Thomas “The Hammer” Vinje Abuses IGF

Association for Competitive Technology

Nov 15, 2007

#Open Standards

Thomas Vinje, the longtime legal hitman for anti-Microsoft front groups, used the forum of a United Nations conference on Internet Governance to try to re-launch a baseless campaign against Microsoft today. He urged government regulators to start new competition cases against Microsoft becaus of the growing use of Microsoft’s .NET technology in internet applications, some of which is coming at the expense of the Java technology his clients prefer.

It is truly abhorrent for Vinje to abuse a multi-stakeholder conference on such critical issues as access, education, privacy, and distance medicine to raise money for his second vacation home in Norway. If his complaint had any merit whatsoever, the leader of the project to create open source versions of .NET would not have publicly repudiated Vinje’s case.

Miguel de Icaza, who founded the Mono project (an open source version of Microsoft .NET development platform) and the Moonlight project (an open source version of Microsoft’s new Silverlight technology), read about Vinje’s complaints earlier this year and devoted an entire blog entry to explain why it was completely off-base.

Icaza argued that Vinje and the group he represents are:

“…not only shooting themselves in the foot, they are shooting all of our collective open source feet.”

Perhaps the lack of support he has received from the industry is why he is stooping so low as to shop for new supporters at IGF. At this point, it seems only a matter of time before Vinje launches his own commercials…"You deserve a lawyer that stays up nights thinking up new ways to regulate your competitors out of existence. Call Thomas "The Hammer" Vinje today!"

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