Some Azure ads, please?

I found this email too funny not to share, it was sent using the contact form of the Romanian Fedora community website and is genuine, from a real advertising agency (who does work for Microsoft), by a real person (with whom I share some common "friends" on social networks).

Translated in English, it says:

Publicity offer request

Good day,

My name is [redacted] and I represent the digital media agency having Microsoft as a client. We wish to have a banner ad for Microsoft on your site, running for a month, 15 June - 15 July.

Please tell if this is possible, which banner format do you have available and what is the cost.
It would be appreciated if you can help with those details today, as soon as possible.

Thank you and waiting for your feedback"

When I stopped laughing, I decided to investigate further and learn if is a naive person, lacking basic clues about technology, FOSS and even her client or a sneaky maneuver from Microsoft trying to corrupt communities. I replied, expressing my genuine curiosity to learn why the website of a Free Software community and Linux distro would be a good place for Microsoft advertising and the answer was "we are promoting a new product, Microsoft Azure, which is intended for programmers and your website is in our target audience" (again, translation mine). I had to lecture again about how Fedora is in both ideological and technical competition with Microsoft and how we can promote only products released under a Free license (preferably GPL) and also free from patents.

Now my curiosity is, starting 15 June, how many FOSS communities (if any), in the country and outside it, will run an Azure banner ad.

Update: it looks like our Ubuntu friends have their share of fun too.

L.O.A.D.

It seems like the LOAD (standing for Linux Open Alternative Day[s]) event is becoming smaller each year, my guess is that may be related to the perceived focus change from Linux as an alternative to the establishment to alternatives to Linux (Microsoft products, antivirus solutions for Windows and such). Anyway, what I wanted to say about it was I may understand to some degree Microsoft being there with presentations and as a sponsor (actually I don't, but this talk is for another day), I may understand almost all talks being about cloud (when the clouds run Linux), I may understand the antivirus presence (when they have Linux server products), I may even understand the opening saying "we move to the cloud, where is not important what runs on the servers, open or proprietary" (no, I don't), but FFS, I can't understand why, at such a Linux event, the laptop for presentations runs Windows 7.

Actually there was a reason for the Windows laptop: one of the Microsoft guys needed it for Hyper-V and Azure demos... To be honest, at one of the presentation the laptop was changed punctually with... a Mac running OS X. It was needed for a Samba 4 demo with Windows clients running on virtual machines (and I am not sure, maybe a Linux server in another VM).

A few points which drew my attention:

• Microsoft is preparing to offer paid support for Linux distros running on their Azure service (most likely CentOS, openSUSE and Ubuntu);
• Avast is a very popular antivirus for Windows, their Linux version is 3 years old, but they are working on a new Linux version. The version after that may have also a management console. Anyway, the "Linux" word was said only after questions from the audience;
• Demotix is a citizen journalism platform and photo agency, it is owned by Corbis, which in turn is owned privately by Bill Gates (his only owned business right now). It runs on Drupal, MariaDB and Linux.

Golden wallpaper

I apologize for doing it again so soon, I couldn't keep myself from making this photo in a desktop wallpaper (actually, if the access was not forbidden on that small island, I would probably took dozens of pics in that magic light).

Fields wallpapers

Is only a couple of weeks since I posted some wallpaper-ready photos, but the spring around is very generous with images, so while I keep myself busy with content on the photography blog, some images are very tempting as desktop wallpapers. Here are some: