Some people just can't get along...

Summary: Response to smears of Matthew Garrett against people who stand up for software freedom, free speech, etc.

A few years ago one of our members, Ryan, anonymously but publicly accused Foxconn of screwing with Linux through defective BIOS-level design. This became a massive thing in the news and Foxconn scrambled to rectify the issue. Mr. Garrett, who openly spoke against Ryan later on, defended Microsoft's side rather than acknowledge that a problem did in fact exist. He also flamed the FSF at times. This was utterly disappointing.

Much to our regret, Garrett has recently been an apologist for Microsoft's anti-competitive UEFI scheme, motivating articles like this one:

Linux Security icon Red Hat and Fedora developer Matthew Garrett has detailed the "range of subtle changes" that have taken place since he began working on Secure Boot support. In a blog posting, Garrett gives an overview of the current implementation. He explains that the current approach, a shim bootloader, "cunningly called 'Shim'", contains a public key under their own control and is signed by Microsoft. The shim will only boot binaries signed with the public key and allows the developers to build and sign all other binaries themselves without going back to Microsoft to get bootloaders or other components signed.

Now, it's bad enough that Garrett helps UEFI (Red Hat should have filed a formal complaint), but more recently we saw him using the "sexism" card against a notable Linux developer, former Linux Foundation CTO, and close colleague of Linus Torvalds. This reminds us of an ACCESS troll who used similar tactics against Stallman, also disclosing private E-mails in the process, as shown here.

Garrett had become a Microsoft apologist before he started personal insults against Free software proponents and notable Linux developers. He helps the embrace and extend endeavours at Microsoft (see some truths in this post about TypeScript), portraying opposition to it as the problem. Shame really.

It is worth noting, at least as a side note, that Phoronix too has exaggerated severity of bugs in Mr. Ts'o 'baby', ext4's code and the ext4 file system's reputation, twice even (see our daily links for details). Michael Larabel got accused of irresponsible journalism for that. We could probably go down the path of addressing file system and rape apologism allegations, but that would not be in the spirit of this Web site. One requires profound knowledge about file systems, whereas the other opens a large jar of worms. ⬆