Bonum Certa Men Certa

Important Issues Not Entertained in the Community, Especially Critics of the Status Quo

Can we discuss rejecting monopolists' money?

Biden-Trump call: Don't worry, I won't reintroduce tax for rich people; Very well then; I will also carry on bombing lots of nations



Summary: There's corporate infiltration inside communities (for oligarchy hunts volunteer, unpaid labour) and those who speak about that as a threat to our cause and objectives are painted as misguided outcasts who must be ignored

THE political analogies we've recently used or borrowed aren't "off-topic" because they can certainly help demonstrate inherent similarities. The way to tackle such issues may also be similar. For instance, in American politics the concept of ending the corporate empire (imperialism for profit, at taxpayers' expense) is almost never entertained by corporate media, owned by those standing to gain from passage of wealth from the general public (growing national debt) into the offshore bank accounts of oligarchs. Wall Street regulation is also restricted -- the permissible "spectrum of debate" sense at least -- to something rather petty.

"Military-grade corporate propaganda (from companies that literally serve the military in exchange for billions of dollars of taxpayers' money) is something to keep abreast of and always bear in mind."Departing from politics, let's examine what we have in the Free software community. Some people are berated or painted as "Extremists", "Zealots", and "Radicals" (even capitalised) for insisting we ought not embrace any proprietary software. Someone tried this on me a couple of days ago after I had responded to Fedora's use of Adobe stuff (proprietary, obviously). This agenda is often shoehorned using the "moderate" and "sensible" and "reasonable" and "in the real world" Open Source pseudo 'community' (corporations disguised as a grassroots effort). Think of Microsoft, Google, IBM...

What exactly are the taboo subjects or impermissible positions in the Free software world (under siege from "Open Source")? Well, an obvious one is rejection of payments (bribes, so-called 'patronships', usually "sponsorships") from proprietary software companies. Mr. Pocock has just mentioned something to that effect (in relation to Google and Debian, FSFE etc.) and we can think of many other examples, including FOSDEM (coming soon). That money always comes with strings attached to it, whether those strings are visible or not (they can lead to subconscious self-censorship for instance).

Google, for example, paid a lot of money to the FSF and the FSFE. Not because Google supports Freedom Software and not because its agenda is to liberate users; its principal agenda is to spy and then oppress users. For evidence of this look no further than what Google will do to Chromium this coming March. Don't let some "Summer of Code" or "Outreachy" PR stunt blind the community (it's leverage for censorship of Google's critics). "Regarding Google and the FSF," Ryan told us moments ago, "Google buys your credit card purchase data from Visa, Mastercard, and Discover, and uses it to figure out how to target ads to you. To say nothing about their cooperation with the NSA..."

Ryan asked: "Is this the sort of company that the FSF should want to associate with?"

Joe Biden and Kamala Harris: Two genders mean we represent everyone, especially the rich peopleRemember that in the early days of this site, way back in 2006, in an act of self-defence we called for a complete boycott of Novell, a proprietary software company that sought software patents (eventually handed over to a Microsoft consortium). Of course we received some scorn for it, mostly from SUSE and Novell insiders, who sought to persuade people outside the company itself that I was some horrible person who must be ignored and shunned. Several people even set up entire sites just to mock us and call for a boycott of our site. What was that all for? Well, we sought to tackle the risk of the Novell/Microsoft patent collusion, designed unequivocally to facilitate a patent war on GNU/Linux at large. Ryan reminds us that "around 2006, Microsoft was openly seeding patents to troll firms and tried to put OpenGL under attack. That was thwarted by someone buying them at auction and giving them to OIN."

"It's impossible to build a general-purpose OS that doesn't contain some sort of advanced graphics API like OpenGL (or the newer Vulkan), and that was the point. Every "Linux" company needed to ship OpenGL or they would lose compatibility with everything from CAD and advanced graphics rendering software to video games, and even hardware-accelerated compositing window managers. The entire OS would effectively be ruined."

That's Microsoft. Not too long ago. It is still doing this (2019 example).

This ludicrous notion that when one speaks out against a large corporation he or she is "toxic" is obviously entertained by the "Open Source" camp, itself besieged if not directly managed by those corporations. Novell, by the way, 'only' had about 10,000 employees at the time. Some of them 'camped' in sites such as Reddit trying to bury links to my articles, in effect starving the work of any traffic/visibility.

Way, way back... or long before we even had this concept of "Cancel Culture" and before "social control media" was even a thing ("social media" and "social networks" were coined and popularised later) people tried hard to malign and slur me, making false claims about me cutting off my genitals, being beaten up by police, and all sorts of other baseless nonsense. There was a large and coordinated attempt to induce shame, guilt, and drive us all off the Web. I've lost track of the number of attacks and methods used. Recently we learned that people responsible for the coup inside the FSF (and GNU, where many IBM employees still do this) falsely claimed that we spread "conspiracy theories" and other junk. They told this to Richard Stallman himself in an effort to incite him against us and prevent him from speaking to me. Ever so classy, right?

This post wasn't supposed to be so personal, but it ended up shedding light on 15 years of a "Cancel Culture"; whether we're aware of it or not, it is a real problem. Since well before "Cancel Culture" was a 'thing' (as a concept and term) the "Open Source" people did exactly what corporations paid (or "sponsored") them to do. As Stallman put it 20 years ago, those people “treated [him] like shit” and they still do. "Stallman mentioned that it's dangerous to depend on things that you can't design around (in a post about MP3 20 years ago)," Ryan recalls, "but often by the time you need support for those things, they're already widely adopted, and it becomes a catch-22. I used to be terribly aggravated by PDFs because, before open source form-filling became possible, I'd have to treat them as static documents, print them out, and then fill out everything by hand. My handwriting is slow, awful, and frequently I would screw something up and have to print it out and start over."

Biden-Trump Town Halls: Corporate left; Corporate rightMilitary-grade corporate propaganda (from companies that literally serve the military in exchange for billions of dollars of taxpayers' money) is something to keep abreast of and always bear in mind. People who support software freedom, just like pro-equality (in the financial sense, not gender or ethnic identity politics) and antiwar politicians, will perpetually be painted as "anti-corporate" "Communists" (or even worse labels, such as "terror sympathisers" or "traitors"). If we're prepared for such propaganda, we'll be more resistant to deception and incitation efforts.

Recent Techrights' Posts

The Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has Un-cancelled the Best People, Just in Time for the Big 4-0
Mr. Oliva should have been there all along (since 2019)
Most "Modern" Technology Makes You Slower and Dumber
Because proprietary software makes you worse off
"What Comes After Free Software?" Wrongly Insinuates We've Reached the Goal (Prison is Not the Goal)
The oil tycoons use similar tactics against environmentalists, giving them fake "wins"
Making More Work Space
I learned the hard way that less is more in circumstances where more means distraction
MAHA is a Lie, Public Officials Never Valued Citizens' Health (They Still Value Private Businesses, Their Sponsors)
Reject demagogues
New Techrights Turns 2
Today starts the third year of the SSG-based Techrights
What Scares Them the Most is Independent News Sites That They Cannot Control and Censor
Wikileaks was a good example of this
If You Don't Control Your Online Platform, Then Someone Else is Controlling You
be (or become) independent
The Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) Has a Policy on Racism and Sexism
In then future we'll show the misogyny and racial slurs
Links 22/09/2025: Murdochs Might Join Fentanylware (TikTok) 'Investors' (Masters), United Kingdom Recognises Palestinian Statehood
Links for the day
 
The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part II - UK SLAPPs for Americans, SLAPPs for Profit
Brett Wilson LLP has a track record of this kind
Mayday: Optus emergency calling crisis
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Links 23/09/2025: Massive Data Breach, Slop Versus Productivity, and Vista 11 Update Breaks Things Again
Links for the day
Code of Censorship
Extortion is peace
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Has a New Press Kit for the Weekend After Next Weekend (40th Anniversary)
miles better than social [sic] media [sic] quips, moderated by narcissists and oil tycoons.
Microsoft Had Two Waves of Mass Layoffs This Month (That We Know of) and It'll Get Worse for Microsoft Soon
Will the axe fall again by month's end?
Gemini Links 23/09/2025: Happy Equinox, Photronic Arts, and Perception Cognition
Links for the day
Lessons We've Learned After 17 Years of American Hosting
GAFAM is "all-in" with the "Trump agenda"
Back to Normal Now, We Plan to Do More In-Depth Series (or Multi-part Stories)
Articles (or series thereof) that contain philosophy are important to us
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Monday, September 22, 2025
IRC logs for Monday, September 22, 2025
Microsoft Media is Panicking Amid Mass Layoffs Every Month, H-1B Fees, and "Seattle’s Tech Scene in Trouble"
In "late stage Microsoft", copyleft becomes proprietary
The Next Wave of IBM/Red Hat Layoffs Being Discussed Already
Red Hat is sort of disappearing the way Tivoli did
Oracle Started This Year With Slop. Then It Stopped.
Passing fads are like this
Distros That Run on PCs Made 20 Years Ago and Don't Use Systemd
Betas for now
The Complaint About Brett Wilson LLP - Part I - Abusing British Women on Behalf of American Men Who Abuse American Women
Transparency is important to us, so we've decided to make this series
Slopwatch: Google News and the Evident Slopfarm Infestation
This is what people get about Linux when they query Google for Linux
Gemini Links 22/09/2025: Esperanto Music History and Apps For Android
Links for the day
Links 22/09/2025: More American 'Censorship' (Retaliation for Journalism), Cheeto "Might Be Losing His Race Against Time"
Links for the day
The Blob Slop
Give me more words, give me some text
The 50-Pound Note Experiment and the "War on Cash"
Britain is actually seeing a rebound in cash payments, and it's not a temporary phenomenon
Slopwatch: Blaming the Victims for Microsoft's Failures and Plagiarising Phoronix
That's what Google has been reduced to: slop and slopfarms
Links 22/09/2025: Breaches, Windows TCO, and Arrests
Links for the day
Gemini Links 22/09/2025: Rabbit Hole and DeGoogling Fairphone
Links for the day
Links 22/09/2025: Russian War Planes Invade NATO Airspace While Dihydroxyacetone Man Escalates Attack on Free Speech Because of Critics
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, September 21, 2025
IRC logs for Sunday, September 21, 2025
Links 21/09/2025: "Hey Hi" (Hype) Under Fire, Fakes Identified; Tesla Burns Family
Links for the day
Google's Software is Malware and Malware in Mobile Devices
Originally posted by Rob Musial
Links 20/09/2025: Hegemony Coming to a Close, Luigi Mangione Ruled Not Terrorist
Links for the day
Gemini Links 21/09/2025: "Charlie Kirk Was a Hateful Piece of Shit" and Slop Code Attempted by Microsofter
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, September 20, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, September 20, 2025