Summary: No matter how deep one digs, based on publicly available information and even rumour mills of IBM insiders/pensioners, it is exceptionally difficult to understand what happened inside IBM's top-level boardroom/management, resulting in many departures, including Whitehurst's
Due to technical issues, the video I had recorded about this didn't work out well (focus on wrong part of the screens), so I've converted it into audio (not much was lost, it mostly showed the contents of the articles below, in turn). The short story is, it's difficult to know what exactly happened... and we dare people to tell us with certainty, rather than just speculate. We're all ears and we welcome any insider account, though we recognise that it likely requires high-level access (the ordinary Red Hatter won't be told the full story; shareholders are told face-saving stories/narratives). ⬆
The pages/articles the audio above (it was a video originally) being alluded to are:
As regular readers are likely aware by now, for material we published years ago some likely broke man without a proper job (except in a company made up or invented by him) wants money
The 'broligarchs', a collective which typically created anything of their own, do not want the general population to possess skills that let it be anything other than passive consumers
It would be interesting to see some charts, based on some long-term study, comparing the general health (blood pressure, BMI etc.) of people who use proprietary stuff and people who do not
In the case of Rust, instead of "the liberation of the digital society" we have empowerment of Microsoft GitHub and of GAFAM in general. Guess who funds this...
