Bonum Certa Men Certa

Canonical and IBM Are Turning Ubuntu and Fedora Into Microsoft Windows, Time to Adopt Real Community Distros

Increasingly more about social engineering and legal 'engineering', not technical engineering

Rocky marathon: they keep moving the goalposts, this is OK
Just because you're still on the ropes doesn't mean you're OK, Rocky



Summary: IBM, with its notorious army of aggressive lawyers and mountains of software patents, is trying to make RHEL proprietary and render Fedora 'spyware' (they know it'll put off existing and potential users; later they can claim "reduced demand" for it and mothball the whole thing, rebranding it as "CentOS" after they had already fired Fedora management and then abandoned OpenSource.com and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice); Canonical keeps up with evil by doing some of its own and they don't compete with Microsoft, so we can trust neither of them

FOR those who do not follow our Daily Links or don't keep up/watch closely enough, here's a quick recap. Less than a fortnight after IBM's "Red Bait" move (we're tempted to say "dick move", but that's not polite or even "professional" enough) we saw Canonical keeping up by taking control of LXD (monopoly!) and pushing Snaps at DEBs' expense (not unlike Red Bait with Flatpak). Snaps are a monopoly at the back end and Flatpak facilitates centralisation -- including censorship -- via Flathub (there are both technical and legal issues). It's promotion of proprietary and monopoly. This can hurt forks and derivatives (Linux Mint blocked Snaps and created LMDE for good reasons). Maybe that's the intention and the plan. Then, days ago, IBM found another way to upset the community and piss off slaves (volunteers). It promoted "telemetry" in Fedora [1, 2]. As for SUSE, it only issued some self-promotional words, but don't trust SUSE. It's the biggest pusher of proprietary software of them all, especially for SAP and Microsoft.



"Free software always adapted; now too it must adapt to survive and we need to reject "corporate" distros because they don't have our (the community's) interest at heart."As we put it in Daily Links some days ago: "Telemetry" = we give you some software but still control it remotely, will pull data out of it (by default, as many people do not change these defaults). It's not truly yours, we remotely observe its usage. What next? Remote activation? CSAM detection? Paywalls?

We also said: Snap's back end is proprietary, so Canonical is trying to build a monopoly with non-Free software. Canonical promotes proprietary Microsoft spyware in the installer, casually promotes Windows (after Microsoft 'incentivised' Canonical to do this), and this trend goes years back. It is not a fluke and it won't stop. There are back room deals.

IBM is not BLMFree software always adapted; now too it must adapt to survive and we need to reject "corporate" distros because they don't have our (the community's) interest at heart. Rocky Linux says it found a workaround, but IBM keeps pulling a fast one and escalating matters every few months (while the Free Software Foundation -- the FSF -- stays idle and silent, probably afraid or shy to criticise sponsors with many employees inside GNU projects).

"It's certainly a lot more likely that Microsoft violates patents than Linux does [...] Basic operating system theory was pretty much done by the end of the 1960s. IBM probably owned thousands of really 'fundamental' patents [...] The fundamental stuff was done about half a century ago and has long, long since lost any patent protection."

--Linus Torvalds, 2007

Recent Techrights' Posts

Writing and Coding Isn't Always Enough
Last year we had to assume a role we didn't have before: litigants
Autumn Has Come
Autumn should be exciting in all sorts of ways; it'll also mark our anniversary
 
Gemini Links 01/09/2025: News Corp. WSJ and A Month With NixOS
Links for the day
Slopfarms Already Peaked, They Will Die When Slop Companies Run Out of Money to Borrow
slopfarms will lack an actual "engine"
“Sideloading” Never Killed Anybody
There are many online discussions this week about the misnomer "sideloading"
Slopwatch: Google News as FUD Vector Against Linux and Plagiarism Enhancer, Serial Slopper (SS) Uses LLMs to Googlebomb "Linux"
Slop destroys the Web not just by screwing with search engines and helping plagiarists. It's also responsible for de facto DDoS attacks...
Links 01/09/2025: "Attacks on Science" and China's "Soft Power" Grows
Links for the day
Links 01/09/2025: Fresh Backlash Against Slop and "Norway’s Electricity Crisis is About to Hit Britain"
Links for the day
Links 01/09/2025: Catching Up (Mostly via Deutsche Welle), "Windows TCO" Effect in UK
Links for the day
Gemini Links 01/09/2025: Linguistic Barriers and "Web 1.0 Hosting"
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, August 31, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, August 31, 2025
The UEFI 9/11 - Part IV - External Interference
They all seem to be playing a role in crushing Software Freedom and self-determination for users
Links 31/08/2025: Baggage Claim Scams, an Insurrectionist’s War on Culture, and a Sudden Robotics Hype
Links for the day
Gemini Links 31/08/2025: Reviewing Netsurf and Slightly Less Historic Ada Design
Links for the day
IBM Has Taken Control of GNOME
Don't expect a successor to be found any time soon
Links 31/08/2025: Google Gmail Data Breach and LF Puff Pieces for Pay
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, August 30, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, August 30, 2025
This is What Google News Has Become
Moments ago
The Slopfarm WebProNews Has Turned Google News Into a Laughing Stock Full of Plagiarism by Slop
If Google News dies of neglect, that's one thing. It's starting to seem like active neglect by Google is a form of participation.
Do What is Moral, as What's Legal Isn't Always Moral
Do what's objectively moral, no matter the costs and the risks
Slopwatch: Google News Assisting Plagiarism and Anti-Linux FUD, Serial Slopper Rips Off Linux-Centric Journalists
This makes the Web a much worse place and lessens the incentive to do journalism
Links 30/08/2025: NVIDIA Fakes Results to Hide a Bubble Already in Implosion Phase, Data Breaches Galore, Important Win for Workers' Union in Canada
Links for the day
Representing and Speaking for Animals
If I ever choose to take this matter to tribunal with animals-centric NGOs on my side, it'll get some press coverage for sure
The UEFI 9/11 - Part II - Campaign of Censorship and Defamation Against Critics
In dictatorships, humour serves an important role. It's tragic.
In Kazakhstan, Yandex Estimated to be 20 Times Bigger Than Microsoft
Bing is measured as down this month
Shutterstock Not Enough? The Register MS Uses Slop Images in Articles (Seemingly More and More Over Time)
Cost-saving trajectory amid office shutdown?
Gemini Links 30/08/2025: Games, PostmarketOS, and Slop
Links for the day
Links 30/08/2025: Imgur Uproar and Many Ukraine Updates (Mediazona Reports Over 200,000 Russians Died for Putin)
Links for the day
How Not to Build Software
code forges that need a Web browser perhaps fill some 'niche' demand
GAFAM and "MATA"
The use of dark humour there hopefully helps illuminate what a lot of "modern" technology became like and how it interacts with human civilisation (to what ends and whose gain)
Birds Are Not "Pests and Vermin", Privacy is Not a Crime, and GNU/Linux is Not 'Hacking Platform'
I could not help but think of Free software analogies
The Sites Should Be Very Fast Again
That issue is now resolved
Flying in 2025
worse than ever before
Activists, Including Technical Activists, Need Not Pursue Affirmation
Techrights doesn't play or participate in a "popularity contest"
The UEFI 9/11 - Part III - Chaos is Scheduled to Happen Second Thursday of September (No Matter What the Microsofters Tell You)
The clock is ticking
Downplaying the Impact of "UEFI 9/11" is a Losing Strategy
we won't publish much whilst on holiday
Government Sites Should Run Free Software
Not proprietary bloatware with buzzwords
LLM Slopfarms Take No Breaks
When people run sites by bots they don't need to worry about "breaks"
GNOME Having a Meltdown Again
Thanks and farewell to Steven Deobald
Gemini Links 30/08/2025: Low Tech and Hunchbin 1.0.6
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, August 29, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, August 29, 2025