Microsoft censored a document that was presented to the United Nations’s World Summit on the Information Society, purging references to Free and Open Source Software. They did so by pressuring the drafting committee to remove references to the software and the movement, which threatens their business-model. Subsequently, Thomas Lutz, the Austrian Microsoft mouthpiece, has gone on record with several outright lies justifying his company’s cooking of the international political process:
“Increasingly, revenue is generated not by selling content and digital works, as they can be freely distributed at almost no cost, but by offering services on top of them. The success of the free software model is one example,” stated the original document, according to the FSFE.
But the final version of the document contains no reference to free software. “Increasingly, revenue is generated by offering services on top of contents,” states the final version of the document.
Thomas Lutz, the manager of public affairs at Microsoft Austria, asked for this section to be deleted as “it contains only a one-sided perspective on the ICT industry.”
“The rationale for this is, that the aim of free software is not to enable a healthy business on software but rather to make it even impossible to make any income on software as a commercial product,” he added.
(Thanks, Living Dead Girl!)