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?
(Score: 2) by moondrake on Friday April 15 2016, @03:55PM
What Torvalds things does not matter that much though. Its not as he "owns" linux. He is, by his own admission, just an engineer. And that is perfectly fine.
The free software community can very well form an opinion on these ideals. In fact, I would argue that it would be illogical of the community NOT to care.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday April 15 2016, @05:11PM
Your wrong, Linus own the trademark Linux. He could sell it and the kernel would have to be renamed to something else if the new owner of the Linux TM did not want it to be used on the linux kernel.