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Microsoft's tactics against GNU/Linux have not changed much in two decades, they're just framed differently, nowadays the attacks are masqueraded as friendship and proxies are used more than before. So as a fresh look at how these established tactics are used currently to attack Free Software, a guest poster at TechRights has summarized them in a ten-chapter handbook, aptly named A Handbook for Destroying the Free Software Movement. The first two chapters cover what Microsoft is now doing through GitHub, licensing, Azure, Visual Studio, Vista10, and its other components foisted on developers. Other chapters cover manipulation of media coverage, OEM lock-in, use of attack proxies, and software patents. Most of all, these tactics have stayed true to the plans outlined over 20 years ago in the Halloween Documents.
- Introduction
- Chapter 01: Know your enemies– Act like a friend
- Chapter 02: Work with the system– Use OEMs and your legal team
- Chapter 03: Playing the victim– Show the world that too much freedom hurts development
- Chapter 04: You get what you pay for– Getting skeptics to work for you
- Chapter 05: Open Source Judo– How to bribe the moderates to your side
- Chapter 06: Damning with faint praise– Take the right examples of free software and exploit them for everything
- Chapter 07: Patent War– Use low-quality patents to prove that all software rips off your company
- Chapter 08: A foot in the door– how to train sympathetic developers and infiltrate other projects
- Chapter 09: Ownership through Branding– Change the names, and change the world
- Chapter 10: Moving forward– Getting the best results from Open source with your monopoly
It's written a bit tongue in cheek from Microsoft's perspective. Some material is drawn from Comes v Microsoft (aka The Iowa Case) and, as mentioned, the leaked internal memos known as the Halloween Documents.
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 13 2019, @06:32AM
Facts don't require "belief". M$ paid from the beginning. Groklaw used to have a lot of coverage of SCO, including how M$ was bankrolling the lawsuit. However, Groklaw.net seems delisted from the search engines, so here is crappy old ZDNet article for you on how M$ used BayStar Capital to shunt money to SCO [zdnet.com] to be able to afford to keep the lawsuit going and going and going.
By the way, the SCO zombie suit won't die [theregister.co.uk]. It's still going even now. So SCO at least is not old news. It is still current and relevant.