The Difference a Decade (and GAFAM Money) Makes
2016:
The Linux Foundation is bad, except when it pays the critics (money derived from seat-buying and helping GAFAM duck antitrust enforcement).
2025: (same site)
LAST year we showed that sites which cover "Linux" and "FOSS" - including "It's FOSS" - were taking money from the so-called 'Linux' Foundation to promote its marketing spam. Yesterday we saw SPAMnil - a spam ("b2b" is the term SPAMnil uses) supplier/provider of the 'Linux' Foundation [1, 2] - running spammy videos for the 'Linux' Foundation and even parroting Microsoft propaganda - hardly for the first time.
It's quite sad that, aside from the growing issue of "Linux" sites becoming LLM slop (LinuxInsider among the latest to join the "slop club"), there are those who compromise principles and become boosters of the very same entities they previously criticised.
What has changed?
Money.
At the end it does not pay off. Credibility cannot be purchased. Attempts to buy credibility typically backfire at the end, eventually. It's inevitable. Because paid-for 'popularity buying' is a problem in and of itself. Principled people won't tolerate it and 'popularity buying' (a sort of PR) is most popular among the corrupt. █