YESTERDAY the COVID-19 death tally was at almost 12,000 (including 2,611 deaths in the US alone, another '9/11') -- almost an all-time high. It's really bad and people may need to wait until those Thanksgiving travel-related figures are factored in (the number of cases will definitely increase due to that).

"The OSI is beyond redemption at this point..."Here in the UK we reopen today, after a 4-week lock-down period across England. They say that in our area there were "191 cases per 100,000 people in the latest week 21 Nov-27 Nov. The average area in England had 129." With almost a quarter million hospital admissions (connected to COVID-19) and nearly 60,000 deaths by now (even more when indirect factors are accounted for; the total excess deaths w.r.t. projections is the more complete figure) it's clear that it's a really bad time to get ill, even with just an ordinary flu. The health services are already overwhelmed with patients as we enter the coldest days of the year (December-January).

It's expected that in less than 50 days from now the US will have a new president; we don't expect him to be a lot better in most aspects, only in some. When it comes to tackling COVID-19 there's not much he can still do; by the time of his inauguration (never mind the transition) it's possible that over 100 million Americans will have had COVID-19 (and tens of million tested positive, having also shown symptoms).

Lately, or during lock-downs in particular, we've been focusing a great deal on the EPO. The Benoît Battistelli era is fully back, as António Campinos 'popularity' level is just as appalling. We hear from insiders. They've had enough!

It's not exactly expected to improve during the pandemic and it certainly isn't going to get any quieter in "EPOnia"; the fact that the mainstream media says nothing about the subject is rather revealing (e.g. of its role). Regardless of what happens, we remain dedicated to covering the most pressing issues of the time. At the moment the situation at the EPO is increasingly urgent, for human rights reasons, setting aside the aspect of software patents.

There's much we could instead say about Free software, infiltration at the Linux Foundation (it seems to be working closely with CBS on marketing, even though CBS keeps badmouthing "Linux" -- with examples as recent as this week), the Slack acquisition by an ICE facilitator, and the OSI Member Survey being carried out by Elana Hashman, who is now OSI Board Director based in Seattle, WA (Microsoft). She says she is "Principal Site Reliability Engineer for Azure Red Hat OpenShift" (so she helps Microsoft).

The OSI is beyond redemption at this point; when I mentioned this to Richard Stallman a couple of months ago he generally agreed but wanted more information. Well, we used to think that the OSI was just a little ill; it changed when its General Manager abruptly resigned and it then turned out that most of the OSI's funds were diverted to Microsoft projects. Regarding the funds of the Linux Foundation, now that there are no physical events their main revenue stream is gone; they were already operating at a loss, having massively overpaid people who don't even use GNU/Linux. ⬆