Jim Zemlin, Microsoft and GitHub (when photo ops tell a story)

Summary: There's a profoundly disturbing pattern; in a rush for influence and money the Linux Foundation inadvertently (or worse -- consciously and deliberately) paved the way to Microsoft's more modern version of Embrace, Extend, Extinguish (EEE)

TECHRIGHTS has an ongoing series/book about how Free software is nowadays coming under attack -- an attack that's masqueraded as friendship. We've already published about half of it. Here it is for those who've missed it:

• Introduction: Cover and quick Introduction [PDF]



• Chapter 1: Know your enemies-- Act like a friend [PDF]



• Chapter 2: Work with the system-- Use OEMs and your legal team [PDF]



• Chapter 3: Playing the victim-- Show the world that too much freedom hurts development [PDF]



• Chapter 4: You get what you pay for-- Getting skeptics to work for you [PDF]



• Chapter 5: Open Source Judo-- How to bribe the moderates to your side [PDF]



• Chapter 6: Damning with faint praise-- Take the right examples of free software and exploit them for everything [PDF]

This mini-book is expected to be completed by month's end. The first two chapters directly allude to what Microsoft is now doing through GitHub. It's about licensing, it's about Azure, it is about Visual Studio, Vista 10 and so on. Microsoft just wants to forcibly 'buy back' developers.

"Microsoft just wants to forcibly 'buy back' developers."We've meanwhile also published some exclusive articles about the Linux Foundation, which we intend to cover very closely throughout this weekend. There's a great deal of interest in it and all the feedback we receive is overwhelmingly positive.

People do not believe Microsoft. The PR is, with few exceptions here and there, ineffective. Linux Foundation staff and contractors participated in this PR for years, but that's a story for another day/article. Those who participate in this PR even get arrested. Microsoft's PR/marketing staff must be laughing really hard whenever it sees people saying things like "new Microsoft" or "but it's Open Source" and "Microsoft loves Linux"...

"People do not believe Microsoft. The PR is, with few exceptions here and there, ineffective.""The PR campaign worked," says Microsoft to itself, "now they repeat our lies for us!"

But how many people actually believe this nonsense? Among actual GNU/Linux users, from what we've able to gather online, almost nobody falls for it. These users aren't as stupid as Microsoft wants and needs them to be.

To those who accept or even spread (gratis) the "Microsoft loves Linux" lie a sobering reality check would be worthwhile; consider this from Thursday's news. Longtime Microsoft booster Tim Anderson wrote about GitHub slapping GNU/Linux users across the face. The responses are more noteworthy than the article itself because the article is mostly promotional. It's GitHub promotion.

"How can anyone develop something in Electron but not support GNU/Linux?"We now know that people who spent a decade working as Microsoft copywriters, e.g. promoting the idea Microsoft “loves Git” (a year before it bought GitHub), are in fact perverts and criminals (i.e. the usual). One prominent example has just been arrested for pedophilia and several Techrights readers hypothesise that this is how Microsoft had leverage over him. His past in the British Library (in "Preservation") amid the OOXML scandals also brings up potential shadowing, but we cannot prove any of these hypotheses. One sure thing is, he was a very key participant in Microsoft's war on Git (to hijack projects that used Git). He wrote many articles towards this objective. While grooming kids Microsoft was grooming him to publish 'prepared' articles for them in Condé Nast's site Ars Technica (which Microsoft had paid to push lies). Will all that PR and paid-for trash be retracted? Nope, not likely.

So another British Microsoft booster has just spoken of a so-called 'app', GitHub Desktop 2.0. How can anyone develop something in Electron but not support GNU/Linux? He too wondered aloud:

One curious thing is that although GitHub 2.0 is built with the cross-platform Electron framework, it is only officially available for Windows and Mac. Of course there is a fork, but why?

It is not because Linux users scorn GUI tools. "Our team has a strong background in Windows and macOS development, so those installers have been stable and fine for a while. We also have the ability to adapt the application to the platform it's running on, using the __LINUX__ global symbol in code. But the Linux ecosystem is the unknown for us, and my fork is a way to experiment and get something working with those who have the ability to provide feedback," said GitHub's Brendan Forster.

This has caused some puzzlement. "That an entity called 'GitHub' can't manage an official Linux app is just darn surprising," said one user.

Anderson has many of these articles; it feels like an ad with a link at the end (to proprietary software) and comments rightly point out the obvious:

Ignorance is not bliss. "...so that millions more can participate in software development, research, design, and more,"

Obviously not. I mean there aren't many devs working on Linux now are there? Slippery slope, thin end of the wedge, embrace, extend, extinguish. You know the score. "Our team has a strong background in Windows and macOS development..." In case you have forgotten Git was developed by Linus Torvalds who if I recall correctly also had something to do with developing Linux. Take the bloody blinkers off and try and see that the whole world does not revolve around Windows any more, if it ever did. 1 4

Microsoft and now the corrupted (wages from Microsoft) GitHub team want us to think very few people use GNU/Linux but among developers who use Git the market share of GNU/Linux is extremely high. Microsoft has a goal here; it has a vision and it's not pretty; it wants all software developers (as in "DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS DEVELOPERS") to only use Vista 10 or WSL under this piece of malware that subjugates lots of people, companies, and even governments. Remember that Jim Zemlin from the "Linux" Foundation was meeting in person the founder and chief of GitHub and the person from Microsoft who has just paid Zemlin a lot of money (while lying; "Microsoft loves Linux" etc. in his presentation at this event) and based on Microsoft ghostwriters came up with the idea to steal GitHub as far back as 5 years ago (when the 'ambush' started). Here it is perfectly depicted (authentic photo).

LF, Microsoft and GitHub years before the takeover (Source: Microsoft, via)

The person who last week said Microsoft is “no Satan” is Dina Bass, a longtime Microsoft ghostwriter (documents from the inside show how Microsoft grooms her and prepares 'articles' in collaboration with her). A week ago she said that Guthrie (shown above) put the strategy to buy GitHub in the drawer for a few more years, entrapping more projects upon takeover (last year). Meanwhile Microsoft 'shelved' all its code (openwashing of projects) there, then used ghostwriters to say that it's #1 contributor (maybe it was to GitHub, but the ghostwriters said "to Open Source"). Mac Asay was among those who repeatedly spread this lie. It wasn't enough for him to put that lie in headlines only once; he did so every week or every month. Remember that he had, at least once, sought a job at Microsoft (in his personal blog there's text about his job interview there).

"Mac Asay was among those who repeatedly spread this lie. It wasn't enough for him to put that lie in headlines only once; he did so every week or every month."Apparently, or so I'm told (but not shown any numbers because it's secret), many people are leaving GitHub and not many join anymore. That's the effect of Microsoft (which foresaw this, based on Bass). Yesterday Anderson revealed additional issues associated with GitHub under Microsoft, which may be suggestive of brain drain (loss of key engineers):

"I can't believe how easy it apparently is to have someone's life work taken down from Github," he said on his forum, fortunately hosted elsewhere. "And GitHub never emailed me about this. Not a whisper. Just poof, account gone. When I logged in, I could see my account, and see that it had been 'flagged', with no other explanation given."

Rohrer turned to the last and sometimes sole refuge of tech giant victims – social media. "If you're thinking about using @github for your life's work, FYI, they may remove it without any warning or notice," he protested. 373 retweets and a few hours later, and everything was restored.

But why did it happen in the first place? Things like this did not happen in the past (as far as we're aware). Let's hope that Microsoft wasted a lot of money on GitHub, wrongly assuming it can just swallow everything while in practice people flee and go elsewhere. We wrote a great deal about GitHub even before the takeover. 5 years ago Microsoft actually sabotaged GitHub; it was around that time that it made the strategic choice to 'conquer' it instead. Then Zemlin announced partnerships with GitHub. A decade ago he said we should "respect Microsoft" and compared Microsoft to "a puppy". ⬆