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Waiting for the Cylons
For forty years, the Cylons had been silent. To the citizens of the Twelve Colonies, the war was ancient history - a dark chapter taught in schools, but utterly disconnected from their modern, prosperous reality.
Against this backdrop of unprecedented peace, Admiral William Adama continued to enforce a strict, fiercely unpopular rule on the aging Battlestar Galactica: absolutely no networked computers. To the younger crew, the press, and the politicians, Adama was a paranoid dinosaur. He was an artifact of a bygone era, stubbornly clinging to an outmoded view of a world that had long since moved on.
For a modern free software advocate, looking at Microsoft today feels exactly like standing on the un-networked bridge of the Galactica.
Those of us who have been around long enough remember the First Cylon War. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Microsoft's posture toward free software was defined by overt, existential hostility. It was a war of survival, and the attacks weren't subtle. We saw the leaks of the Halloween Documents, which explicitly detailed Microsoft's internal strategies to disrupt and undermine. We watched their executives publicly brand the GPL a "cancer." We lived under the constant, looming shadow of software patents, wielded as a bludgeon to threaten and trap us.