04.03.21
Gemini version available ♊︎Fedora Council is Just a Mouthpiece and Instrument of IBM Management, It Doesn’t Speak For (What Used to Be) Fedora Project/Community
Summary: Fedora is quickly distancing itself from the notion that it’s really a community, as opposed to a pet project of IBM (which IBM barely cares about; or less and less over time)
THE situation at Red Hat isn’t pretty, but that’s what happens when you join the total catastrophe that is IBM (see what insiders are saying). Many prominent people have left Red Hat, including GNU’s Alex Oliva; he was part of a trend — part of the exodus away from IBM and into companies that actually have somewhat of a future. We’ve noticed some IBM insiders citing Techrights when expressing concerns about their employer’s action and IBM employees have long attempted to bury links to Techrights (a couple of weeks ago half a dozen of them ganged up in Hacker News to spike a trending story, which was factual, because in it we showed inconvenient facts about IBM). For those who are in doubt, IBM is no friend of software freedom and one reader of ours pointed out to us IBM’s despotic role at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO). Days ago he sent a letter*.
“We’ve noticed some IBM insiders citing Techrights when expressing concerns about their employer’s action and IBM employees have long attempted to bury links to Techrights…”At IBM, for a fact, there were many layoffs and still many departures (resignations), including part of the above-mentioned Council. We’ve refrained from focusing on names, but we’ve already given examples of Fedora ostracising longtime community members and contributors while outsourcing code to Microsoft/GitHub and hosting to AWS. It’s as if IBM really doesn’t care and the other day a key person from Fedora (shown above) made excuses in his personal blog for outsourcing to Microsoft, as if giving the code to the NSA is “security” (Canonical's incidents refute such a talking point).
I myself am a former Fedora user, so it saddens me to see the project reduced to de facto mouthpiece of IBM — to the point of censoring Fedora contributors and attacking software freedom by joining hands with Bully de Blanc. I suppose that’s what people would do for a salary. Even in defiance of the views of volunteers. In a sense, Fedora Council is to Fedora what GNOME Foundation is to GNOME; it doesn’t speak for GNOME developers. █
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* “Attached is the Report About the USPTO that I prepared,” he told us. “Don’t know if it will do any good, but I’ll start sending it out next week, once I manage to get it printed, so I can mail it out to people in DC who I can’t contact by e-mail.” There’s a lot there about David Kappos (IBM/USPTO, also a lobbyist for Microsoft now) and USPTO blocking/neglecting/excluding GNU/Linux users. It’s a PDF file 3.3 MB in size (“REPORT ABOUT THE USPTO – PDF VERSION”).
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