Y’all might remember the BadVista campaign started at the very end of 2006. It’s now officially dead what with the FSF turning their venom towards the runaway successes that are Windows 7 and the iPad. The old BV site, now strictly for nostalgic purposes, is worth more than a few chuckles.
My favorite is how they declared victory and yet, in the very next paragraph, attempt to redefine what “victory” means, since it’s clear that the BV campaign was not successful by any means.
When the last post was made, from January 2009, Vista’s market share was over 13%. 7 months later, Vista market share rose to over 22%, at its peak. Linux has not even been able to achieve a fraction of that market share in its 15+ years of existence and the FSF calls it a victory? I guess they have their own cute little definition of “victory” which is probably also a recursive acronym.
But it gets funnier still. Which distro were the BV boys trying to push? Why, gNewSense! Really? A distro that doesn’t even appear in the major list on distrowatch? If Linux has 1-2% market share, what does gNewSense have? 0.001%? Are you kidding me? This is a victory?
Let’s recap, shall we? The BV campaign attracted 7000 registered members, as opposed to 400 million Vista users at its peak. BV was unable to stop Vista from reaching over 13% as of the last update declaring victory. BV was unable to get Linux usage to rise over 3%, nor was it able to convince people (Linux users included) to adopt their distro of choice. And now MS has released a product which is overtaking Vista.
Victory indeed.
Comments
My favourite Loonism in this respect is the sneer that “Windows 7 is just a service pack for Vista.” This neatly avoids the facts:
(a) It isn’t
(b) Most people are grateful for service packs
(c) Ubuntu 9.10 is just a service pack for 9.04. Well, a disservice pack, really.
Ofc it is, I mean how else would Dr. Roy have figured Vista 7 otherwise?
No seriously, Vista 'failed’ in the eyes of the public, true. But certainly not because of the clown campaign of the FSF. Rather it was because the original RTM was somewhat buggy. Ok, this had to happen they rewrote like anything in Vista compared to XP. One could argue that both XP->Vista and Ubuntu 9.04->9.10 are 'sometimes’ accompagnated by failure. But the difference is, that Vista did actually provide a reason for it, they rewrote like everything from scratch and added lots of new features. I couldn’t tell what this 'revolution’ would be from Ubuntu 9.04 -> 9.10 ? Oh wait, I know, the new theme!
@ChrisTX
Ironically, it’s not Vista’s initial problems with bugs and drivers that the BV campaign targets. It’s the commercial nature of the OS and of MS itself! They couldn’t care less if an OS is buggy and lacks driver support – after all, they use Linux! They’re just riding on the bandwagon of negative Vista press and using it to further their own agenda, as always.
I mean, check out this gem of heavyweight crap:
“DRM is enforced by technological barriers. You try to do something, and your computer tells you that you can’t. To make this effective, your computer has to be constantly monitoring what you are doing. This constant monitoring uses computing power and memory, and is a large part of the reason why Microsoft is telling you that you have to buy new and more powerful hardware in order to run Vista. They want you to buy new hardware not because you need it, but because your computer needs it in order to be more effective at restricting what you do.”
If that’s not BS, then I’ve never seen it.
omg, badvista.org the mother of all fud. I’m not in the mood to read this sh** now, but I remember when vista came out they had a propaganda-pdf which you could print out. There have been several posted in my institute.
I also like the particular choice of the Icon. It is very similar to the “Nazis raus” icon; actually all the did was replacing the swastika by the Windows logo. I don’t think that’s a coincidence.
“Ironically, it’s not Vista’s initial problems with bugs and drivers that the BV campaign targets. It’s the commercial nature of the OS and of MS itself!”
Of course, but that doesn’t stop the FSF to claim that the 'commercial nature’ of Windows is the reason why people didn’t want it, does it?
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