Bruce Perens and the OSI board [LWN.net]

Bruce Perens and the OSI board

Posted Mar 24, 2008 20:05 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
In reply to: Bruce Perens and the OSI board by einstein
Parent article: Bruce Perens and the OSI board

Unless a person is willing to go ask a bunch of people who work at Microsoft about that.. that
person is only left with prebuilt decisions which are basically prejudice. 

There are over 100k Microsoft employees. In that number there are going to be people who want
Open source and people who do not. There will also be some number who are sadist, masochists,
and child molesters.. but that does not mean they all are. However, the human brain is built
to deal with large groups via prejudice (positive or negative.) It will try and label all of a
group as those they feel represents that group. 

Thus every Microsoft employee is Steve Ballmer and Bill Gates because they must be or they
wouldn't be Microsofties. And to people outside of Linux, every Linux person is some member
who they have seen on Zdnet or somewhere: Eric Raymond, Bill Perens, or these days Hans
Reiser. And if they aren't like that, they wouldn't/shouldn't use Linux.

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Bruce Perens and the OSI board

Posted Mar 24, 2008 22:38 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]

I have met lots of Microsoft people, and they are mostly perfectly nice folks. They do sometimes have to take orders. The ones that are corporate climbers can be more aggressive and enthusiastic about implementing those orders - even if there's some nasty stuff involved.

Bruce Perens and the OSI board

Posted Mar 24, 2008 23:20 UTC (Mon) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

Yes.. all people are told to follow orders at some point in time. Sometimes those orders come
from the people writing the checks, sometimes they are from the voices in ones head. Each
person gets to decide what ones they will follow, and some people are complete slime balls.
Every community gets them.. you have been vilified and threatened by some in the FLOSS
community. 

My main problem is that I find too mamy people using the Microsoft bogeyman the same way as
other 'bogeyman'. It gets an emotional reaction and turns off people's reasoning circuits and
turns on their partisan circuits. You don't get a reasoned debate about the merits of someone
after that has happened.

Bruce Perens and the OSI board

Posted Mar 24, 2008 23:33 UTC (Mon) by BrucePerens (subscriber, #2510) [Link]

you have been vilified and threatened by some in the FLOSS community.

Yes, but that was a long time ago, and nothing like it has happened lately. The guy who did it was eventually made to pay in a gruesome manner that I would not have wanted inflicted upon him: He was made fun of. For years.

Read this, please. I think it makes the point that MS thinks they really are at war. We really have to watch out for their trying to game the system, and warn folks when it happens.

Bruce

Bruce Perens and the OSI board

Posted Mar 25, 2008 20:00 UTC (Tue) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

I am not saying that the executives inside of Microsoft are not out to try and keep their
monopoly at all costs. I am saying is that the implication that everyone from Microsoft is
verboten is wrong. I say this from the fact that I still get the "Oh you worked at Red Hat,
aren't they the Microsoft of Linux trying to taking away the GPL from people?" 8 years after I
left. 

No amount of explaining ever changes it for them.. and every time someone starts complaining
about companies in Linux they come out and say that Red Hat is the worst of them, blah, blah,
blah. The same for people who are anti-Novell, anti-FSF,etc. Its just that Microsoft gets the
most angry villagers. You are sure to get a whole bunch of pitchforks, torches, and angry
emails by raising the spectre that Microsoft is going to control XYZ. Heck I remember when the
rumour that Red Hat was going to be bought by Microsoft how much hate email hit the servers...
first from the Red Hat haters, and the others who hate Microsoft and thus sure that we were
all in it.