This past Friday a IT banking friend and I spoke at length about the upcoming Microsoft event prior to OSBC which is designed to encourage OSS companies to partner and win with Microsoft. The guys at Olliance have been trying to help Microsoft not be such incredible clowns about open source and this event seemed like a good idea. Nonetheless, I just couldn't convince myself to attend and in fact I was kind of ob This past Friday a IT banking friend and I spoke at length about the upcoming Microsoft event prior to OSBC which is designed to encourage OSS companies to partner and win with Microsoft. The guys at Olliance have been trying to help Microsoft not be such incredible clowns about open source and this event seemed like a good idea. Nonetheless, I just couldn’t convince myself to attend and in fact I was kind of obnoxious about the whole thing. My main issue was that I had zero trust that Microsoft was going to do right by me, my company or the community at large. This weekend I was proven 100% correct. Microsoft wants nothing more than to kill open source, and is clearly very threatened–far more than we have realized in the past. When I first saw Bill Hilf’s comments over the weekend (I fed them to Matt since I knew he would go for the throat) I figured it was just another ill-intentioned shot over the bow. Matt and I both thought that Bill had been misquoted, but then the Fortune article came out with the outlandish patent claims (I wonder if the patent for white space in a document is in the “burden”.This morning I started to think about what could be done to show Microsoft just what a bunch of sniveling brats the company has turned into; a flock of penguins at the event? some kind of butterfly vs. penguin ultimate fight? I decided that I am going to hold an unofficial/offical boycott of Microsoft and it’s bogus olive branch to open source at both OSBC and on the blog here. I encourage anyone attending or speaking at the event to cancel and I strongly suggest OSBC return the sponsorship funds from both Microsoft and Novell (sorry Matt!) Dear Microsoft, I reject your attempts at lulling open source companies into your axis of evil. I am constantly amazed at the new ways your company proves itself to be an enemy of freewill. I welcome the day when you are met with the irrelevance and downfall you deserve. See you in hell, -dave We’ll open up to anyone to wants to post about the Microsoft patent BS. The only rules: no foul language, spell-check and no anonymous posts. If you are interested send email to opensources@ infoworld.com. Open Source