Techrights

A Cost-Free Bribe From Microsoft

Posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 02, 2024

Mr. Stenberg (Curl) should be smart enough not to become Microsoft's jester

Daniel Stenberg is not dumb, but he seems rather gullible or unprincipled, maybe unscrupulous. I spoke to him before; it's hard to convince him Microsoft is a problem.

Recently he had mild altercations with Microsoft. Windows was containing unsafe versions of Curl and Microsoft pissed him off for several other reasons. Weeks ago he wrote about "slow TCP connect on Windows" and last year he wrote about deleting system32\curl.exe (there was a more recent scandal of this kind).

It keeps happening. Take a hint.

I've long urged him to delete (as in quit, migrate away from) GitHub and he wrote a long blog post about it. Microsoft was bribing him with swag and fake 'awards' on top of the fake 'free' hosting. GAFAM should never be a badge of honour but a sign of sellout, greed etc. They hope they can swim with the shark, hanging where the big money is, and then somehow stay afloat. GAFAM imposes a CoC and often discards the founders, taking over their projects through committees and boards manned by their own staff.

Watch out, Mr. Stenberg...

If that's not bad enough, and after his bashing of the unknown, he is now boasting that aiding the thugs makes one a "professional".

Instead of doing the right thing, Microsoft does what it's accustomed to - bribe critics. Daniel Stenberg is targeted by the criminals from Microsoft and he falls for it, as usual. To be clear, "MVP" is not a prize. In fact, it is a cost-free bribe that lets Microsoft silence you, as some MVPs recently explained (Microsoft gave that to our Ryan too... way back in the 90s).

As an associate put it, "Daniel is still in Microsoft GitHub too and digging in deeper [now it'll be harder for him to criticise Microsoft]..."

"I think he is losing sight of the big picture or has lost it already."

"So it's not just that he's selling out, he's selling out for less than an old song" (MVP)

He's actively using Microsoft (LinkedIn):

And boasts like this:

Enjoy Microsoft... maybe people can enjoy GNU's wget (Chelsea Manning did) instead of Curl, which is hosted and controlled by Microsoft and by extension the NSA. █