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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?
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Debconf 2016 Welcomes... Microsoft!
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Either I'm dead or my watch has stopped.
-- Groucho Marx's last words
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @08:16AM
In the case of IBM, they did it to themselves.
Every unit they produced in the Boca Raton (PC) facility had a (business) customer who could hardly wait to get his mitts on it and those folks were willing to pay for the "quality" of Big Blue.
The open architecture of the IBM PC allowed -other- vendors to supply the troublesome, low-volume hobbyist cheapskates.
Everything was going smoothly for IBM.
...then they got greedy and decided to go proprietary with their incompatible-with-everything MicroChannel Architecture.
Now, folks who had legacy equipment couldn't even use parts from spare|dead boxes to fix IBM's new stuff.
Folks quickly lost interest in "real" PCs and went with clone makers.
.
Now, from their start with PCs, IBM clearly saw itself as a HARDWARE company.
The suits at Boca clearly didn't read microcomputer journals or they would have been aware who-all was producing software--specifically OSes--and who wasn't.
The clowns from Boca showed up on Gary Kildall's doorstep without even making an appointment.
Gary, having a meeting with someone who HAD made an appointment "went flying" to that meeting.
The IBM guys were left standing around with their dicks in their hands.
...and they decided to go see Gates--who DIDN'T have an OS to sell them.
...though Tim Paterson (one t) did have one of those (as did Kildall).
OS/2 was just the epilogue.
...which is not to say M$ hasn't stabbed LOTS of "partners" in the back.
-- OriginalOwner_ [soylentnews.org]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @10:39PM
I have a friend who was a hardware engineer at IBM in Boca through the end. He was one of the last engineers there. Tells stories of how he and the other final few had nothing to do and moved their offices around for kicks to where they each had their own desk in giant empty buildings. He had been there for some time, and ended up getting stiffed out of months of vacation he had saved up.