Another Reason No To Like M$?

[lost_in_space]

I came across this in Wikipedia. Thought I'd share. These are excerpts.

"The Alexis de Tocqueville Institution (not "institute;" abbreviated AdTI) is a Washington, D.C.-based right-wing commercial think-tank and consultancy that produces reports at the behest of its sponsors.

The AdTI rose to notoriety with a controversial book (funded by Microsoft) that claimed that Linus Torvalds, creator of Linux, had stolen source code from Professor Andrew Tanenbaum.

This claim has been repeatedly refuted by Professor Andrew Tanenbaum and by independent source code analysis. It has also published reports attacking Linux and open source software. Tanenbaum, an operating systems theorist, produced an account of how the institution wrote a book about the history of Unix. [1].

Microsoft has been one of the Institution's backers for five years, although a Microsoft spokesman said they had not funded any specific research [2]. Microsoft funds several think tanks, including the American Enterprise Institute, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, the Heritage Foundation and the Cato Institute. [3] [4]

AdTI is a member organization of the Cooler Heads Coalition which asserts that the theory of global warming is a myth...

The AdTI is known for publishing a series of studies beginning in 2002 on the theme of intellectual property in the software industry. The Institution's reputation among free software advocates suffered when it emerged that it had obtained funding from Microsoft concurrent with authoring Opening the Open Source Debate (June 2002), a report critical of Microsoft's open-source rivals. This report claimed that open source software was inherently less secure than proprietary software and hence a particular target for terrorists."

To quote Sideshow Bob "I mean, really"....

[cdnvic]

Use what works for you and let others worry about the political silliness running in the background.