Last month it was four countries and now this:
All-time low for Windows:
Summary: The decline of Microsoft Windows continues; sooner or later Android (Linux inside) will be dominant in almost every country in terms of its market share or number of users
Background: Windows Has Had a Very Tough Year (That’s Why Microsoft Starts to Block GNU/Linux With ‘Secure’ Boot) | Antitrust Action Against Microsoft is Well Overdue | Microsoft’s Crimes Against the Competition, Notably BSD and GNU/Linux, Persist Albeit Disguised as ‘Security’ (UEFI ‘Secure’ Boot, TPM, Pluton…)
Minutes ago: (Source)
Windows loses its grip on the biggest market; the reasons for migrating away from Microsoft are both control and security; furthermore, all countries can realise those benefits by ditching Microsoft
Summary: China’s official policy is that it'll migrate away from Windows; so far this year the effect can be seen and Microsoft seems to have responded by technical sabotage
Earlier this year: Microsoft Propagandist Turns “Years” Into More Than Ten Years to Belittle a Massive Migration to GNU/Linux in China
Summary: China is preinstalling GNU/Linux on laptops; “The [above] laptop,” says an English report, runs “Deepin OS 20,” which is based on Debian GNU/Linux
THE world is changing. South Korea, Russia, and China (sharing a border) plan to move their governments and then their citizens to GNU/Linux (South Korea started this year). This won’t happen overnight (due to legacy workflows and systems), but progress is being made; they moreover make their own chips (processors and beyond) to promote self-reliance. Is this good for North America and Europe? Maybe not. Depending on one’s political orientation and stance on security (including back doors).
“We heard about the MateBook earlier this year; Qingyun L410 shows it must have been a success, as otherwise they would not put GNU/Linux on further and newer models of laptops.”Recently, in Daily Links we mentioned this article citing a Chinese portal (screenshot above; it’s hard to access that site). It spoke of a laptop that comes with GNU/Linux preinstalled. “The laptop itself,” it said, “is named Qingyun L410 and is expected to be a cheaper version of the MateBook 14. There’s also the possibility of the device supporting 5G connectivity given that the SoC itself features an integrated 5G modem.”
We heard about the MateBook earlier this year; Qingyun L410 shows it must have been a success, as otherwise they would not put GNU/Linux on further and newer models of laptops.
Kylin and Deepin are the better known Chinese distributions these days (it changes over time and there’s also UOS). Here’s an article about UOS (from May 2020):
Certainly the decline of Windows worries Microsoft; lobbyists even begged the Trump administration to allow Microsoft to carry on imposing Windows on banned companies (so much for “Microsoft loves Linux”). Did it work? Not really, at least not based on the above. China has other ideas for its future and it rightly views Microsoft as an imperial espionage tool that’s subsidised by the US taxpayer. Not only did Trump pass a lot of military budget to Microsoft (Pentagon budget as Microsoft stimulus); he also helped Microsoft steal a Chinese company (TikTok) even if that did not materialise at the end.
Microsoft is telling us (even confirming) Azure layoffs, in spite of Microsoft pretending to have found an alternative and promising future in Clown Computing. They literally join or come to our primary IRC channel, trying to interject damage-limiting PR.
Let’s hope that in 2021 the mask will slip further (causing more project exoduses in GitHub), Microsoft layoffs will carry on, and nations as large as China (with the largest number of computer users) will migrate to GNU/Linux. █
Summary: The EPO has chosen autocracy and aggression over science and excellence; this never ends well, but some people can become exceedingly rich in the process (destruction)
THE media isn’t talking about it; but that doesn’t mean it isn’t happening.
Judging by the comments here and here, there’s ongoing resentment against the EPO regime of Benoît Battistelli and his friend António Campinos.
“In the name of “innovation” they bring autocracy and corruption, in effect robbing Europeans.”The latter concerns the attack on science itself when it says: “One way to resist is to flag up the work of Harvard Professor Naomi Oreskes (link below) and her current book “Why Trust Science”, to anybody willing to listen. Impressive, in the book, is how she solicits views from other academics and then replies to them. Judge for yourself how convincingly she sees off her academic rivals.”
For me, personally, this attack on science is reminiscent of the lobby to deny climate science, deny the seriousness of COVID (here in the UK we now have ~11,000 people critically ill as we head for another nationwide lock-down), and vote for a fascist who doesn’t accept the concept of an election (except when he tries to seize power in the first place). If we in Europe come to accept those type of people, then we’re doomed to suffer. In the name of “innovation” they bring autocracy and corruption, in effect robbing Europeans.
The EPO mentioned a “virtual meeting” this morning, alluding to a webchat from yesterday (warning: epo.org link) when stating: “The Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) was signed by EPO President António Campinos and Colombia’s Superintendent of Industry and Commerce Andrés Barreto during a virtual meeting yesterday. [...] Under the MoU, over the next five years the Superintendence will be able to make use of the EPO’s work products, tools and practices when granting national patents. The agreement aims to strengthen our co-operation in the provision of efficient, high-quality patent procedures and in support to local innovators, whilst improving market access for European companies who wish to protect their inventions in Colombia.”
Don’t even think Colombia has enough European Patents to justify such a “virtual meeting”; in the case of Cambodia that number is a flat zero (for years). Colombia is an easy ally for such a ‘meeting’ because there’s more for Colombia to gain from the association.
The EPO recently did a couple of similar parades with China. Is this what Europe strives to? China and Colombia? What a FARC.█
Summary: There seems to be shrewd misdirection towards false claims, painting Mr. Gates’ critics as deranged and detached from reality; the facts, however, still exists and they’re still very damning/damaging to Mr. Gates, who views himself as self-appointed, life-long leader of the universe
THE other day I saw fact-checking sites pointing out that some widely-shared memes (or social control media posts) about what Gates had done in India were in fact false. That’s correct. They’re false (we’ll spare the links; they won’t help). I should know, having covered the said incidents several times back in 2014 and sooner. This whole thing contributes to the notion that anything one says about Gates in India (if it’s negative) should be presumed false. Is that a PR strategy?
“This whole thing contributes to the notion that anything one says about Gates in India (if it’s negative) should be presumed false.”We’ve long written about the negative impact of so-called ‘Conspiracy Theories’ (falsehoods) about Gates; they distract from factual criticisms. They sometimes serve to discredit the underlying facts and hard evidence. Sometimes we wonder if this is at least partly deliberate. If so, clever stunt you got there…
Here’s mainstream coverage from India (2017):
It comes with the following text:
The Centre has shut the gate on the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation on a critical national health mission, and possible conflict of interest issues arising from the foundation’s “ties” with pharmaceutical companies is one of the reasons.
All financial ties of the country’s apex immunisation advisory body, National Technical Advisory Group on Immunization, with the Gates Foundation have been cut off.
NTAGI Secretariat will be now fully funded by the central government, the health ministry confirmed to ET. NTAGI’s Secretariat was so far being serviced through the Gates Foundation-funded Immunization Technical Support Unit (ITSU) at the Public Health Foundation of India (PHFI).
ET has learnt that the government’s decision was informed by, among other factors, arguments from senior medical professionals and outfits like Swadeshi Jagran Manch.
Concerns raised by members of the steering group of the National Health Mission and the Sangh-affiliated outfit centred around “conflict of interest issues” in the NTAGI-Gates Foundation relationship.
Several years earlier the Government of India (GoI) wanted to sue Gates over experiments he had done on Indians, leading to many fatalities. We wrote several articles about it. The above issue (CoI), recently explored in The Nation with its investigative journalists, isn’t unique to India.
The Jeff Bezos-owned Washington Post moreover touched the subject a few months ago when it published “Billionaires are playing savior now. But they broke the economy to begin with.“
We don’t like Bezos, but at least he barely pretends to be “savior” of the world, unlike Gates. Here’s a screenshot to accompany an archive of the article (bypassing the paywall).
The problem at hand isn’t even unique to vaccines (let alone to India); as one columnist put it half a year ago, Gates wants to control everything (including but not limited to the White House). Bill Gates does not do media appearances on COVID-19 because he cares about health or understands public health (he’s trained to talk in ‘sound bites’), he’s there to direct politicians to funnel taxpayers’ money into his own pockets, i.e. the usual. People resigned from his foundation after he was gifting Modi, who sought legitimisation and could use an award from a foreign oligarch who had white-washed his name and mostly vanished his history of crimes. Suddenly, with this autocrat at the top of GoI, Gates seemed like the new ‘master’ of India. Watch their video chats, where Gates seems to have authority over Modi. Who the heck controls the nation’s response to COVID-19? An Indian or an American psychopath?
The columnist rightly noted that Gates “in reality [...] offers no new insights. He merely sounds like a well-briefed parrot repeating what experts are already telling the world.”
They train him to say that stuff on TV.
“It’s all about buying authority (control/power) over billions of people, experimenting on them not only with untested and unapproved vaccinations/drugs (an illegal practice in the West); the “War on Cash” is also being tested in India right about now, in effect robbing people who collected cash (people with limited/moderate means) and spying on everybody, for the benefit of Microsoft’s empire.”“It’s hard,” the columnist continued, “to say there was only altruistic motivation with the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation’s decision to pump a staggering $80 million into the same school their own children attended. It’s a good example of how a conflict of interest can arise with such charitable donations. [...] The Gates Foundation’s $50 billion charitable enterprise is to be welcomed, but perhaps it would be much better served if it was run by an independent board rather than on the whims of the world’s second richest man and his wife. But you could bet the farm on him refusing to hand over the keys to those particular gates. Gates would be better off exiting the world stage and privately going about his philanthropy. Otherwise the question has to be asked: why the desperate desire to stay in the spotlight?”
It’s all about buying authority (control/power) over billions of people, experimenting on them not only with untested and unapproved vaccinations/drugs (an illegal practice in the West); the “War on Cash” is also being tested in India right about now, in effect robbing people who collected cash (people with limited/moderate means) and spying on everybody, for the benefit of Microsoft’s empire. If Bill Jr. can live as long as his father did (he died a month ago), we may have to confront this sociopath for another 2-3 decades. The damage he has done to technology has expanded to other domains, where he’s robbing taxpayers worldwide and asserting control over elected officials. Who ever elected Gates in the first place? Who is he accountable to? There are many calls to impeach Donald Trump, but who’s calling to “arrest Bill Gates”? Sadly, usually the ‘Conspiracy Theorists’ (who base their judgment of Gates on a pile of falsehoods, sometimes Trump-leaning ones).
“He’s a taker, not a giver. In India he was also an undertaker up until Modi seized power.”Media companies that still pocket some money from the fake ‘charity’ (so-called ‘foundation’) and then white-wash the unelected tyrant have played their ruinous role in creating a monster (future generations won’t forgive them… if they last that long at all); it’s up to them to prove they can undo the damage they’ve contributed to. Public access (or Commons) medicine should be defended, not exclusive rights (monopoly). Gates is trying to reshape the Indian policy on medicines in the same way he introduced user-hostile proprietary software, rendering it the ‘norm’. He had basically stolen from the Commons, sometimes literally fishing other people’s code, to create an empire of exploitative artificial scarcity. He’s a taker, not a giver. In India he was also an undertaker up until Modi seized power. █
Summary: We need to acknowledge that just because a huge number of people may be migrating to “Linux” (or GNU/Linux in some form or another) doesn’t mean that the cause has been fully fulfilled; it won’t be enough to liberate these people from repressive digital tyranny
SOME hours ago in this detailed new page about Xiaomi the author wrote a section about “GNU GPL violations,” stating that (and it’s hardly a new issue, not limited to Xiaomi either):
Smartphone manufacturers that release Android phones need to adhere to the GNU General Public License. This is a bit complicated, but the basic gist is that, since Android is an open-source system, companies like Xiaomi need to provide to the public the source code kernel of every device it manufactures.
Over its history, Xiaomi has had a tough time with this. In many cases, its public posting of kernels would be delayed, and in some cases, it simply didn’t post anything. For various reasons, repercussions for this inaction didn’t fall too hard on the company.
The GPL obligations (copyleft licences at large) do matter, unless all that we care about is “market share”…
“Over a decade ago it was reported that the Chinese government strictly limited the range of distros permitted for use in public terminals, presumably because back doors were required (inside GNU/Linux).”But perhaps more important than this fixation on size there’s the aspect which pertains to software freedom. The above article shows a large number of different devices whose net effect on privacy is really horrendous. In some cases, spying by peer (or surveillance by nearby people) is encouraged and spun as a hip thing with social merits. This has long been an issue with many Android-powered devices; sure, Android became more dominant (or widespread/ubiquitous) than Windows, but just because it has Linux in it — not to mention that the base system itself (AOSP) is liberally licensed — doesn’t mean that people are emancipated from oppressive software and titans who control that software for their own financial ends. In China, perhaps more so than in the United States, the industry works closely with the government and is often an extension of it. In some parts of China people are forced to carry around malware that spies on them (through so-called ‘phones’) and it doesn’t matter much if the underlying operating system is Android or something else.
Many headlines have appeared in the past year about China’s longterm plans to abandon Windows in favour of GNU/Linux. Prior to that we heard much of the same about Russia and South Korea. We’ve seen no evidence of this policy or those sorts of plans changing. Microsoft is really losing control of the market. It fights back, sure, partly by attempting to “wrest control of Linux” like it attempted to “wrest control of Java” (we’ll publish Bill Gates deposition tapes about it tomorrow, in part 6).
There’s no easy solution to all this. It’s a longstanding conundrum. When the GNU Project started 37 years ago it was envisioned or foreseen that widespread use of GNU (and later the GPLvX) would liberate people. It did accomplish that to a certain degree, but even Bruce Perens (a defector in a sense) recently acknowledged that people’s rights are being tramped on. Even using this supposedly user-respecting code. There are no restrictions on how it is used, who by etc.
China is going to become a good example of widespread and large-scale deployments of Linux where the presence of GPL, GNU and all sorts of projects like OpenStack fail to bring freedom to the people of China. Over a decade ago it was reported that the Chinese government strictly limited the range of distros permitted for use in public terminals, presumably because back doors were required (inside GNU/Linux). █
Reprinted with permission from the Free Software Fellowship
When the leaders of free software organizations want to avoid answering questions about money and conflicts of interest, one of their most popular fudges is to have some sidekick come in and complain about the tone of the question. These are the tone police. Beware.
What, then, is the correct tone for women and volunteers to use when asking husbands and leaders about money?
The Malaysian Government has provided an insight: try to sound like the cartoon character Doraemon. Doraemon is a robotic cat without ears.
The Malaysians have gone a lot further, creating a complete Code of Conduct for women to observe during the Coronavirus lockdown:
What happens if you have a Code of Conduct issue? Well, most Codes of Conduct have a reporting procedure. In many free software organizations, it involves sending a report to the leader or the event organizer. If you look around the real world, you’ll notice that in many cases the most serious Code of Conduct abuses are committed by people in positions of authority. Therefore, if free software organizations designate their leaders and close allies to handle CoC complaints, they make it impossible for the most serious complaints to be investigated.
The marital home provides an opportunity for us to understand this: if a Malaysian woman has a Code of Conduct problem, what is she going to do, put on her best Doraemon voice and ask permission to complain? Sadly, that is exactly what the brochure instructs.
In her infamous talk about enforcement at FOSDEM 2019, OSI president Molly de Blanc insists that it is necessary to follow through on community guidelines. She even gives a horrendous picture of a cat behind bars, how would Doraemon feel looking at that?
This is no laughing matter unfortunately. A recent survey found one in five women still believe husbands deserve to beat ‘disobedient’ wives as they enforce Codes of Conduct in the home.
As we read that, we couldn’t help wondering if the rate of domestic homicides will increase in 2020 and if so, is the Code of Conduct to blame for that?
While the wording of this Code of Conduct varies significantly from those used in free software organizations, the principle is the same: trying to justify a situation where some people are more equal than others. █
Openwashing power (very expensive hardware that needs dishonest marketing to sell) and political power, but power is still power and one day it’ll be misused really badly as it’s the region most likely to inflame nuclear conflict in the coming years
Summary: As we noted last week, IBM is very close to Modi because it is moving a lot of its workforce to India [1, 2] and this can become a future liability to IBM’s reputation (or lack thereof) as a tolerant firm
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