Bonum Certa Men Certa

Increasing Focus on Advocacy for the Free Software Community (Putting Control Over Computing in the Hands of People, Not Large Corporations)

3 days ago: The Next One Thousand Blog Posts and the 15th Anniversary of Techrights

They eat our cake, then ask us to report bugs
Want to become an unpaid volunteer of IBM? Then join Fedora in 2021. And create a Microsoft GitHub account.



Summary: After 31,000 blog posts it's time to add a new theme to our coverage, which prioritises science, computer developers, and technology users; an urgent matter and pressing issue is the passage of control (e.g. over code and policy) to non-practising entities

THIS blog post of ours is technically the 31,000th (unpublished drafts included), but a pointless self-congratulatory post would not accomplish anything. Instead, let's discuss priorities. Thinking ahead, the EPO conflict will certainly escalate as dialogue with António Campinos broke down this year (first SUEPO at the start of the year, then increasingly the staff representatives too) and recent rulings about the Benoît Battistelli-led Vichyite strike regulations led to this call for reparations (see all the comments here).



"Team UPC will continue to spread false predictions in the media. As always!"A decade ago the EPO typically referred to European software patents as "CII" but now it's "AI" (Hey Hi!) and a bunch of other fluff. We need to keep abreast of those sementic games as they occasionally spread to other continents, threatening to undo 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101 at the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) and even the Patent Trial and Appeal Board (PTAB).

Judging by what President Biden has done so far, we don't expect Coons et al to thwart 35 U.S.C. ۤ 101 and therefore we won't be focusing on the US patent system, except habitually in Daily Links (as we last did this morning; Chris Coons, the corrupted lobbyist/mole of the litigation fanatics/profiteers, is being groomed by Joff Wild and IAM).

Litigation companies insisting they want 'innovation'Remember that from Day 1 (2006) we've been fighting against software patents. That's nothing new.

Team UPC will continue to spread false predictions in the media. As always! We can safely respond to that in Daily Links without devoting long articles to the subject.

So what does that leave us with? Mostly Free (as in freedom) software and EPO.

But our plan is to add more focus to simplicity and UNIX philosophy (the roots of GNU). Something ought to be done about complicated, monopolised, privatised, and centralised so-called 'tech'. We need to change that current trajectory because people are being farmed, not served. Complexity needs to be replaced by simplicity and front groups like Linux Foundation replaced by communities. Google has not helped anybody embrace (software) Freedom, IBM does not embrace real communities (it calls its own employees "communities"), and Microsoft is openwashing everything so as to push proprietary software whereas Amazon mostly kills off lots of small webhosts and shops.

The way things are generally going, we won't win back freedom (or control over our computing), even if "Linux" spreads further over time.

Corporate 'community' and grassroots community
Grassroots communities aren't for-profits with shareholders

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