Online Mobs and Crabs: Doing to Fabrice Bellard What They Did to Richard Stallman and Linus Torvalds
They just don't want skilled people to be productive; they try to drag them down by all means available.
4 years ago (it'll be exactly 4 years in a couple of weeks) libera.chat (Libera Chat) pretty much "destroyed" what was left of Freenode and we see similar stuff happening in Mastodon right now. Matrix is also in a state of crisis/alarm. How are people meant to form and foster communication channels? First they need to instruct/convince many people to leave Freenode after ~20 years and instead join this brand new "Libera Chat" thing because of some "woke reasoning". Some of them say, move to Matrix instead. Now some big projects like Debian instruct people to quit Matrix immediately for their own safety. It never ends. Now it's similar in some Mastodon 'islands' (not even some niche or small instances).
This whole chaos feels somewhat intentional and very familiar to us. The methods are the same. We made our own IRC network, we dumped the IRC bridges, and we left the US/America, the source of all the serious abuse we had received. We documented a lot of this stuff and we intend to spend several years writing about it. A bunch of suicidal people cannot forever extort people using their own craziness.
I know for sure that Linus Torvalds wasted a lot of his life/career having to deal with bullies; the same is true for Richard Stallman, who continues to be defamed (apparently the image slop generators show him next to Jeffrey Epstein, whom he never met or defended; some YouTube channel has just had to swap the image generated for Stallman because it falsely associated him with the friend of Bill Gates, as usual).
What I didn't know about was the extent to which Fabrice Bellard too got dragged into tactics like these. "The kerfuffle between ffmpeg and libav was NOT over licensing," this new comment recalls. "Instead, a large number of developers made an announcement that they were staging a coup and taking over the project. That came as a surprise to Fabrice Bellard and Michael Niedermayer, the absolute geniuses that represented something like 80% of the code base at the time. They tried to take over the domains, repos, trademarks, etc., but Ballard legally owned all of those. So, they were legally forced to make their own. Despite losing the repos and the Gods-among-men responsible for most of the code, they decided to push forward. They created their own fork, and copied the logo and name of the library as libav. They used their positions at a number of distros to force them to change from ffmpeg to libav. The problem is that ffmpeg and its creators were better in every way that matters to basically everyone. They stayed ahead of security bugs, kept up with the latest codecs, had better performance and optimization support, responded to packagers, and even maintained compatibility with libav, etc. Libav, on the otherhand, stagnated, introduced their own bugs, had some fairly large issues, and continually feel behind and less responsive. Frankly, Ballard and Niedermayer were just better software engineers than the attempted usurpers. This left no choice but for them to change back to ffmpeg. Libav was left by its creators to wither on the vine while they moved on to other things."
Up until last year there were several imposter sites/domains that practically (yes, in practice, never mind if proxied) copied every single page of Techrights, causing all sorts of issues aside from copyright- and trademark-type issues. It's not legal for such sites to imitate yours, but suing people isn't fast or cheap [1, 2].
Ever since 2022 if not 2021 I've had to waste a lot of time dealing with the very same bullies who also defamed and harassed Stallman and Torvalds.
Over time it'll become clearer why we write about these issues every day. There's a war on Free software and it's typically waged by the same ringleaders/rings. These are the people who buried Freenode, and who moreover strive to destroy Mastodon (some instances rightly banned those troublemakers) by defaming people and creating abusive imposter accounts.
Some of the people who do so are (by their own admission) clinically insane and seek psychological help (some might be pedophiles); so it's probably not an over-generalisation to call these people lunatics. When it comes to Microsoft's Serial Strangler, even people who know him in person and who worked with him for a long time say he's insane/crazy.
All the people who SLAPPed [1, 2] us are basically crazy people who do crazy things to people. If there's insufficient room in the US prison system, they should at least be candidates for a mental asylum because letting them "roam the streets" may mean more women will be hurt and more men will get harassed/defamed.
Human life on the globe cannot be sustained if people aren't properly punished for things they did and innocent people aren't kept out of harm's way. █