This year FOSDEM is supported by CodePlex (among other sponsors). CodePlex is Microsoft's vision/version of an "Open Source" project hub.

I don't know what strikes me more, that FOSDEM would accept dirty money or the realisation that Microsoft has completely (or so it seems) changed their minds about open source.

It was only in 2008, before Bill Gates retired from Microsoft that he said such things like:

"there is this thing called the GPL, which we disagree with."

[Open source creates a license] "so that nobody can ever improve the software,"

It still seems difficult for MS to integrate the term "open source" completely, it's all over the CodePlex website, but on the FOSDEM page there is a link to www.microsoft.com/opensource which redirects to www.microsoft.com/en-us/openness/default.aspx. It's as if it's too much too soon to have the term "opensource" in a microsoft url. : ]

In the end I guess one could say that Microsoft is a better place without Bill Gates. Maybe Apple will soon follow .. HAHAHAHHAHA!!

Not even one month after Microsoft killed bought Skype bugs and such have started to pour all over their status site. People can't log in, problems with software that wont install/uninstall properly, can't call numbers in certain countries (depending on the weather), issues when trying to reset a password, etc etc...

You can check Skype's status on the site heartbeat.skype.com. I checked for each month over the last year, most of the issues they have had are related to payments and such, especially around December for some reason an issue with MasterCard... strange..

The past 2 months are really bad..

• June 2011
• May 2011

Microsoft has purchased Skype. Now I'm wondering what is going to happen to this software. I know its never been Free Software, however in it's early days it was directly available for GNU/Linux at a time where most other software vendors would not consider platforms other than windows and macos. Another thing is that I have to admit that it does work and it works well.

So what will happen next ? I predict they will first drop the GNU/Linux version. Then they will of course drop the p2p system and prefer a centralised method that will make it less efficient... Good side is that maybe more work, technical and promotional, might go into XMPP + Jingle (Jabber) and that would be cool. In the meantime, brb need to delete an account.

I have been receiving some spam from authenticated hotmail users lately, so I thought it could be useful to report it to them. Remembering some of the Microsoft logic I decided to use the Bing search engine to find out what kind of process they may have set up for the common people to use. Of course I did this because they do not respond to the recommended "abuse@domain.tld" addresses, they are above that sort of thing anyway.

I finally found this very informative page on how to report spam to hotmail and I think "what if I click the link titled How to report abusive e-mail with full headers to MSN?". So I do just that, and guess what, it's a link to a a page titled Dealing with Pornography Online, and the page does not even contain any information on how to deal with porn online... . It's the same for the link to the page that is supposed to explain how to identify if the mail has been sent using their systems. It's hopeless.

It seems I spoke to soon, they have taken note of my email, however their auto replies have been blocked because the ACK emails are sent from misconfigured SMTP servers:

I of course set up some stuff to at least be able to see where this goes.. .. I will update this article when they send the actual response.