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“I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

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Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#31

I thought this was going to be a Clippy joke, but the truth was much more disturbing. Why is Microsoft sharing this level of information (from a corporate account) with third parties?

Well I think we all know why. They make money from it. The question that’s more relevant is how many of you are going to cancel your Azure accounts and move to a different host after seeing this and will it lose MS enough money to stop the practice. I’m taking bets that not enough will at 50:1 odds.

It will definitely keep me avoiding marketplace offerings. All we do on Azure is spin up VMs / K8S deployments / Connections to on Prem.

The one time we tried to set up SendGrid "from the marketplace", it failed horribly.

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#32
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Marketplace quote is worth noting too: >A look at the terms for the Azure Marketplace throws up this sentence: "If you purchase or use a Marketplace Offering, we may share with the Publisher of such Offering your contact information and details about the transaction and your usage." So the publisher of something on their Marketplace gets some information. This doesn't seem 'that' weird (well the linked in…

You buy a dishwasher from Best Buy. They send your name and address to Maytag. You buy soap from Walmart. They send your name and address to Johnson & Johnson. You buy a sandwich at your local deli. They send your name and address to Boar’s Head. Cool?

I don't know if it is cool, but I wouldn't be surprised.

The idea that a AWS or Aszure market place with third parties involved is different than say my example, an App store with third parties seems like a good way to think about it.

I'm not justifying the policy, but I am noting the context isn't that different and how we should think about it.

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#33
post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you really think Ubuntu doesn't already have similar agreements with other cloud providers...? Azure is a big fish. If they managed to get that, they definitely got smaller ones.

Then time to move off Ubuntu? I’ve been a big fan of it for a long time but it seems my servers will be moving to a BSD sooner rather than later.

You could also just use Debian instead of Ubuntu.

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#34
post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You buy a dishwasher from Best Buy. They send your name and address to Maytag. You buy soap from Walmart. They send your name and address to Johnson & Johnson. You buy a sandwich at your local deli. They send your name and address to Boar’s Head. Cool?

I don't know if it is cool, but I wouldn't be surprised. The idea that a AWS or Aszure market place with third parties involved is different than say my example, an App store with third parties seems like a good way to think about it. I'm not justifying the policy, but I am noting the context isn't that different and how we should think about it.

That’s fair. I guess if Canonical is selling something directly by using Azure’s storefront that’s a different thing. Still, their response to this is pretty terrible.

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#35
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Marketplace quote is worth noting too: >A look at the terms for the Azure Marketplace throws up this sentence: "If you purchase or use a Marketplace Offering, we may share with the Publisher of such Offering your contact information and details about the transaction and your usage." So the publisher of something on their Marketplace gets some information. This doesn't seem 'that' weird (well the linked in…

You buy a dishwasher from Best Buy. They send your name and address to Maytag. You buy soap from Walmart. They send your name and address to Johnson & Johnson. You buy a sandwich at your local deli. They send your name and address to Boar’s Head. Cool?

Cool? no. The reality? Almost certainly.

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#36
post #8

The register article on this https://www.theregister.com/2021/02/11/microsoft_azure_ubunt... has responses from Canonical and MS, which shed a bit more light on the situation. The Canonical quote is the most illuminating :- "As per the Azure T&Cs, Microsoft shares with Canonical, the publisher of Ubuntu, the contact details of developers launching Ubuntu instances on Azure. These contact details are held in Canonical…

Wow. I just lost a whole lot of respect for Canonical. “If you read the document we expect nobody to read, you’d know that you sold your soul to us. We didn’t mean for you to find that out but one of our salespeople got overeager and tried to sell you your soul back. He will be reprimanded. Can we all forget about this real quick?”

This was my first response as well (it's not the data sharing that's the problem, it's that you noticed).

Thinking about it though, a lot of it is a question of surprise and unknowns. I would find this message to be a lot better - "We see that you've taken advantage of the Ubuntu image that Canonical provide in the Azure Marketplace. I am available to you for (etc.)".

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Then time to move off Ubuntu? I’ve been a big fan of it for a long time but it seems my servers will be moving to a BSD sooner rather than later.

You could also just use Debian instead of Ubuntu.

But systemd :). Honestly the main servers I am thinking of moving use zfs and zfs on FreeBSD is more of a first class citizen than on Linux.

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#39
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the Marketplace quote is worth noting too: >A look at the terms for the Azure Marketplace throws up this sentence: "If you purchase or use a Marketplace Offering, we may share with the Publisher of such Offering your contact information and details about the transaction and your usage." So the publisher of something on their Marketplace gets some information. This doesn't seem 'that' weird (well the linked in…

You buy a dishwasher from Best Buy. They send your name and address to Maytag. You buy soap from Walmart. They send your name and address to Johnson & Johnson. You buy a sandwich at your local deli. They send your name and address to Boar’s Head. Cool?

> You buy a dishwasher from Best Buy. They send your name and address to Maytag.

For warranty purposes of course

> You buy soap from Walmart. They send your name and address to Johnson & Johnson.

In case they need to recall the soap

> You buy a sandwich at your local deli. They send your name and address to Boar’s Head. Cool?

So you can get some cool Boar's Head swag!

Just kidding of course. We need much better data privacy protection.

Re: “I saw that you spun up an Ubuntu image in Azure”

#40
As someone who works in tech sales - the real bullshit here is that this is some right-out-of-college 22 y/o entry level sales person (SDR) who was likely told to to take this list and message everyone on linkedin 1x1.

The negative impact of this goes on his shoulders where the positive responses from this get passed off to someone else who is outside the blast radius.

Stuff like this is the norm when sales is viewed as an extension of marketing ("we need more leads") and not as a function that helps companies coordinate the evaluation and purchase of software ("we need to find out if this is the right fit for them") and the ones who pay the highest price are at the lowest levels when it's executives who are giving the orders.

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