Bonum Certa Men Certa

The FSF Needs to Reject OSI (and Open Source) Along With Much-Needed Rejection of the GNOME Foundation (Not the Same as the GNOME Project)

Video download link



Summary: Response to a good little speech (unscripted apparently) by Geoffrey Knauth, who explained his position on Open Source about a year ago

THE current FSF president is a good guy. Geoffrey Knauth is a good and welcoming speaker (reminiscent of Peter T. Brown). But since his talk that I saw this morning a lot has happened in the OSI and it merits a discussion.



"Their petition backfired so badly that all they do with it right now is remove signatures."The above started as a spontaneous response to this video of Geoffrey Knauth (from last year). Here it is for context:

Video download link



“A lot of those conferences are run by women… and we really have no conflicts,” he notes. A lot of what he says makes perfect sense and I agree entirely. What Knauth says about "Open Source" (around 9:00 onwards) I may have agreed on a year ago, but a lot has changed since then. The video explains what and why... I show this blog post from the OSI and explain the situation with the GNOME Foundation, where most chiefs proceed to sellout, becoming Microsoft employees. The GNOME Foundation is extremely problematic (it has tried to cancel RMS for over a decade), but so is the OSI. And by extension the "Open Source" brand...

Berlin scenesThe problematic blog post from the OSI was the start of something; a month and a half later the OSI (with zero full-time and permanent staff; it's defunct and cannot even organise an election) took/chose a key role in attacking the person who had most stubbornly protected the mission statement, initiating this attack based on complete nonsense including distortion of some very old stances. They just waited for an opportunity to pounce and then attack the FSF, collectively. Yes, they sought collective punishment, too.

It gets worse.

Well, they (Bully de Blanc and the Interim GM of OSI, a former IBM et al stooge) have been concurrently attacking software freedom even before the 'cancel mob' was assembled with support from biased and subjective media, based on almost nothing at all (just a little announcement about a return to some board, not even leadership, which Geoffrey Knauth maintains). Their petition backfired so badly that all they do with it right now is remove signatures. Karma still works, doesn't it?

Recent Techrights' Posts

Our Desktops Are Not Your Experiments, X is Not an Experiment
Breaking what already worked
Microsoft's Big Lies Regarding This Week's Mass Layoffs Have Already Begun (and They're Already Being Spread by Slopfarms)
Microsoft is the "market leader" in slop
They Made Technology Scary and Taught Us That It's Innocent, Friendly, Even "Social"
Rejection of all this "apps" and "gadgets" and "Smart" (whatever that means!) status quo isn't a rejection of society
 
Microsoft XBox Layoffs: Almost 2,000 Layoffs Became "Over 2,000"? (Over 20% of the Staff)
over 20% of staff will be let go, not counting staff that leaves voluntarily
GNU/Linux Growing in Sierra Leone This Year
Based on what statCounter is seeing, this year there are more and more people there who adopt GNU/Linux
Serial Sloppers Gonna Slop
More sites out there ought to call out the cheaters
Quartz (qz.com) is Spam and a Slopfarm
It used to be OK. Then they fired the staff.
Links 30/06/2025: US Economic Woes, Extreme Heat
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, June 29, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, June 29, 2025
Gemini Links 30/06/2025: "The AI Hype" and New AuraGem Ask
Links for the day
Summer Plans in Techrights and Elsewhere
massive layoffs at Microsoft
Explaining the Full Story of SLAPPs From Microsoft Staff
For every action there is a reaction, for every attack there will be proportionate consequences
The Openwashing Shills Initiative (OSI) - Part III: IRS and Status of OSI
"They lied to the US IRS and there’s a paper trail"
IBM Red Hat's Dogmatic Fanaticism Under a Thin Veil of "Modernism"
IBM now has the audacity to paint people who don't agree as "nazis"
Microsoft's Share in Guatemala Fell From 97% to 14%
Eventually Microsoft will get stuck in a loop of layoffs, layoffs, and more layoffs
The Media is Under Attacks Partly Because There's Little Other (Remaining) Press to Speak in Its Defence
The biggest danger here is that when there's very little press or no "opposition media" left it becomes even easier to crush critics because there aren't many people left to speak about the matter
If Your Web Site is Run by Bots, Eventually Nobody Will 'Read' It Except Bots (People Don't Want to Read Slop)
Eventually people learn from mistakes
Links 29/06/2025: Microsoft Releases False/Fake Benchmarks, "Google Wants You to Watch Ads or Take Surveys to Read Articles"
Links for the day
Links 29/06/2025: Data Breaches and Online Censorship
Links for the day
Gemini Links 29/06/2025: "The Price Of Eggs" and Gemini 3D Tic Tac Toe
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, June 28, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, June 28, 2025
The "News" You Saw About Canonical is Misleading, It Made Only 18 Million Dollars Last Year and Barely Paid Any Taxes
Lies are the norm these days...
Pushing Wayland Using Straw Man Arguments
phoronix.com has long promoted the talking point of "Wayland people" (for at least a decade already)
Australia: Windows Fell to All-Time Low, Even Lower Than iOS
There's a good reason why next week there will be so many Microsoft layoffs
Slopwatch: Linuxsecurity, WebProNews, and Google News Boosting Slopfarms as 'News'
People who don't recognise the slopfarms and don't know which sites are fake would struggle to understand what's really going on
Links 28/06/2025: Hardware/GPU Wars, GAFAM Throws Money (Borrowed Cash) at Hopeless Slop Pipe Dream
Links for the day
Gemini Links 28/06/2025: Shellshock and Network UPS Tools
Links for the day
Links 28/06/2025: The Age of Integrity and FreeBSD Foundation Added John Baldwin as Board Member
Links for the day
Fedora 44
IBM now does to Fedora what it did to RHEL
Microsoft Already Shaved Off Costs Anywhere It Could. It Was Not Enough.
Office and Windows aren't "selling" (licences) like they used to
Scheduled Maintenance Next Week
Our community is alive and well
BetaNews: We're Publishing LLM Slop About LLM Slop
Beta version of a slopfarm?
3-Month Updates on Our Complaint to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
In short, the complaint remains open, updated, and is advancing
IBM Red States Hat (Project 2025): Our "New Thing" Replaces This "Old Thing"
The new replaces the old. That's how IBM frames it.
Start X
Just because something is old does not mean it is bad
Slopwatch: Linuxsecurity, Google News Slopfarms, and Linux Journal (LJ)
Today we take a quick look at 3 slopfarms
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, June 27, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, June 27, 2025
Links 28/06/2025: "CC Signals" Virtue-Signals to Slop Ponzi Schemes, North Korea Aims for Tourism
Links for the day