When Fedora Said It Was Looking to Integrate "AI" It Meant Promoting Microsoft's Proprietary Spyware and GPL-Violating Slop

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Apr 16, 2025

Fedora has a new release. There's also a belated revelation. When they say "AI" they mean Microsoft.

Some months ago IBM staff said that Fedora was "hiring" for "AI". Yesterday IBM's staff (Christian F.K. Schaller) wrote: "So an effort we been plugging away at recently is starting to bring AI tooling to Open Source desktop applications. Our first effort in this regard is Granite.code. Granite.code is a extension for Visual Studio Code that sets up a local AI engine on your system to help with various tasks including code generation and chat inside Visual Studio Code. So what is special about this effort is that it relies on downloading and running a copy of the open source AI Granite LLM model to your system instead on relying on it being run in a cloud instance somewhere. That means you can use Granite.code without having to share your data and work with someone else. Granite.code is still very early stage and it requires a NVIDIA or AMD GPU with over 8GB of video ram to use under Linux. (It also runs under Windows and MacOS X). It is still in a pre-release stage, we are waiting for the Granite 3.3 model update to enable some major features for us before we make the first formal release, but for those willing to help us test you can search for Granite in the Visual Studio Code extension marketplace and install it."

Here it is:

It says "Granite.code running on Linux".

No, it's running on Microsoft's proprietary spyware. And we know where that leads.

It is not even intelligence; that's a misnomer and misleading characterisation.

When it comes to Freedom (libre), Fedora being controlled by IBM has been a disaster and the new leader will not improve matters. Consider the following three examples:

There's lots more. █

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