Apparently some suspect a trap.

In case you haven’t seen it, the Borg announced today it would do all sorts of things to play nice with open source. This is nothing new — Microsoft has been doing this Eddie Haskell “interoperability” shtick for a while now — but today’s announcement is significant for one reason, and it’s simply this: The Borg are no longer scared of the freetards, and no longer view them as a threat. Marketwatch has a story here. Money quote in that story comes from noted freetard Matt Asay: “It’s a good indication of Microsoft’s self-confidence that it feels it can open up what effectively are its crown jewels and not lobotomize the company at the same time.”

Self-confidence? I’ll say. Like, for the past nine months Microsoft has been boasting in private about IDC numbers showing Linux growth stalling and even declining; those IDC numbers show Windows actually growing at a faster rate than Linux in the server space, despite being on a bigger base.

Red Hat, the single company freetards always point to when they want to prove that open source can make money, has turned into an inept clusterfuck, with nothing but bluster and bravado and a deluded belief that they’re actually a thorn in Microsoft’s paw. Bottom line: they’re the new Borland. They’re 15 years old and have been publicly traded since 1999 and last year they did all of $400 million a year in sales. Microsoft does more than $1 billion a week. That’s right. Red Hat’s entire fiscal year is a good three days for Microsoft. Last quarter the Borg added $2.6 billion in revenues — that’s six entire Red Hats. In a quarter.

Now Red Hat is being run by a former Delta Airlines exec. And its SG&A is growing significantly faster than its top line. I’m no good with numbers but my friends who are explain it this way: Now that the Unix market has been decimated and the low-hanging fruit has all been plucked, the boys in North Carolina are having to work a heck of a lot harder to take down deals. Hence the boost in SG&A spending. That’s also why all the smart sales guys bailed out of the Hat two years ago, having made all the easy money.

Who else is out there to create a threat to the Borg? Novell is outright pwned. MySQL has vanished into the bowels of Sun, never to be seen or heard from again. Ubuntu? Look, it’s nice that amateurs can play at making operating systems. From what I’m told Gutsy Gibbon fixed some of the problems in Feisty Fawn. Hardy Heron and Indignant Iguana will fix a few more. Wake me up when they get to Zesty Zebra. By then maybe they’ll have pried 3% market share out of the Beastmaster’s hide.

Am I missing someone? Oh, SugarCRM. Okay, fair enough, a huge threat to Microsoft’s booming CRM software business. Ahem. PHP and some other scripting languages may be a nuisance but there’s no big single monolithic threat out there. SpikeSource? I seem to recall lots of hype about them when they were launched a few years ago but jeez lately things have been a little, um, quiet over there.

Face it, kids. I know it sucks to hear this, but .NET is winning. It is. I’m sorry. You know how you can tell? Ask all the open-source application makers which stack they run on most. Er … it’s not LAMP. And it’s not J2EE. It’s .NET.

So of course the Borg is more than happy to play nice with the freetards who are making apps that run on top of .NET. Why not? If it pulls more sales of Microsoft’s stack, and if it saves money for customers which they can in turn spend on yet more Borgware, where’s the hurt?

It’s not like the Borg got religion and no longer thinks open source is a cancer. They still think it’s a cancer. They’ve just figured out a way to make money on cancer.

Plus, they want to look like sweethearts to the Euros.

Open source has ridden the classic Gartner hype cycle. Three years ago was the “peak of inflated expectations,” and VCs would fund anything with “open source” in its name or business plan. Now the cycle has moved on to the “trough of disillusionment.” Reality has set in. Nobody is making money. They’re in the Slough of Despond.

Don’t believe me? Try going out and raising VC for an open-source startup that will compete directly with Microsoft. My guess is you won’t even get a stack of pancakes at Buck’s.

Also worth noting: While open-source is great in many ways, remember that the single biggest tech phenomenon of the past decade has been an entirely closed and proprietary system which was launched in 2001 (two years after Red Hat had already gone public) and which last quarter produced $4.8 billion in sales. It’s called iTunes and iPod. Have you heard of it?

Really, it’s getting out of hand. He flew into Greece today and went straight to the Vikos Gorge. Folks from FSF Europe are trying to stop him but he won’t listen. Damn you, RMS! Get a grip, man!

Friends of free software guru Richard M. Stallman are starting to get worried about his increasingly erratic behavior. He’s been taking off on trips and not telling anyone where he is; he’ll be gone for weeks at a time. Then there was his Craigslist ad seeking a girlfriend, and then the hip-hop dancing on the lawn at MIT. Now this photo has just surfaced on Stallman’s personal web site showing him in Lima, Peru doing bike tricks at one of those concrete rollerblading ramp places. (Our art director, Jason, spotted it.) Stallman was in Lima to give a talk about free software at some socialist university. Afterward he hit the skate park. Apparently he’s going through some huge mid-life crisis, getting all into extreme sports like bungee-jumping and skydiving.

All I can say is, do what you need to do, Stallman. But you really should be wearing a helmet. I’m just saying. Peace out.

See here. Noted freetard Matt Asay says Linus was out of his mind when he said recently that OS X was “utter crap” compared to Linux. Money quote: “I guess when you’re famous you can say inane things and get away with it. Yes, Linux does some things better than Mac OS X and Microsoft’s Windows Vista on the desktop (security, maybe), but let’s be honest: the Linux desktop is ‘utter crap’ compared to either OS X or Windows when it comes to the thing that matters most: usability. If normal people can’t use it, it just doesn’t matter how beautifully architected it is. Sorry, Linus. Everyone has to be wrong sometimes. This is your turn to shine.”

Much love, Matt Asay. Prepare to be called a shill by your fellow freetards.

Honestly, the balls on this guy. See here. Money quote: “To Microsoft and Apple it’s a way to control the whole environment … to force people to upgrade their applications and hardware.” He says that like it’s a bad thing. Man oh man.

Yes, dear friends, it’s our own beloved Richard M. Stallman, the king of all freetards, doing that Soulja Boy dance on what looks like the MIT campus in Cambridge, Mass. Go, RMS! Superman dat ho! It appears that RMS has some free time on his hands these days now that GPLv3 is finished, and so he’s out doing dance classes and trying to meet the ladies. Not sure if he knows what the phrase “Superman a ho” actually means. Much love to Larry for the link.

It’s Richard M. Stallman showing off his “fluent” Spanish and his singing abilities, crooning his original composition, The Free Software Song. We figured since Stallman is placing ads on Craiglist maybe we could help him out a bit.

Is this a hoax? It’s been rocketing all over the Internet today — a personal ad by Richard M. Stallman on Craigslist. See here. It looks real, except he fails to mention some of his quirks — like eating his own hair and sticking flowers up his nose and calling it “nose sex.” Then again, the guy lives in Cambridge, where this sort of behavior is not unheard of. Much love to the many tipsters who sent this in today. Free fake iPhone to anyone who responds to the ad and gets a response from RMS.

His name is Dennis O’Reilly and he says here on CNET that he’s had it with Windows and this year he’s going to dump Microsoft and switch to Ubuntu Linux because it “has a reputation for being complete, well supported, and easy to use.” But then he admits that he’s made this momentous decision purely based on articles he’s read and some stuff on Wikipedia. Money quote: “I know the OS only by reputation, however.”

Um, yeah. Well I’m sure Linux will be just as easy to use as all those articles say. What could possibly go wrong?

Question: Have you ever used one of those online dating services, like Match.com, where you meet people based on that one really good-looking photo? Do they ever actually look like that photo? Right. Well good luck with your desktop migration, Dennis O’Reilly. Let us know how that works out, you friggin n00b. My guess is the freetardation will wear off and we’ll be seeing you at an Apple store shopping for an iMac by about, oh, I don’t know. March? We’ll be waiting for you.