsor. I can't tell you how many tech events I've been to where Microsoft was listed as a "Gold" sponsor. The last few were small ones in a 100 person conference room and nobody from Microsoft was even there. They just paid the x number of dollars to get their name listed as a sponsor for the event. What is $20,000 to a company that charges $30,000 for a single-processor edition of SQL Server 2008 Enterprise?
Citation needed. For all of it, really.
These are big changes that occurred in FreeBSD. None of these were apple's contributions.
There's no exit door on the Microsoft tent!
Have gnu, will travel.
Microsoft sponsored POSSCON and had a keynote speaker. The organizers were a bit embarrassed by how the crowd (and even other speakers) treated him (and Microsoft) given how much money Microsoft had provided - even providing a very nice lunch. They didn't sponsor the following year, for which we were thankful.
Now the keynote speaker himself should have been quite embarassed too as he kept on talking about how Microsoft was all about standards and helping people, etc; how they're integrated open source, and more. Only, he was new to Microsoft (only hired in a fews prior, IIRC) and seemed to have been only shown as much of Microsoft as needed to make the statements he was making - or reiterating points from someone else. His presentation was pretty much a joke.
While POSSCON doesn't get a bigger crowed like the other conferences do, or even a lot of the bigger names (outside of their speakers); I would expect that the other conferences would likely treat Microsoft the same (for better or for worse) just because of their reputation within the community. The community (as seen here on Slashdot too) is very cynacle of Microsoft, and for good reason.
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away. - Elvis Presley (source: imdb.com)
but they "pioneered" the changes! what a #$@#
Linux is embedded in a great many products in the world and Microsoft collects a lot of money in license fees from those installations. A lot more than 20,000 I'd say.
There are people in the world who like to disassemble proprietary code. Surely the folks who bring patent suits employ some of them.
Bruce Perens.
Wasn't this story about Microsoft, and their contribution to buy the right to speak at a Linux convention?
What the fuck does Apple have to do with it?
Also, on the actual story: IT'S A TRAP!!!
leave the rest
Microsoft has no morals and will stop at nothing to subvert everything to their profit motives. They should not be trusted.
I'm at (E)LCE right now and all I can say is that there is a microsoft booth here..... for the past couple of days noone has been standing at it. Obviously they didn't find it useful to pay for someone to present Microsoft offering here............ I'm not impressed.
Apple added DTrace support with OSX10.5 = Leopard in something they called "Instruments". Apple porting the solaris and bsd code tree onto Apple's hardware, and the "required changes" which "they pioneered" were the changes necessary for it to work on Apple's own OSX platform. Can you point me to what it is that they fed back and released into the BSD world?
.
Seriously, you are overstating it to put a one-word "D-Trace" as an isolated item #4 on your numbered list as if Apple had almost everything to do with the conception, creation/generation, and distribution of D-Trace. You are immensely overstating their contribution. Porting a package to your own system is not the same as a contribution, and is certainly not citeable as ``pioneer[ing] the required changes.''
they were the first to bitch about needing them
http://www.mslinux.org/
Honestly, the LinuxCon is a completely insignificant conference in Europe where US corporations celebrate themselves. I don't mind Microsoft to sponsor the event.
They could have simply contributed to KHTML and been done with it. The way they did it really screwed over the KDE project in a manner from which they have yet to fully recover.
I really wanted to change my sig to something witty, but all I could come up with is this.
This exactly my point. They contributed nothing of substance.
make them a shame, fall them off, cal them futitives again en morons, don' t trust them