Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Sneaking around the open source door...Microsoft


Oh man, this is rich.

Microsoft apparently tried to pay a blogger to "revise" some content on an article on Wikipedia. HAHAHAHAHA! For those who don't know, Wikipedia is open to all Internet users (for the most part) who wish to contribute to various online articles. The content ranges from everything. It's awesome, really. You can find out all kinds of information on the site, and while some of it should be taken with a grain of salt, if you want to find out what happened to that kid in Disney's first live action film, The Black Stallion, you can bet your tokhes you can find it on Wikipedia.

The Wikipedia staff like to keep the content devoid of conflict of interest, so when Microsoft tried to pay someone to revise the various articles (which contain content related to open source document management which Microsoft's 'pay-me-for-everything' approach doesn't tolerate) it's considered bad form.

The reason why is explored in an article on sfgate:

"Microsoft acknowledged it had approached the writer and offered to pay him for the time it would take to correct what the company was sure were inaccuracies in Wikipedia articles on an open-source document standard and a rival format put forward by Microsoft.

Spokeswoman Catherine Brooker said she believed the articles were heavily written by people at IBM Corp., which is a big supporter of the open-source standard. IBM did not immediately respond to a request for comment."

So at the sideshow, I guess that could read as:

This is for my mental and my momma that I cried on
Microsoft motherfuckers let bygones be bygones
But since I'm Mack'intosh, I'ma double click your icons
The Coup, Steal This Album
"Me and Jesus the Pimp in a '79 Granada Last Night"

No? I guess it'd be more appropriate if Boots was rappin about IBM instead of Apple.

Anywho, the article on Wikipedia is about OpenDocument or ODF, short for the OASIS Open Document Format for Office Applications, is an open format for saving and exchanging electronic documents such as memos, reports, books, spreadsheets, charts, and presentations. This model doesn't exactly jive with Microsoft's pricing structure and proprietary formats, so it would seem that they wanted to plant some kind of "two-thumbs down" piece.

Oh yeah, Vista is also launching this month. You can buy a limited edition copy of the OS on amazon...it's signed by the multi-billionaire philanthropic small business crusher.

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