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Microsoft's 800-pound gorilla

Posted by lcafiero on · 5 comments
Larry the Free Software Guy; By Larry Cafiero 		Mail this story
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There's an 800-pound gorilla -- not Steve Ballmer, the other one -- sitting in the middle of Microsoft's living room. With their most recent SEC 10-K filing in which they write off Linux as a threat with the stroke of a pen, Microsoft has done the regulatory and marketplace equivalent of sticking their fingers in their ears, closing their eyes and shouting, “La, la, la — I can’t hear you.” While Microsoft tells federal regulators Linux is no longer a threat -- echoed by fanboys and fangirls everywhere -- back on the planet Earth, the reality is much different.

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Comments (5)

Fettoosh ·
Could it be that MS no longer considers FOSS to be an enemy?

Or, Did it finally figure out that mentioning Linux as a competitor is counter productive since it would give Linux more publicity?

Never know, it is a strange and sleety operator.

jdixon ·
> Could it be that MS no longer considers FOSS to be an enemy?

No. Not as long as Ballmer is CEO.
gus3 ·
Ballmer's CEO position is predicated on having enemies. If all M$'s enemies vanished in one minute, he'd have to make some more to avoid paralyzing confusion.
Fettoosh ·
Quoting:No. Not as long as Ballmer is CEO.


I believe one commentator here on Lxer tried to convince us that Linux is not the enemy, VMWare is.

Could it be that MS is trying to create such perception?

lcafiero Story submitter ·
Fettoosh wrote:Could it be that MS no longer considers FOSS to be an enemy?


I'm not so sure. Unless you're a stockbroker, stock buyer, attorney or have any other financial interest in Microsoft (or any other company for that matter), a corporation's 10-K report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission is hardly a page turner. In fact, it's a real snoozer, from a literary standpoint. For the most part, much of what is in the 10-K can be found in the annual business report, but not always. Therefore I don't think it's Microsoft waving a "white flag," nor do I think it's Microsoft playing nice.

Instinctively, my immediate thought is that someone in the higher echelons of the Microsoft business/legal department probably drafted an eloquent memo saying, "Look, we have bigger threats than Linux," especially if you compare the 2008 10-K statement about Linux to the one submitted in 2011 (and, to be fair, I haven't read the 2009 or 2010 10-K reports since, as I mentioned in the previous paragraph, I am not in the lineup of people who would be remotely interested in this sort of thing). Possibly, they may have gotten tired of much of the text and wanted to jazz it up. Who knows?

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