Summary: With only one truly technical person inside the Linux Foundation Board (it got a lot worse in 2020) it seems safe to call it 95%+ corporate gerrymandering with no signs of improving any time soon; it’s all about letting hostile corporations change Linux rather than allowing Linux to change the world
Summary: Jim Zemlin’s Linux Foundation has sold Linux to a bunch of Linux-hostile dictators
Summary: A response to Torvalds- and Stallman-shaming videos from one year ago, this one by Chris Titus (Mr. Titus is a person who is quite new to GNU/Linux and cites Techrights sometimes)
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
This week there have been widespread revelations about Debian banning Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux kernel.
Incidents like this say more about the perils of groupthink than about the developer in question.
Techrights have published a treasure trove of 253 emails about the matter.
However, we only need to consider one key point: in his speech at DebConf, Torvalds had immediately corrected himself:
the kind of stuff that was going on behind the scenes made me once and for all to decide to never have anything to do with the FSF again so if you want to give money to an organization that does good give it to the EFF, the FSF is full of crazy bigoted people that’s just my opinion right and well actually I’ve overstated that a bit right the FSF has a lot of nice people in it but some of them are a bit too extreme
Torvalds admits making a mistake. It doesn’t look like his comments were planned, he was invited at the last minute. If bigoted is the word that popped into his head, it is most likely because it has come up in private conversation, unfortunately, so many times before. While the comment is regrettable, it is also worth remembering that people don’t come from all over the world to spend a week together watching Sesame Street.
Over 1,000 Debian Developers produced and consumed 253 emails about Torvalds’ slip of the tongue, resolving to ban him from future events.
It isn’t hard to find smarter responses.
If you are in the least bit tempted to read through the leaked emails, it would be a far better use of your time to pick up a copy of The One Minute Manager, by Ken Blanchard, PhD and Spencer Johnson, MD. In The Third Secret: One Minute Reprimands, Blanchard and Johnson suggest how important it is to focus on the mistake and not the person, to thank the person for their usual work and then move on putting it behind them.
The behavior of Debian’s leadership figures couldn’t be more remote from that. Over and over again, we see volunteers subjected to extended periods of public shaming and criticism. Torvalds didn’t even need a One Minute Reprimand: he had already delivered it himself. Debian’s shaming of Daniel Baumann lasted five years. That is a very long minute.
In another recent blog, I picked apart the falsification and misrepresentation of claims Debian circulated about Jacob Appelbaum. There is a pattern here: certain figures in Debian resent the attention on more senior developers like Torvalds and Jacob Appelbaum. They push these people out of the spotlight, obscuring their opinions and also obfuscating who does the lion’s share of the work in free software.
Torvalds apologized for calling the FSF bigots but nobody from Debian has apologized for calling Jacob Appelbaum a rapist.
Debian would not exist without the work Linus did to create the original Linux kernel. In fact, over 99.9% of the work in Debian wasn’t created by Debian Developers, it was created by people like Torvalds and so many other senior developers like myself working in the upstream free software projects.
In 2019, Chris DiBona of Google asserted that Google Summer of Code
is a vitally important program for the ongoing health of free and open source software
yet the only thing that is vital are the leading developers who bootstrapped the whole movement in the first place. Google may not exist without Linux. Linux would not exist without Linus.
A report by Sam Varghese of ITWire this week explains how grateful he is for the stability of his Debian desktop. He gives all the credit for that to Debian. This reflects the impact of banning, censoring, demoting, expelling, moderating, excluding and publicly shaming the real developers, including Linus Torvalds himself. The people who deserve the credit have been photoshopped out of the picture. Debian’s attitude to real developers, as revealed by Linusgate this week, is comparable to plagiarism in academic work or doping in sport. █
Summary: A Google employee is trying to defame me by associating me with rape, based on nothing at all (because of my Linus Torvalds article that received about 100,000 views and earned the above response from Linus Torvalds); shouldn’t that be expected from the very same people who tried to cancel Linus Torvalds (and failed) 5 years ago?
Summary: The corrupt Linux Foundation and the infiltrated OSI have nothing to do with software freedom; in fact, they actively work to undermine it and those who speak about it
Linux Foundation board meeting: does anybody here actually use Linux?
Summary: There’s growing recognition that the so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation isn’t working for Linux at all
Summary: The Linux Foundation‘s choice of proprietary GitHub for almost all of its projects (not Linux itself, but Microsoft will keep trying) shows how absurd and how freedom-hostile this foundation has become (defying even the preferences of the person whose given name it is named after; Linus understandably dislikes GitHub)
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Guest Editorial Team
Community: Get involved
RSS Feed: subscribe to the RSS feed for regular updates
Site Wiki: You can improve this site by helping the extension of the site's content
Site Home: Background about the site and some key features in the front page
IRC Channels: Come and chat with us in real time
Design by Beccary and Weblogs.us · Valid XHTML · Valid CSS · Hosting by Schestowitz · Part of Bytes Media
 | |
Content is available under CC-BY-SA
