01.25.21
Important Issues Not Entertained in the Community, Especially Critics of the Status Quo
Can we discuss rejecting monopolists’ money?
Summary: There’s corporate infiltration inside communities (for oligarchy hunts volunteer, unpaid labour) and those who speak about that as a threat to our cause and objectives are painted as misguided outcasts who must be ignored
THE political analogies we’ve recently used or borrowed aren’t “off-topic” because they can certainly help demonstrate inherent similarities. The way to tackle such issues may also be similar. For instance, in American politics the concept of ending the corporate empire (imperialism for profit, at taxpayers’ expense) is almost never entertained by corporate media, owned by those standing to gain from passage of wealth from the general public (growing national debt) into the offshore bank accounts of oligarchs. Wall Street regulation is also restricted — the permissible “spectrum of debate” sense at least — to something rather petty.
“Military-grade corporate propaganda (from companies that literally serve the military in exchange for billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money) is something to keep abreast of and always bear in mind.”Departing from politics, let’s examine what we have in the Free software community. Some people are berated or painted as “Extremists”, “Zealots”, and “Radicals” (even capitalised) for insisting we ought not embrace any proprietary software. Someone tried this on me a couple of days ago after I had responded to Fedora's use of Adobe stuff (proprietary, obviously). This agenda is often shoehorned using the “moderate” and “sensible” and “reasonable” and “in the real world” Open Source pseudo ‘community’ (corporations disguised as a grassroots effort). Think of Microsoft, Google, IBM…
What exactly are the taboo subjects or impermissible positions in the Free software world (under siege from “Open Source”)? Well, an obvious one is rejection of payments (bribes, so-called ‘patronships’, usually “sponsorships”) from proprietary software companies. Mr. Pocock has just mentioned something to that effect (in relation to Google and Debian, FSFE etc.) and we can think of many other examples, including FOSDEM (coming soon). That money always comes with strings attached to it, whether those strings are visible or not (they can lead to subconscious self-censorship for instance).
Google, for example, paid a lot of money to the FSF and the FSFE. Not because Google supports Freedom Software and not because its agenda is to liberate users; its principal agenda is to spy and then oppress users. For evidence of this look no further than what Google will do to Chromium this coming March. Don’t let some “Summer of Code” or "Outreachy" PR stunt blind the community (it’s leverage for censorship of Google’s critics). “Regarding Google and the FSF,” Ryan told us moments ago, “Google buys your credit card purchase data from Visa, Mastercard, and Discover, and uses it to figure out how to target ads to you. To say nothing about their cooperation with the NSA…”
Ryan asked: “Is this the sort of company that the FSF should want to associate with?”
Remember that in the early days of this site, way back in 2006, in an act of self-defence we called for a complete boycott of Novell, a proprietary software company that sought software patents (eventually handed over to a Microsoft consortium). Of course we received some scorn for it, mostly from SUSE and Novell insiders, who sought to persuade people outside the company itself that I was some horrible person who must be ignored and shunned. Several people even set up entire sites just to mock us and call for a boycott of our site. What was that all for? Well, we sought to tackle the risk of the Novell/Microsoft patent collusion, designed unequivocally to facilitate a patent war on GNU/Linux at large. Ryan reminds us that “around 2006, Microsoft was openly seeding patents to troll firms and tried to put OpenGL under attack. That was thwarted by someone buying them at auction and giving them to OIN.”
“It’s impossible to build a general-purpose OS that doesn’t contain some sort of advanced graphics API like OpenGL (or the newer Vulkan), and that was the point. Every “Linux” company needed to ship OpenGL or they would lose compatibility with everything from CAD and advanced graphics rendering software to video games, and even hardware-accelerated compositing window managers. The entire OS would effectively be ruined.”
That’s Microsoft. Not too long ago. It is still doing this (2019 example).
This ludicrous notion that when one speaks out against a large corporation he or she is “toxic” is obviously entertained by the “Open Source” camp, itself besieged if not directly managed by those corporations. Novell, by the way, ‘only’ had about 10,000 employees at the time. Some of them ‘camped’ in sites such as Reddit trying to bury links to my articles, in effect starving the work of any traffic/visibility.
Way, way back… or long before we even had this concept of “Cancel Culture” and before “social control media” was even a thing (“social media” and “social networks” were coined and popularised later) people tried hard to malign and slur me, making false claims about me cutting off my genitals, being beaten up by police, and all sorts of other baseless nonsense. There was a large and coordinated attempt to induce shame, guilt, and drive us all off the Web. I’ve lost track of the number of attacks and methods used. Recently we learned that people responsible for the coup inside the FSF (and GNU, where many IBM employees still do this) falsely claimed that we spread “conspiracy theories” and other junk. They told this to Richard Stallman himself in an effort to incite him against us and prevent him from speaking to me. Ever so classy, right?
This post wasn’t supposed to be so personal, but it ended up shedding light on 15 years of a “Cancel Culture”; whether we’re aware of it or not, it is a real problem. Since well before “Cancel Culture” was a ‘thing’ (as a concept and term) the “Open Source” people did exactly what corporations paid (or “sponsored”) them to do. As Stallman put it 20 years ago, those people “treated [him] like shit” and they still do. “Stallman mentioned that it’s dangerous to depend on things that you can’t design around (in a post about MP3 20 years ago),” Ryan recalls, “but often by the time you need support for those things, they’re already widely adopted, and it becomes a catch-22. I used to be terribly aggravated by PDFs because, before open source form-filling became possible, I’d have to treat them as static documents, print them out, and then fill out everything by hand. My handwriting is slow, awful, and frequently I would screw something up and have to print it out and start over.”
Military-grade corporate propaganda (from companies that literally serve the military in exchange for billions of dollars of taxpayers’ money) is something to keep abreast of and always bear in mind. People who support software freedom, just like pro-equality (in the financial sense, not gender or ethnic identity politics) and antiwar politicians, will perpetually be painted as “anti-corporate” “Communists” (or even worse labels, such as “terror sympathisers” or “traitors”). If we’re prepared for such propaganda, we’ll be more resistant to deception and incitation efforts. █
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