THE Free software community needn't despair; the attacks on the community are predictable. They're reactionary. They're disruptive, but we can endure it all, eventually. Efforts to divide us aren't hard to see (along shallow and superficial lines).
"...remember that only a couple of months before the layoffs began Bill Gates left Microsoft (he knew what would come)."Microsoft is slipping off/out of balance (layoffs almost every week this summer), as it's faking Azure numbers (this is what Microsoft tells shareholders its future is!) and Azure layoffs then follow, albeit very quietly. Microsoft is super-paranoid about its investors finding out. It would cause the shares to collapse; non-slip metal (as below) would not save Microsoft from slipping and remember that only a couple of months before the layoffs began Bill Gates left Microsoft (he knew what would come). He always knew there was much more money in mass vaccination campaigns than in software (he candidly spoke about this on camera) and he's experimenting on Africans (seems like South Africans are the latest guinea pigs).
Our advice to Free software aficionados is, keep up the good work, keep out of the traps (GitHub, Azure etc.) and wait patiently for the monopolies to lose their plot. COVID-19 is accelerating their demise. We know it, they know it, and earlier this week Debian revealed that it had managed to recruit many new developers during the lock-downs (more the twice the usual number). ⬆