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Concern Trolls and Free Speech Nazis
,----[ Quote ]
| Weâve seen a huge increase in âconcern trollsâ
| in the FLOSS arena, mainly corporate-backed
| âvocal membersâ feigning wide-eyed innocence
| when called out on attempts to corrupt,
| undermine and discredit Free Software. Their
| favorite flavor of political correctness is to
| take great offense at the very suggestion that
| Free Software might be preferable in some way
| to closed and proprietary software, painting
| both the opinion and the speaker thereof a cad
| of the highest order for bringing up things
| like ethics or morality in mixed company!
|
| Granted, the vast majority of âconcern trollsâ
| are cretins with corn-pone opinions, to whom
| honest discourse is a term without meaning or
| import, but I still believe it useful to point
| out their lies and demagoguery if for nothing
| more than illustrating the clay feet of their
| rhetorical statue.
|
| Whatâs funny to me is that there arenât any
| âfree speech nazisâ on the other end of the
| pole. Sure, I see a lot of attempts by the
| above âconcern trollsâ to paint certain Free
| Software figures as ânazisâ (or even more vile
| characterizations), but even concern-troll-
| favorite-target-RMS is constant in his
| recognition of individual right to chose the
| software they use, even when under the most
| tasteless personal attacks and
| misrepresentation of his position.
|
| In fact, even when the concern trolls go so far
| as to organize slanderous campaigns chock full
| of good old fashioned mud-slinging personal
| attacks, I have yet to hear the target cry
| âcensorshipâ (I have seen the trolls play the
| âthis censorship is not actually censorshipâ in
| advance though, in what I consider the pathetic
| gasps of a guilty conscience writ exceedingly
| small).
|
| Pointing of fingers
|
| To be fair (and without naming names) I am
| aware couple of presentations / personalities
| in the FLOSS universe that I would personally
| classify as taking the âoffensive for the sake
| of being offensiveâ road and then pretending
| any objection to the offense is âPC run amokâ â
| these people one could group in the âfree
| speech naziâ group, but they are not Free
| Software advocates.
`----
http://www.the-source.com/2010/07/concern-trolls-and-free-speech-nazis/
Recent:
A New Rant â Microsoft, Ubuntu, Canonical, Novell, and Mono
,----[ Quote ]
| I was reading Goblinâs latest post at
| OpenBytes. He had some interesting points,
| but I thought he was missing a few things. At
| point I hit four paragraphs in response, I
| decided to answer him here instead, because I
| kept on thinking of more things to say.
| Goblinâs concern is that Canonical, the
| company behind the Ubuntu family of GNU/Linux
| operating systems, is bringing out a new
| product called Ubuntu One, and they are going
| to make a Windows version as well as a Linux
| version.
|
| Goblinâs is right â Canonical seems to be
| moving closer to Microsoft, both in supplying
| a Windows version of Ubuntu One, and because
| of Canonicalâs new search deal with Yahoo.
| Since Yahoo has a search deal with
| Microsoft, Canonical is in effect delivering
| Microsoft Bing search results to GNU/Linux
| users.
|
| [...]
|
| Yes, Microsoft is trying to use itâs monopoly
| to force everyone else out of the market.
| Theyâve bought several companies recently who
| produced products for multiple operating
| systems, and then proceeded to make them
| Windows only. So sorry, we donât make a Unix
| version anymoreâ The only problem with this
| sort of action, is that those customers who
| used the Unix version now know what Microsoft
| thinks of their business. Nothing. So they
| arenât going to buy more Microsoft product.
| Thereâs no gain for Microsoft. Oh, strictly
| Microsoft shops might buy a bit more, but
| they are becoming rarer, as the advantages of
| GNU/Linux servers become more evident.
|
| [...]
|
| Microsoft can limit competition in the
| marketplace for a short period of time only.
| This combined with the damage that Microsoft
| has done to their brand by releasing failures
| like Windows Vista, which limits the amount
| of money they can spend on monopolistic
| practises means that we are probably only
| five-ten years from seeing a collapse of the
| company, driven partly by their own
| incompetence, and partly by the negative
| image that the Microsoft brand has gained
| over the last five years. For example Novell
| made a deal with Microsoft, and Microsoftâs
| bad reputation has affected Novellâs
| reputation, to the point where a lot of
| techs, even those who had used a lot of
| Novell in the past, will not recommend Novell
| products anymore. Another example is the
| migration under way from Yahoo to Google,
| because of Yahooâs pending deal with
| Microsoft.
|
| [...]
|
| But Gnome may no longer matter. There are
| rumours around the net about a âNew Desktop
| Foundation.â The rumour I heard was that this
| would be a fork of the Gnome desktop,
| removing all Mono and C# packages. There are
| enough people who are upset at Ubuntu, Gnome,
| and Miguel de Icaza (one of the founders of
| Gnome, and founder of the Mono project, and a
| Microsoft MVP) that it could possibly be
| true. I was also told that the use of âNewâ
| was deliberate, since in English the
| pronunciation is the same as the
| pronunciation of âGnuâ.
`----
http://madhatter.ca/?p=241
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