'Linux' Foundation (Microsoft, IBM et al) is Infecting the GNU Project With Community-Hostile Codes of Censorship
THE other day IBM ensured that GNU was getting CoC'ed whether the FSF wants to or not. It's a bit like an act of coercion. It wasn't even the first time, as they had done this to binutils and to GCC. Piecewise they're parcelling GNU packages and sending them to the Linux Foundation 'club' with help from the SFC (infrastructure outsourced, too!), which profits from lying to people. They're not technical, they're marketing charlatans who want to gag "opinionated" geeks (or geeks with opinions). Their vision has no real community, just employees. To them, "pro bono" means a quarter million dollars a year.
Earlier this week we noticed this message (via), suggesting that vapourware or code never used in any way whatsoever had been inserted into Linux:
It says: "As far as anybody can tell, this product never shipped. If it did, it shipped in 2007 and nobody has access to one any more. Remove the fbdev driver and the backlight driver."
So defective chip maker Intel made this "Carillo Ranch" design, which never even shipped, and around the time 'Linux' Foundation (not so rogue in the beginning; Ian Murdock was the first CTO) was born the code was added to Linux. Why the fork did Linux adopt this thing in the first place? Because Intel was a dominant player in OSDL? Was there any quality control in place? Does a CoC cover this? Has Linux become a burial ground for anything from sponsors, irrespective of code status? This is how truly terrible code from Sarah Sharp was allowed into Linux (later on loads of serious bugs were found) and Sharp now works for SFC with a phony job title and a different name).
What typically happens in practice is, a Code of Censorship is (typically) leveraged to deny a real community any veto power or the ability to deny patches from certain corporations' employees (as that would be spun as an act of intolerance). Or even to deny unwanted, malicious, user-hostile patches from/for Microsoft. Instead of arguing they want to guard a monopoly they insist they're protecting vulnerable minorities. Let this be a cautionary tale. █