Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Corporate 'Cancel Culture' Industry — Part III: Non-Technical People Trying to Ruin the Lives of the Geeks

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Series parts:



Summary: Corporate takeover (over the code produced by volunteers who like to code and are good at it) should be a cause for concern to communities composed of altruistic people who share; to the people who see everything as "assets" and "IP" we're just temporarily-valuable resources to be discarded like "slaves" or "serfs"

THE other week I was contacted by someone who had been a cause for concern and then decided to do this series, of which we've done two parts of [1, 2].



"The recent investigation started because Intel exercises too much control over the Linux Foundation, protecting its turf using money..."Today's third part deals with the example that started this whole debate. Towards later parts we'll explain the phenomenon in general. It was explained 1.5 years ago in the "peak code" series by Dr. Andy Farnell [1, 2, 3]. The gist of his series was, we're being robbed by corporations. We must always be apprehensive regrading motivations, as we recently saw in the case of Red Bait. They used an army for volunteers for about 2 decades (Fedora) and now they're putting paywalls on the code. There have been other examples lately of either walled gardens or paywalls. It's rather "trendy" right now...

To put it in very simple terms that everybody can understand, they get people to work for free for "everyone's sake". And then all of a sudden it's not for everyone and you need to buy a subscription even just to access your own contributions, which you gave for free. Academic/scholarly publishers can be a lot like this.

The recent investigation started because Intel exercises too much control over the Linux Foundation, protecting its turf using money; it is "the Intel vs ARM thing is what I've talked about before," psydroid told me. "Linux ran better on x86 chips for a long time because Intel spent a lot of money on optimising it for x86, not because ARM and other chips weren't capable" and "it's not just Linux, it's the whole stack... the thing to understand is that x86 is different from everything else."

It's not unlike OSDL, which predates the Linux Foundation despite this gross distortion in Wikipedia. Intel was a cofounder.

"Some time has passed (nearly a fortnight already) and not a single article on this matter showed up anywhere."Another person argued people out there still misunderstand the Linux Foundation, or LF for short, because of the misleading name. They should not read anything into the name of the LF. It exists to represent the interests of the members in Linux development rather than to promote and advance Linux in society and industry.

Some time has passed (nearly a fortnight already) and not a single article on this matter showed up anywhere. In the next part I'll explain why I refused to participate in any of this. Someone with an axe to grind merits caution, not cooperation.

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