Whenever a WinTroll is accused of being a paid shill for Microsoft, they
invariably rebuke this by claiming the same of Linux advocates, but that
claim is completely absurd.
The motivation of commercial entities like Microsoft, is to make money,
and only to make money ... end of story, but what is the motivation of
the FOSS community? If any of these FOSS people are shills ... who is
paying them, exactly? Who are they Astroturfing for?
If a commercial Linux company like Red Hat, were to pay a shill to
discredit the competition, would they send that shill to a *Linux*
newsgroup ... to promote community Linux distros like Debian?
Look at what is being promoted in this group; it's virtually all free
(and Free). *Who* exactly is going to *pay* us to promote something that
is free? Where is this money coming from? What financial return on their
"investment" do they get from the promotion of *free* software?
Given that the motivation of the FOSS community is to promote Freedom of
choice, Open Standards and Open Sources, how can any one of us be
accused of being "Astroturfers"? The idea is ridiculous.
But now let's look at the WinTrolls; what is *their* motivation? We've
read comments from the likes of DFS going on about bringing "balance" to
the group ... but for what purpose? Balance for whom? This is a Linux
group for Linux advocates; if you are here and you don't advocate Linux
then your motivation is suspicious. The only "imbalance" is in those who
think there should be someone standing over every Linux advocate,
correcting and rebuking every word they say. What kind of person would
want to do that? Wouldn't you need to be financially motivated before
you'd perform such a menial task ... and continue that task for days and
weeks and months on end?
So why are the WinTrolls here? If they are not paid Astroturfers then
what motivates them? For example; there are plenty of things in the
world that I don't like, but you won't see me on a Britney Spears
message forum raving about how crap she is; I have better (and more
positive) things to do with my time. If the WinTrolls are just ordinary
Windows users, then wouldn't it serve their purposes better if they
simply moved to a newsgroup or forum for Windows users? Why would they
even *want* to hang around here? You can see why their presence here
looks suspicious.
The WinTrolls motivation is obviously money, or more precisely the fear
of losing it, which would explain why people who are very obviously
shills are posting on behalf of Microsoft in this group. For every Free
application or OS that is adopted in industry or on the Desktop,
commercial software entities lose money, and companies like Microsoft
are not going to sit idly by and let that happen ... not without some
serious Astroturfing and carefully crafted FUD. Of course FUD and
Astroturfing are surely your only options for promotion, when your
product can't sell itself on its own merits (because it doesn't have
any). With a steady barrage of complaints and concerns being raised in
the public eye over certain commercial software titles and Operating
Systems, is it any wonder that the Astroturfers are frantically
scribbling away in the forums and newsgroups?
At the end of the day, which is more questionable; a Linux advocate
advocating Freedom in a Linux advocacy newsgroup, or a Windows user in
the same group trying to discredit it?
--
K.
http://slated.org - Slated, Rated & Blogged
.----
| Mastery of UNIX, like mastery of language, offers real freedom.
| The price of freedom is always dear, but there's no substitute.
| Personally, I'd rather pay for my freedom than live in a bitmapped,
| pop-up-happy dungeon like NT.
|
| -- Thomas Scoville, Performance Computing
`----
Fedora Core release 5 (Bordeaux) on sky, running kernel 2.6.16-1.2133_FC5
02:45:09 up 111 days, 3:01, 3 users, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00
|
|
