08.30.20
People Who Truly Love GNU/Linux Don’t Brush Setbacks and Problems Under the Carpet
‘Happy stories’ are for PR (fantasy) departments
Summary: We need to talk about threats to Free software and constantly remind ourselves of the attacks on software freedom (otherwise we cannot confront the attackers)
FREE SOFTWARE is not about price; it’s more about justice or addressing injustices (that needn’t have happened in the first place — but happened anyway). We don’t need to emulate what we’re trying to replace. We don’t want PR (lies) departments to sweep issues and legitimate concerns under a rug. Here in this site we started with a boycott of Novell and lots of protests against software patents, including software patents in Europe (still being illegally granted by the Campinos- and Battistelli-led EPO). We’ve never just relayed mindless PR, not even for so-called ‘Linux’ companies. We just don’t do that. We want truth, not marketing. When the USPTO grants millions of patents that patent trolls then use to bully programmers we speak out, uncensored. That’s just what we do.
At the moment it may seem easy to accuse us of being ‘against’ Debian even though it’s what everyone here uses and many in the Debian community are rightly concerned about secrecy at the top. There’s a two-tiered (class-like) system where some people exploit worker bees (known as DDs) and some of these people never even wrote a single line of code. People join Debian in order to replace a corporate culture. They’re volunteers. They want to know what happens around them and it’s important to understand who exploits the free labour.
“5 years of “Microsoft loves Linux” lies are going down the PR drain (lost budget, trying in vain to mislead the general public) and we see more projects moving to self-host their SCM, e.g. GitLab.”So again, like we said at the start (and the title), by no means conflate criticism of something with disdain of the whole. When we called for a boycott of Novell we sought to save GNU/Linux from a collective and widespread patent attack by Steve Ballmer/Horacio Gutierrez/Microsoft. It mostly worked. Years later Novell went the way of the dodo and it was rendered a pile of patents (mostly expired by now). GNU/Linux is still around and it is doing very well. On Web servers, for instance, Microsoft was reduced to just 4% of the market. In supercomputers and phones? Microsoft is at around 0%. It’s being ‘slaughtered’, so now it’s trying to steal ‘Linux’ using bribery and vendor capture. We must respond to that. Seeing that Debian now rejects Microsoft money (or Microsoft no longer bothers bribing Debian), we have reasons for hope. 5 years of “Microsoft loves Linux” lies are going down the PR drain (lost budget, trying in vain to mislead the general public) and we see more projects moving to self-host their SCM, e.g. GitLab. Nowadays version control is done by a more extensive suite of tools with advanced features, which include bug tracking.
Don’t be afraid to become critical of what’s happening. The worst thing we can do is stay silent, allowing Microsoft (and media it corrupts to serve as loudspeakers) to change the narrative to promote ruinous falsehoods. █
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