Waiting for the Cylons
Sat, 28 Feb 2026
For forty years, the Cylons had been silent. To the citizens of the Twelve Colonies, the war was ancient history - a dark chapter taught in schools, but utterly disconnected from their modern, prosperous reality.
Against this backdrop of unprecedented peace, Admiral William Adama continued to enforce a strict, fiercely unpopular rule on the aging Battlestar Galactica: absolutely no networked computers. To the younger crew, the press, and the politicians, Adama was a paranoid dinosaur. He was an artifact of a bygone era, stubbornly clinging to an outmoded view of a world that had long since moved on.
For a modern free software advocate, looking at Microsoft today feels exactly like standing on the un-networked bridge of the Galactica.
Those of us who have been around long enough remember the First Cylon War. Throughout the 1990s and 2000s, Microsoft's posture toward free software was defined by overt, existential hostility. It was a war of survival, and the attacks weren't subtle. We saw the leaks of the Halloween Documents, which explicitly detailed Microsoft's internal strategies to disrupt and undermine. We watched their executives publicly brand the GPL a "cancer." We lived under the constant, looming shadow of software patents, wielded as a bludgeon to threaten and trap us.
But today, we're living in the armistice. The tune has drastically changed. The corporate messaging is plastered across the tech industry: "Microsoft Loves Open Source." They bought GitHub and became its top contributor. The overt patent threats have gone quiet.
Yet, if you listen closely to this modern diplomacy, there's a massive, glaring tell regarding their true motivations: Microsoft explicitly and constantly praises "open source," but they carefully, deliberately avoid ever talking about "software freedom."
That omission isn't an accident. "Open source" is a development methodology - a highly effective, profitable way to build and maintain software. "Software freedom" is a moral philosophy. Microsoft eagerly adopted the methodology because it served their bottom line, but they never adopted the ethics.
Which brings me back to the DRADIS console. When I look at the landscape today - the free software licenses, the corporate treaties, the sudden influx of goodwill from a historic enemy - the lingering question remains. Am I just an outmoded version of Adama for still looking over my shoulder?
Why the Cylons Stopped Attacking
So why did the attacks stop? Why did the empire that once called the GPL a "cancer" suddenly put down its weapons, embrace our community, and start publishing its own code as free software?
If you listen to the PR, it sounds like a corporate redemption arc. But looking at the board, the reality's far more pragmatic. It wasn't a moral awakening. The Cylons didn't suddenly develop a conscience, and Microsoft didn't suddenly realize the ethics of free software.
They stopped because they were losing a massive, existential war.
While Microsoft was busy trying to crush free software, the battlefield fundamentally shifted out from under them. The industry's future moved to "the cloud". And in the "cloud computing" space, Amazon (AWS) had become the dominant empire.
Almost overnight, Microsoft found itself in an unfamiliar position: the underdog. Their traditional tactics - locking people into proprietary, Windows-only, heavily patented environments - were failing spectacularly against the flexible, predominantly free software-based infrastructure that AWS offered. People were leaving in droves because Amazon gave them the tools they actually wanted to use.
Microsoft was bleeding relevance, and they needed a new strategy to survive. As industry observer Matt Asay pointed out, "open source is the weapon underdogs use to break a monopoly."
When you can no longer beat the dominant player with proprietary software, you embrace the community to undercut them. Microsoft's massive pivot wasn't a true peace treaty; it was a calculated flanking maneuver. By making their frameworks free, contributing to the free software movement, and suddenly playing nice with the community, they weren't surrendering to it; they were embracing it. They were weaponizing the "open source" methodology to recruit developers, hoping to use that goodwill to fight a much bigger enemy.
The Locked Patent Hammer
If we accept that this is a tactical maneuver rather than a philosophical awakening, we have to ask: why don't they use their massive patent portfolio to crush free software anyway?
The answer is mutually assured destruction. Attacking free software today would be corporate suicide.
Microsoft's entire strategy relies entirely on developer goodwill. They've spent years painstakingly building a narrative that they're the friendly, developer-centric alternative to Amazon Web Services' cold, calculating machine.
To maintain this narrative, they had to sign an armistice. In 2018, Microsoft joined the Open Invention Network (OIN), bringing tens of thousands of its patents into a defensive pool designed to "protect" us. They issued corporate patent promises assuring that they wouldn't sue us for building compliant software on ecosystems like .NET.
These agreements are the locks placed on the patent hammer. Microsoft keeps that hammer locked away because they know exactly what would happen if they ever took it out and started swinging it around at free software again. The backlash would be instantaneous and catastrophic. Years of carefully curated "Microsoft Loves Open Source" PR would vaporize overnight, and developers would immediately migrate their infrastructure back to AWS.
Right now, in this specific phase of "the cloud war", the risk of Microsoft filing a patent lawsuit against the free software community is effectively zero.
But this is where the Adama mindset kicks in. A locked hammer is still a hammer.
If you read the fine print of these armistice agreements, you see the escape hatches. A company can legally withdraw from the OIN with just 30 days' notice. Corporate "promises" are policy decisions, not irrevocable, binding freedoms like the GPL.
We're living in an illusion of safety, built entirely on current market conditions. The Cylons haven't dismantled their weapons; they've just turned the safeties on because firing them would damage their own ship. And history tells us that peace treaties only last exactly as long as they're strategically convenient.
Will We See the Basestars on the Horizon?
This brings us to the most dangerous question of all - the one that keeps the Adama mindset alive. We know why the Cylons put down their weapons. But what happens if they actually win?
What happens if "the cloud wars" end, AWS is defeated or marginalized, and Microsoft regains absolute, unchallenged dominance over the tech industry?
The moment they're no longer the underdog, the entire strategic calculus changes. The desperate need for developer goodwill, which is the very foundation of this current peace, vanishes. When you're the only game in town, you don't need to play nice. You dictate the terms.
If Microsoft reclaims that monopoly, its tone and attitude will inevitably shift. The armistice agreements that protect free software today will suddenly become strategic liabilities for a dominant empire. Corporate "promises" might be easily revised. The locks on the patent hammer, secured by a flimsy 30-day exit clause, might be quietly opened.
But if they do go Cylon again, what does a modern attack actually look like?
They learned from the First Cylon War. A barrage of direct patent lawsuits against free software is loud, messy, and instantly rallies the resistance. Today, the attack would be a Silent Fleet.
It would be a quiet enclosure of the ecosystem. Because they've spent years luring people in with the "Come here, we have Linux, we love it" trap, they already control the underlying infrastructure. The modern attack takes those foundations and gradually introduces proprietary extensions that work only on Azure or Windows - starving the free versions of their tools of crucial updates. In contrast, the proprietary versions get all the optimization.
They won't need to sue the free software community. They'll just slowly, quietly extinguish our software freedom by wrapping it in a proprietary web until we can't move.
Looking at the DRADIS
This brings us back to the Old Man and his un-networked ship.
To be clear, this isn't a manifesto to immediately purge every piece of Microsoft-backed code, avoid C#, etc. This isn't about declaring that using their free software tools today is strictly "good" or "bad."
It's simply about recognizing the board's reality.
There's a moment early on in Battlestar Galactica where a civilian teacher confronts Admiral Adama in the corridors of the ship. She's frustrated by his archaic rules, telling him that a computerized network would simply make it faster and easier for the teachers to be able to do their jobs. She accuses him of just being afraid of computers.
He apologizes for the inconvenience, but firmly declares, "I will not allow a networked computerized system to be placed on this ship while I'm in command."
To many, things like C# and .NET are exactly that integrated network.
Personally, I don't find C# or .NET technically interesting or appealing in the slightest. The pressure to use it doesn't come from its technical merits; it comes from the sheer gravity of its ecosystem. When a prgram written in C# is the only existing free software compiler for a language you want to use, the path of least resistance is to just install it and get to work.
But just because everyone else is eagerly wiring their ships together doesn't mean it's safe.
Adama didn't refuse to network the Galactica because he hated technology or progress. He refused because he remembered who the Cylons were. He understood that a prolonged period of quiet doesn't change the fundamental nature of an empire. He knew that the moment you sacrifice your systemic independence, you leave yourself entirely vulnerable to the whims of an entity that once tried to destroy you.
As I see people using their tools and happily embracing them, I have to ask myself: Am I just an outmoded version of Adama for still wondering about this? Is my skepticism just a relic of the First Cylon War, completely out of touch with this new era of corporate benevolence?
Maybe. But if the situation does change - if Microsoft wins "the cloud wars", sheds its underdog status, and the strategic necessity of playing nice evaporates - what happens next? Will the free software community notice the basestars assembling on the horizon in time to react?
Or have we grown so comfortable that Caprica will burn before we even realize the network's been compromised?
In the meantime, my DRADIS console is still scanning.