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Summary: Gardiner Bryant, the creator of The Linux Gamer as well as The Off Topical Podcast, reacts to our articles about DRM in Linux (he even pronounced my name correctly)
Even the GPL is no longer favoured (it is about Azure, not freedom)
Summary: A rough timeline of Microsoft’s interactions with Linux and the Linux Foundation since 2015
“There’s no company called Linux, there’s barely a Linux road map. Yet Linux sort of springs organically from the earth. And it had, you know, the characteristics of communism that people love so very, very much about it. That is, it’s free.”
–Steve Ballmer
‘Shiny’ proprietary stuff!
Summary: An insufficiently ‘conservative’ Linux ceases to be freedom-respecting
Whatever gets clicks, irrespective of underlying facts
Summary: Flamebait and clickbait ‘journalism’ dooms whatever credibility media has left; Linux and GNU both suffer from that ‘tl;dr’ (too long, did not research) culture too
“Linux 5.5 RC5 is Out, But Media is More Interested in ‘Pure Garbage’” as we've put it in the latest Daily Links. The term ‘Pure Garbage’ is not obscene and it’s the sincere view that came from Torvalds, who also openly bemoans the media cherry-picking only his outbursts and bad words. This latest clickbait journalism came from Phoronix, which was in turn cited by Slashdot, causing a bunch of more publications to follow suit (full chronology here.
As we explained some months ago, the mainstream (corporate) media seems to ignore criminals (or their words) and instead paint as “bad boys” a bunch of people who simply use terms lots of us occasionally use, e.g. “garbage” and “crap”. This isn’t fair to Torvalds and it is an insult to the already-dying occupation occasionally known as “journalism”.
“This isn’t fair to Torvalds and it is an insult to the already-dying occupation occasionally known as “journalism”.”Sure, writing technical articles about Linux isn’t easy. It’s possible, but it’s not easy. It takes time to learn, to research, to prepare, to fact-check with domain experts. So a lot of so-called ‘journalists’ either cover things they haven’t a clue about or just focus on choice of words, making whole articles about ‘Pure Garbage’ (in the headline) without actually studying the code or offering some technical insight. This is why the so-called ‘media’ is dying and people won’t trust it. This is the kind of irresponsible crap that caused Torvalds to take a break for a month and caused Stallman to step down (MIT and FSF) under great pressure. █
Summary: The Linux kernel’s Code of Conduct Committee now includes Intel, so a company of multi-continental antitrust violations and endless criminality nowadays gets to decide who to banish from Linux and various events
Greg K-H sent out the following message a few weeks ago: “Side-note, yes, the website at https://www.kernel.org/code-of-conduct.html is not up to date with the list of the current members of the kernel code of conduct committee, nor does it contain this or the prior report yet. I’ll get that working soon…”
Greg is Torvalds’ so-called ‘right-hand man’ (as the old term goes), so that kind of matters, irrespective of our opinions about him and his past at Novell (when Novell acted like a de facto department of Microsoft).
The Linux CoC Committee is now available for all to see.
Kernel.org has just updated its CoC page (this page was updated yesterday, based on the RSS feed). We could not flag the differences and the Wayback Machine has only a year-old copy of this same page (maybe it just hadn’t been modified since, until this week).
The Code of Conduct Committee is shown as follows:
The Linux kernel Code of Conduct Committee is currently made up of the following people: Kristen Accardi <kristen.c.accardi@intel.com> Mishi Choudhary <mishi@linux.com> Shuah Khan <skhan@linuxfoundation.org> Greg Kroah-Hartman <gregkh@linuxfoundation.org> Committee members can be reached all at once by writing to <conduct@kernel.org>.
Choudhary is OK. I get along pretty well with her. I regret that she recently did a panel discussion of the SFLC with Microsoft on the panel, though it’s probably not her choice/fault. But the first person in that list comes from the same employer as a notorious drama maker, who picked on all sorts of kernel hackers, including Greg Kroah-Hartman. These people all have a lot of power; they can oust people from Linux, even based on selective enforcement hinged upon broad rules (maybe something which was tweeted a very long time ago). They’re like bosses in a sense. We saw weakly-backed accusations used for targeted witch-hunts before. Its sets precedents and deterrents.
But let’s also put things in perspective; the committee now has in it employees of a company that assaulted a charity which had promoted GNU/Linux in Africa (for kids’ education). The company committed many other actual crimes (we have ample documentation of those). Who are they to police ethics?
Here’s an example of policing:
Linux Kernel Code of Conduct Committee: September 2018 to July 2019 report In the period of September 15, 2018 through July 31, 2019, the Committee received the following reports: - Inappropriate language in the kernel source: 1 - Insulting behavior in email: 3 The result of the investigations: - Education and coaching: 4 We would like to thank the Linux kernel community members who have supported the adoption of the Code of Conduct and who continue to uphold the professional standards of our community. If you have questions about this report, please write to <conduct@kernel.org>. ------------ Side-note, yes, the website at https://www.kernel.org/code-of-conduct.html is not up to date with the list of the current members of the kernel code of conduct committee, nor does it contain this report yet, but that will be resolved next week when I have a chance to fix it up. Sometimes web site changes are hard for kernel programmers :) To let everyone know, the current members of the Kernel Code of Conduct Committe [sic] are: Mishi Choudhary Shuah Khan Greg Kroah-Hartman One other person has been nominated, but due to travel issues has not formally accepted. Their name will be added to the above web site when that happens in a few weeks. thanks, greg k-h
Notice that list at the end. Intel is the new addition. Shuah Khan is Linux Fellow at the Linux Foundation, so Accardi is the first corporate member of the Committee. Does paying the Foundation help get your staff in that Committee? The Foundation has already banished all community participation in its board, so…
The person per se is not a problem. We are not personifying the issue. According to the Linux Plumbers Conference, she’s technical (“Kristen is a Linux kernel engineer working on power management for Intel’s Open Source Technology”), but we know where salaries come from and that’s who the person is loyal to.
The Foundation became just a company or a front for several. This is how they fire people (even those not on the payroll). Earlier today we mentioned this in relation to Debian. Ultimately, this lets the world’s richest people be in charge of everything, even Free software. █
Big mother (or Big Brother) is watching… everything you say
Summary: We’re back to the same old conundrum: what is more toxic? Oppressive censorship (of truth)? Or the expression of ‘unwanted’ speech?
LWN has just (about 2 hours ago) removed the paywall from this article entitled “A year-end wrap-up from LWN”. I couldn’t help but notice this rather disturbing paragraph from the editor himself (Jonathan Corbet). About the Linux Foundation‘s code of conduct (CoC) it says this: “Did somebody try to test out the kernel’s code-of-conduct as predicted? As of November 30, there had been no code-of-conduct events in the last three months, and only minor events before. That prediction, happily, has not worked out. Thus far, it seems that the code of conduct may actually have succeeded in making the kernel community a nicer place without the need for any serious enforcement efforts.”
Putting aside the recent ban of a “MAGA” hat-wearing person (banned from Kubecon), let’s examine closely what the above actually means. We’re supposed to count the CoC as an achievement not because it’s actually being used but because people are afraid of it — they’re afraid to speak out. Those are the classic hallmarks of authoritarian regimes. Hardly an accomplishment!
An anonymous Debian community site wrote this yesterday (it’s already in our Daily Links by the way). We’ll reproduce a portion below again, for those who aren’t keeping abreast of Daily Links:
Over the past twelve months, concerned developers have spoken out publicly about blackmail in Debian. It has been referred to as analogous to Thought Reform, the brainwashing programs of the totalitarian Chinese communist state and many former eastern European communist dictatorships.
The regime operating this program are the Debian Account Managers, comprising Enrico Zini, Joerg Jaspert and Jonathan Wiltshire.
Using the public complaints about the process, let’s break it down into easy steps. Like Zini, Jaspert and Wiltshire did at Christmas 2018, you could make this into a holiday project and start your own regime during a long weekend.
Begin with the conclusion
Normally, an expulsion or imprisonment comes at the end of an inquiry or investigation. In a blackmail program, the process is reversed.
In Debian’s case, this involves removing somebody from the Debian keyring. This is something that is relatively easy for Zini, Joerg and Wiltshire to do using their position in the project.
Add something menacing
For some developers, simply removing them from the keyring can cause immediate problems with their employment as they can no longer upload packages to Debian if they are not included in the Debian keyring. Without saying any more, Zini, Joerg and Jaspert now have the victim’s full attention.
This is about Debian, where there seems to be a(n anti) “free speech” cabal that gags people for questionable reasons; it’s to do with Google money, politics and social justice causes. In the case of the Linux Foundation it’s somewhat worse because the speech policing is done by people who do not use Linux. Sure, they run “Linux Foundation” and “Linux dot com” and so on. But they don’t even use GNU/Linux; they don’t understand the users and the community, only corporate agenda (of corporate sponsors). So they’re in effect like a Ford CEO who drives a Japanese car around, insisting even in public that it is superior. They tell us free speech is dangerous and are adamant — even eager — to suppress any views that don’t suit their career goals. This is a recipe for total chaos; we already saw what that did to the FSF. Watch closely the LWN comment (on the above article) which says: “Recently I received issue 35 of the FSF Bulletin. (Not yet available at https://www.fsf.org/bulletin .) My copy has already been recycled but it struck me Stallman wasn’t mentioned even once. Surreal.”
If FSF did this consciously, what does that say about today’s FSF? As we said months ago, several times in fact, there cannot be software freedom without freedom of speech; those two principles are closely intertwined. It has been reported and proven that the FSF even censors its mailing lists (e.g. messages in support of Stallman!). █
Hint: this man doesn’t even use Linux!
Summary: Shadows and ghosts from 2016 (when Microsoft already knew it would buy GitHub) and the Linux Foundation did photos such as these after Microsoft had paid it to (nowadays virtually everything at the Foundation is being outsourced to GitHub/Microsoft)
From bad to worse, but I guess it’s expected. When your staff doesn't even use Linux why would they test changes to the site from GNU/Linux machines? I cannot close the popup below and therefore cannot navigate anywhere. Imagine Apple’s Web site rejecting Mac users.
Summary: We’ve meanwhile noticed that Linuxfoundation.org — the official Web site of the Linux Foundation — added more spying and the site had become inaccessible to actual GNU/Linux browsers; bordering the insane or the totally absurd…
Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Guest Editorial Team
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