so?
so what? Anyone can buy a sponsored link at Google. If you pay them more for it than Microsoft did to link to say /. you get the advertising space.

That's open market, something some open source people seem to forget in their zealous fight to bar everything else...

so?
so what?,

I'm not calling them to be put to death. It's just slimey. Like say... buying a google ad that says (Insert jwently's real name here) and links to some S&M site.

so?
You may not be a zealot, but unfortunately with the abundance of so many zealots demanding that people who use microsoft products or say good things about microsoft, or point out problems in open source should be put to death make it very hard to figure out your true intentions. As you probably know there are so many cheap people out there attacking other people (even illegally DDoS attacks i.e.) because they think that they are the only good people who wants to save humanity and everybodyelse who disagrees with them are anti-Freedom or something like that. They are turning a good thing (open source, sharing) into a bad thing (like communists presuring everybody to accept their idealogy, threating to attack otherwise). That's probably why people don't like cheap jokes about Microsoft anymore.

so?
I hear you. Zealots are a thorn in the side.

I don't see the original post as a cheap joke though. More like sad commentary.

Feel free to point out sad commentary of the open source community. I think that's fair game too. I think most of us do aswell, I may have to re-examine that notion.