Screaming Penguin - Source Does Matter

Turns out the little Microsoft and Novell deal a few weeks back was not quite what I, or others, thought it was.

In fact I had a Microsoft employee tell me personally what a great boon this agreement would be and that Microsoft was "listening" to customers such as myself (who I explained may use .Net in some circumstances, such as on mobile devices, but want to keep our core hardware and software "commodity driven" as I call it, inexpensive, horizontally scalable, AND LINUX BASED because it is less expensive, more secure, more reliable, based on open standards, so on - I will use .Net where it makes sense because there is no open standards based alternative, nowhere else, don't need the headache of vendor lock in, licensing, having to run on Windows, and so on that has burned me in the past).

Turns out, as most Microsoft "deals" do, that this was a duplicitous bullshit move and Microsoft gave SuSE 440M so SuSE could give back 40M to "license our intellectual property." Ballmer says:

Linux uses our intellectual property
. . . .
Novell pays us some money for the right to tell customers that anybody who uses SUSE Linux is appropriately covered . . . this is important to us, because [otherwise] we believe every Linux customer basically has an undisclosed balance-sheet liability

And just the other day another Microsoft guy was arguing with me about how crappy Linux is, trying to tell me thats why I should NOT use it. Now is it crappy, or did Microsoft create it, or both?

And rather than openly and honestly explain what IP you are hallucinating you own in Linux to try to get it out, your response is rather to threaten to sue everyone and make underhanded deals with companies that can't resist the cash.

I would be WILLING TO BET, if put to the test, line of code to line of code, MICROSOFT is using a hell of a lot of open source directly pasted in (as has been proven in the past - remember the whole TCP/IP stack fiasco - and the HotMail tangent while a different matter is always good for a laugh) or as derivative rewritten algorithms and such - rather than the other way around. You think we fucking want MS code in Linux, please. Tell us what on earth you think you own and we will remove that shit right now just because of the association, albeit an invalid FUD association.

This should serve as a lesson to all software developers and open source advocates, over the years Microsoft has "embraced" open source recently, after calling it a "cancer" for so many years, they now have all sorts of "open" initiatives. Don't participate or accept any code from MS, its a ruse.

Piss off Microsoft, never again will I go near one of your products whenever I have the choice.

And yeah, this makes me mad at SuSE too, which at my very large corporation is the current distro of choice. They likely need the cash but I think it is tantamount to an admission that Linux doesn't need, blood money, and I for one will look for another distro.