Bonum Certa Men Certa

Biggest Threats to Software Freedom (Which Almost Nobody Talks About)

Destroying the movement by buying it piece-wise, then using patent traps inside it to assert that it's indebted to 'generous' Microsoft

...and then we pay LF, then OSI, then OIN... Don't forget to grab the repos (Github) and then NPM... You think it wasn't planned already?... Wait, how do we bribe or destroy the FSF?



Summary: The assault on Free software carries on, as various building blocks are hijacked by Microsoft (to spy, censor and generally control) whilst illegal software patents are being advanced using meaningless buzzwords that any programmer would laugh at

THE world of software development -- not necessarily just Free/libre software -- hardly speaks of the dangers associated with GitHub.



In quick succession Microsoft attacks many pillars of software and its supply/development chain. This is overlooked by those who are bribed by Microsoft to "stay in line". The Linux Foundation now actively promotes GitHub, which is proprietary software designed to entrap users of Git. Look at the Board of the Linux Foundation; Microsoft is all over it (and top management of the Linux Foundation too).

Today, as of this morning, many people spoke about Microsoft's move against NPM, which is an act of all-out aggression. Make no mistake about it. Also see who's behind it. Those are people who have attacked the Free software world for decades. Conde Nast (which 'ousted' Torvalds for a month) welcomed this with a number of very recent puff pieces, pretending that a land grab by a proprietary software behemoth is a gesture of "love". Microsoft loves Open Source? No. Microsoft is attacking it. While smiling at us.

We're going to leave that aside at the moment and instead return to it in a separate, dedicated article.

We also remain concerned about total apathy towards the patent aspect. When did OSI and Linux Foundation (both in Microsoft's pocket) last speak about it?

The European Patent Office (EPO) under today's leadership illegally grants patents that (GNU/)Linux would certainly be in infringement of. And those patents aren't even legal patents!!!

Where's the outrage?

Upcoming 'events' promoting illegal software patents in Europe are again being advertised today. This new press release says: "An intensive update on patent protection for software-related inventions covering all the major developments in European patent law in particular GUI inventions and mixed' inventions with both patentable and non-patentable subject matter..."

"We also remain concerned about total apathy towards the patent aspect. When did OSI and Linux Foundation (both in Microsoft's pocket) last speak about it?"Also, behind IAM's paywall this week there's this scoop about Microsoft's patent blackmail and extortion chief moving to Marconi. To quote IAM on Twitter: "Another big hire for Marconi as it adds former Microsoft patent chief..."

Microsoft's patent chief is a thug, but Microsoft is also IAM's financial backer, so they will not 'insult' this Mafia, will they? Money talks, says the famous idiom. Microsoft buys a lot of "talk" and the "talking points" are passed on.

One can imagine what will happen next. HTIA (best known for advocacy of Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB) inter partes reviews (IPRs)) has meanwhile published this letter and tweet, stating: “The single most important thing the USPTO should do in the context of AI is improve the technical training given to examiners who plan to examine AI-related technologies.” Read more in our joint comments on patenting AI inventions…"

We've looked into the underlying 'letter' [PDF] and found it rather void of substance if not dreary. They suggest some amendments, but they play along with the buzzwords and the accompanying hype.

"Microsoft buys a lot of "talk" and the "talking points" are passed on."The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) likes finding tricks to work around restrictions on software patents (limitations such as 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101/Section 101/Alice) and just calling everything "HEY HI!!" (AI) is one of the more popular tricks these days. Out of nowhere they suddenly use these buzzwords all the time.

Suffice to say, the USPTO merely does here what the EPO did before it. They try to make it acceptable for patent offices to grant patents that courts later reject.

"The EPO Board of Appeal lacks independence; there are ongoing and outstanding complains about it. Already, as of months ago, Campinos threatens those same judges to permit software patents."How about patents granted in defiance of Mayo (the other high-profile SCOTUS decision alluding to naturally-recurring things in nature).

Perhaps not minding the underlying law, Emma Longland (HGF) has just published this piece about the EPO granting likely illegal European Patents on life, as the EPO is totally out of control and even its own judges are besieged by António Campinos and his boss. To quote:

The much-watched validity dispute over the Broad Institute’s patent for fundamental CRISPR-Cas9 technology – recently revoked by the EPO Board of Appeal – is not the only CRISPR-related IP issue to watch out for in Europe this year, explains HGF’s Dr Emma Longland.

The EPO Board of Appeal’s recent revocation of the CRISPR-Cas9 patent, EP2771468 – belonging to the Broad Institute, Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology – has garnered a great deal of attention since January. However, IP professionals interested in keeping up to speed with the technology’s patent landscape should also pay attention to several other important CRISPR applications going through the EPO opposition and appeals process this year.

The Broad Institute and its collaborators were among the innovators working on CRISPR gene editing during its early development in 2012 and 2013. Thanks to a strategy of accelerating the prosecution of their related patent applications at the EPO, they were the first to get granted foundational CRISPR patents in Europe. And several patents other than EP2771468 are now at various stages of the opposition and appeal process.


The EPO Board of Appeal lacks independence; there are ongoing and outstanding complaints about it. Already, as of months ago, Campinos threatens those same judges to permit software patents. This is a gross abuse of the EPC.

Free software is in a bad position as long as this carries on. There are already several troll lawsuits against it (GNOME, Mycroft etc.) based upon ridiculous software patents. What did OIN do about it? It's shocking. OIN works for Microsoft now. As for IBM with a Red Hat CEO as President? It is still suing companies using software patents, so we know nothing has changed.

Recent Techrights' Posts

Windows in Åland Islands: From 100% to Less Than Half
Åland Islands lost the sense of urgency to move to GNU/Linux
Not Just Slow News But Also Late News (Julian Assange Landing in Thailand)
Why did AP take so long (nearly a week) to release these?
[Meme] Smart Alec Poettering
How many Microsofters can the Debian Project withstand?
Getting Rid of Microsoft Does Not Go Far Enough
Microsoft already has many problems. One day Microsoft won't exist anymore. But that does not guarantee users' freedom.
Alyssa Rosenzweig's LibrePlanet Talk About Freeing the Apple GPU
Alyssa Rosenzweig is the graphics witch behind the reverse-engineered drivers for the Apple GPU. She previously led Panfrost, the free drivers for Arm Mali GPUs powering devices like the Pinebook Pro. She graduated in 2023 with a Computer Science degree from the University of Toronto and now writes free software full-time.
Links 30/06/2024: LLMs Under Fire and Dictatorship of the Old
Links for the day
[Meme] Walking Outside the Guardrails of the Walled Gardens Built by Monopolies
So-called "advertiser-unfriendly" material was never a problem for Wikileaks
 
Wikipedia Co-Founder (Not Wales) Expresses Support for Wikileaks Founder Julian Assange, Says Assange Will Probably Continue
probably exactly the sort of thing that the US prosecutors did not want
Marco Calegaro on Hacking Art Into a Community
talk by Marco Calegaro
Links 01/07/2024: Chokecherry Leaf and Agile Manifesto
Links for the day
Johannes Åsgård on Making the Raspberry Pi More Free With librerpi
Johannes (also known as dolphinana)
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 30, 2024
IRC logs for Sunday, June 30, 2024
200 This Week
Monday started with 40 articles/pages and this is #200
Press Complicity and Public Apathy All Along Enabled 14 Years of Illegal, Arbitrary Detention and Coercion Into Plea Bargain of Julian Assange on Brink of Death
They basically blackmailed him into letting the US 'win' the argument
At the End Journalism a Crime (If It Involves Accessing or Gaining Access to Documents Marked "Confidential" or "Classified" by Those Looking to Hide Their Misconduct/Crimes)
At least in the US, especially where the imperialism is at stake
Links 30/06/2024: Tensions in Korea and Japan, Criminalisation of Sleeping Outdoors
Links for the day
100% Slop/Spam From linuxsecurity.com
This is the kind of stuff that's killing the Web faster
Gemini Links 30/06/2024: Murdoch and Ideal OS
Links for the day
In the First 6 Months of 2024 Thailand Moved to GNU/Linux, Not to Windows Vista 11
maybe users moved from Vista 10 and 11 to GNU/Linux, seeing where Microsoft was heading with forced hardware "upgrades"
Eko K. A. Owen, New Outreach and Communications Coordinator for the FSF
Nice to see many new additions to the FSF's team
Microsoft Has Slaves and Enablers, Not Partners
Obligatory meme too
Tobias Platen Covered Freedom-To-Play Games in LibrePlanet 2024
Freedom-To-Play games using Taler
[Meme] Opening a 'Webapp' With 'Only' 4 GB of RAM
Until 2020 none of my PCs ever had more than 2 GB of RAM
Destination 'Five Percent'
We reckon GNU/Linux can break the 5% barrier some time by the end of this year, even without counting Chromebooks
A Crisis of Online Journalism
Almost a week ago a journalist was forced to plead guilty for an act of journalism
Germany One of Many Countries Where Microsoft's Bing Lost Market Share After All That LLM Nonsense (Bing Chat and Further Rebrands/Renames)
openai.com traffic plunged 60% last month
Microsoft’s Latest Antitrust Scrutiny
4 new stories
Microsoft Layoffs, Mass Plagiarism, and More
outrage included
GNU/Linux Climbed 0.25% This Month (in statCounter)
Around midday on Tuesday we'll start seeing preliminary data for July
Ilya Gulko Introduces Pollyanna
"Pollyanna is a web framework that makes it easy to create your own libre social space, such as a social network or blog."
'FSFE': Underage Labour, GAFAM Fronting, and Identity Theft to Undermine the FSF's Current Fundraiser
looking to raise funds at the same time as the FSF
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 29, 2024
IRC logs for Saturday, June 29, 2024
Links 29/06/2024: Astronauts at Risk, Ukraine Updates
Links for the day
Fedora and Red Hat Leftovers
mostly redhat.com
Microsoft is Now Googlebombing or Spamming 'Open Source' and 'Linux' to Promote Proprietary Surveillance, Azure
Notice the title and the image, what's being promoted etc.
Seychelles: GNU/Linux Doing OK
Seychelles cannot be considered poor
This War Crime Footage, Nothing Political Per Se, Is What They Made Julian Assange Plead Guilty To (War Criminals Not Convicted, Only Those Who Expose Them)
Wikileaks' Julian Assange: Exposing the US Military Crimes
Gemini Protocol Isn't Even Remotely "Dead"
"Lupa knows of 505,000 (half a million!) working Gemini URLs at present, up from about 425,000 this time last year"
About 10 New Free Software Foundation (FSF) Members Per Day
The total changed from 46 to 47 while typing the article
20 Years Passed, Let's Go Even Faster Now
We are hoping to bring more original stories
Vista 11 Adoption Unusually Low in Germany and It's Going Down, Not Up
This is not happening only in Germany
Kevin Korte on Computers Being Allowed to Make Decisions Based on Cryptic Algorithms and Proprietary/Secret Data
It uses buzzwords where none are needed
[Meme] Garbage In, Garbage Out (linuxsecurity.com)
It is neither Linux nor security, just chatbot-generated slop
Microsoft-Invaded CISA Spreads Anti-Free Software FUD (as If Proprietary Software Has No Memory Safety Issues), Brittany Day Uses Chatbots to Amplify and Permutate the Microsoft FUD
linuxsecurity.com became an anti-Linux spam site
Microsoft Laying Off Staff in an Act of Retaliation and Union-Busting
retaliatory layoffs at Microsoft
Gemini Links 29/06/2024: Content Drowning in 'Goo' and LLM Slop
Links for the day
Windows Lost Almost 92% Market Share in Egypt
From over 99% to just over 7%
In Ecuador, GNU/Linux Adoption Surged From Under 1% to Over 4% in About 3 Years
Not even counting Chromebooks
LibrePlanet: Cultivating Backups (of Recordings)
an appeal to recover some of these talks
Microsoft/Windows Machines Are Turned Off (or Windows Deleted/Decommissioned) in Web Servers, as the "Market Share" Collapse Continues
Taking full history into account, this is a decrease of over 90% in some cases
Corwin Brust Hosting Freedom: A Behind-the-scenes Tour With the GNU Savannah Hackers
"the "smiling faces" behind it."
Android at 90% or More in Chad
Windows below 2%
David Wilson: Cultivating a Welcoming Free Software Community That Lasts
"a feeling of shared ownership for all users."
Julian Assange Might Continue Wikileaks, But Certainly Not Yet (Recovery Time Needed)
And probably at a symbolic capacity only
Bringing in 12 Santas and Taking 13 Out (Old Interview With Julian Assange)
Julian Assange's life inside the Ecuadorian embassy
Neil Plotnick on GNU/Linux in the High School Classroom
uploaded to the LibrePlanet instance of MediaGoblin
Asia Appears to be Fastest to Adopt GNU/Linux
the home of a considerable majority of the world's population
Alexandre Oliva's LibrePlanet 2024 Talk About "Software Enshittification"
in spite of technical difficulties encountered while recording
What They Used to Do With Mono They Now Do With Systemd (Lower and Deeper Down Than Userspace)
Now we have a project started primarily by Red Hat (and managed by Microsoft GitHub, which is proprietary) being managed by Microsoft and primarily serving Microsoft and IBM
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 28, 2024
IRC logs for Friday, June 28, 2024