Bonum Certa Men Certa

Microsoft Paid the Open Source Initiative. Now (a Year Later) Microsoft is in the Board of the Open Source Initiative.

Entryism
Wikipedia on entryism



Summary: The progression of Microsoft entryism in FOSS-centric institutions (while buying key "assets" such as GitHub) isn't indicative of FOSS "winning" but of FOSS being infiltrated (to be undermined)

I WORRY greatly about where Free/Open Source software (FOSS) is heading. Why wouldn't I, having dedicated my entire adult life to this cause (literally my entire adult life, since my late teens or early twenties)? Having just written my sincere thoughts about the LF (hardly worthy of the "Linux" brand anymore), I feel inclined to comment on other organisations. It is no secret that Microsoft is on the Board of the LF (whereas community participation in the Board got completely scuttled). These people in the Board would support Zemlin as long as he supports the likes of Microsoft, so it's entryism or a slow-motion 'coup'. Torvalds was already self-'suspended' for a number of weeks; can he still speak about Microsoft the way he used to? It would now be in direct violation of the new CoC.



Not a word from LF regarding the patent blackmail by Microsoft -- a new patent lawsuit which was exposed earlier this month (OIN has not uttered a word, either) [1, 2, 3]. How come? Don't they care? Don't they oppose software patents? OIN certainly does not and its new leadership gives room for concerns (the same patent trolls who attacked Linux now hold top positions in OIN).

"Not a word from LF regarding the patent blackmail by Microsoft -- a new patent lawsuit which was exposed earlier this month (OIN has not uttered a word, either)."How about OSI? A couple of years ago the chief of the OSI invited me to run for the Board, but seeing the direction in which it has gone since, I'd probably face a hostile environment, resistant to criticism of corporations that actively attack Open Source while claiming to "love" it (in practice, for the most part, hijacking it while leveraging it to promote proprietary software with back doors).

Talking about the OSI's elections (the outcome is days old) is a rather sensitive subject, so I will not name people and will not say much. Some readers actually wrote to me about after I had already noticed it. The corporate media keeps focusing only on gender rather than corporate affiliations. It is as though we should quit caring about the agenda of the businesses and instead obsess over something entirely different. Curious readers will notice that Microsoft is now (as far as I know for the first time ever) on the Board of the OSI. So the 'cancer' is progressing. Nobody wants to talk about it for fear of being called "Sexist".

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