A Severe Linux Foundation Conflict of Interest (Microsoft Staff in Charge of Linux Foundation)
THINGS are not exactly improving. Linux affairs are just getting less transparent. 'Legwork' online becomes necessary. As an associate put it today, "evil does not go away, it just moves around. One has to know where it has moved to."
Latest from the Linux Foundation's site:
That's a new addition (recent months). Walli has been attacking the Free software community from the inside for at least two decades. He moves back and forth between Microsoft and organisations it tries to influence from within. We wrote about him for many years. Microsoft even buys him keynote slots at events; therein he does the attacks, too. It's a very toxic actor. Readers keep sending us information about the harms that he has done. Don't underestimate these tactics.
Yet worse: (different person)
Sarah Novotny left Microsoft 6 months ago and left the Linux Foundation (Board Of Directors) 18 months ago... after nearly 5 years there. In her role there she tried to outsource Linux to Microsoft! Last year Microsoft had 3 board seats - more than any other company! That's also impermissible, as per the Linux Foundation's rules (it is in the formal IRS filings), so for a bribe from Microsoft the Linux Foundation would even break its own rules... just for Microsoft.
Active (on Microsoft payroll) Microsoft staff is still in the leadership team of the Linux Foundation. One of them left that team and apparently left GitHub/Microsoft as well (it does not say when). From "At-Large Director" to MD at Redpoint...
As far as we can tell, the 'Linux' Foundation has - for the first time - hired someone black (it took nearly two decades). And yet they had the sheer audacity to troll others about "inclusion". The main thing 'Linux' Foundation is good at including is Microsoft. That's inclusion?
And speaking of inclusion, 6+ countries are banned (that's hundreds of millions of people banned from 'Linux' Foundation projects because of their nationality alone).
So you can call Linux "cancer" and still do anything you want inside the 'Linux' Foundation. Even break its rules with impunity.
Just make sure you don't hold a Russian passport (or birth certificate):
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Several Russian developers lose kernel maintainership status
Perhaps one of the more surprising changes in the 6.12-rc4 development kernel was the removal of several entries from the kernel's MAINTAINERS file. The patch performing the removal was sent (by Greg Kroah-Hartman) only to the patches@lists.linux.dev mailing list; the change was included in a char-misc drivers pull request with no particular mention. The explanation for the removal is simply "
various compliance requirements
". Given that the developers involved all appear to be of Russian origin, it is not too hard to imagine what sort of compliance is involved here. There has, however, been no public posting of the policy that required the removal of these entries. -
Several Linux Kernel Driver Maintainers Removed Due To Their Association To Russia
Quietly merged into this week's Linux 6.12-rc4 kernel was a patch that removes a number of kernel maintainers from being noted in the official MAINTAINERS file that recognizes all of the driver and subsystem maintainers...
The two links above are new and circulating right now.
Contrary to how it's framed (above and elsewhere; put the politics aside), it's not the first time this is happening inside Linux. Microsoft even shut Linux developers out of their own Linux projects. Yes, Microsoft now has this kind of control over Linux. Are you Russian? Then we orphan your own project. Novotny wanted to outsource Linux (the kernel) to GitHub too. Novotny was the community leader for NGINX, which is both Russian and Microsoft. Strange world and how rules are applied (or not) in it. It's not even about politics, it's just all about corporate power and every oligarch's ambitions (no matter the oligarch's loyalties/allegiances). █