SoylentNews

Debconf 2016 Welcomes... Microsoft!

posted by martyb on Friday April 15 2016, @04:56AM   
from the speechless dept.

Bot writes:

The annual Debian developers conference, debconf 16, is taking place July 2-9 in Cape Town, South Africa, featuring for the first time ever Microsoft as a silver sponsor.

This seems consistent with the strategy, that pessimists may define EEE (embrace, extend, extinguish), of seeking close integration with the GNU/Linux system.

The move, from a traditionally hostile company that recently started showing enthusiasm towards open source software, is causing a mixture of derision and opposition in the community. As the grey beards in the IT community might recall, most of Microsoft partners, from IBM to the humble dev, tend to end up screwed in the long term. Will GNU/Linux be the exception?

---

Original Submission

• They killed at least two mac conferences that way They killed at least two mac conferences that way (Score: 5, Informative) by canopic jug on Friday April 15 2016, @06:44AM

  by canopic jug (3949) on Friday April 15 2016, @06:44AM (#332102) Journal

  The Debian organizers are stupid and harming the conference. Pretty soon Debian whether GNU/Linux or GNU/kFreeBSD will be just a footnote, with the malefactors having taken over and tainted with their content. Debian is the foundation for a lot of other distros, so just like with systemd, this is screwing a much larger community.

  It's not like the Debconf organizers even have an excuse for not knowing. Here is one of the relevant court exhibits from the late, great Groklaw [groklaw.net] :

  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-platform, 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 showed up. 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 always...they 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 brought...because 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?

  Comes v Microsoft, Plaintiff's Exhibit 2456 [groklaw.net]

  --
  Money is not free speech. Elections should not be auctions.

  Starting Score:	1		point
  Moderation		+4
  Interesting=1, Informative=3, Total=4
  Extra 'Informative' Modifier		0
  Karma-Bonus Modifier		+1
  Total Score:		5

• Re:They killed at least two mac conferences that w Re:They killed at least two mac conferences that w (Score: 2) by bitstream on Friday April 15 2016, @07:50AM

  by bitstream (6144) on Friday April 15 2016, @07:50AM (#332122) Journal

  Don't invite fillers on the peril of dilution into irrelevance?

  Time for some McCarthyism.. "Are you now or have you ever been paid by the evil Microsoft empire of the United States?"

  "Are you part of a conscious and articulate instrument of the Microsoft conspiracy?"

  "Have you ever knowingly or willfully advocate, abet, advise or teach the [...] desirability or propriety of overthrowing the free software movement or any open source project by coercion or bribes, or for anyone to organize any association which teaches, advises or encourages such an disruption, or for anyone to become a paid associate of or to affiliate with any Microsoft activities?"

  Of course the free open source movement must start the, House Committee on Un-Unix Activities! :p

  Parent

  • Re:They killed at least two mac conferences that w Re:They killed at least two mac conferences that w (Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @09:56AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @09:56AM (#332151)

    Time for some McCarthyism..

    For all the hate he got, McCarthy actually turned out to be right about damn near every one of the people on his list of subversive agents. The FBI files even revealed that the Communist Party USA (which had many close ties to the Democratic party) was not directly subservient to Soviet Russia...

    So, yes. Indeed. It's not paranoia when they really are out to get you. And inviting known subversives to your "open environment" is only survivable if constant vigilance is maintained.

    Parent

    • Re:They killed at least two mac conferences that w (Score: 2) by bitstream on Friday April 15 2016, @06:22PM

      by bitstream (6144) on Friday April 15 2016, @06:22PM (#332348) Journal

      Microsoft is kind of like CCCP in this context: Yuri Bezmenov: Psychological Warfare Subversion & Control of Western Society [youtube.com].

      Parent

    • ''[McCarthy's] list of subversive agents" (Score: 1, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @07:43PM

      by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @07:43PM (#332383)

      You forgot to put "subversive" in quote marks.

      the Communist Party USA [...] was not directly subservient to Soviet Russia

      In fact, the vast majority of members were ANTI-Stalinist.
      They recognized that (top-down) Totalitarianism is the OPPOSITE of Communism.

      What USAian Communists wanted was a more egalitarian sharing of the immense wealth of the USA and the DEMOCRACY EVERYWHERE paradigm inherent in Marxist philosophy.
      ...rather than the concentrated wealth inherent in Capitalism and the oligarchy inherent in the founding documents of USA (with a only a veneer of actual Democracy in order to try to keep the proletariat pacified).

      In fact, the USA's Constitution leaves a loophole for changing the system (via amendments).
      In addition to that, Thomas Jefferson advocated a Constitutional Convention every generation to see if the Constitution needed to be rewritten.
      If the USAian Commies had included one or both of those in their rhetoric, they would have been called Jeffersonian Patriots.

      -- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]

      Parent