Bonum Certa Men Certa

Too Much Noise and/or Distraction and General Loss of Focus (on the Real and Urgent Issues, Such as the Ongoing Anti-FSF 'Coup')

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Summary: The media is full of Microsoft fluff and technical blog posts still focus on the Freenode fiasco, among other things that don't matter all that much; but we certainly need to talk about steps undertaken to undermine the FSF's power because long-term ramifications may be huge

THIS past week, especially the past few days, may have seemed rather turbulent. Microsoft has resorted to vapourware (they really could use a distraction from all the scandals, which extend to and include Bill Gates) and many projects that rely on IRC are (or were) still on Freenode, so there's a big debate about what happened and what to do next.



"It's about giving more control to monopolies."Sadly, I worry that many people lost sight of what GNU C Library (glibc) and GNU Portability Library (gnulib) are doing -- a subject we covered here before. There are efforts to weaken the FSF, in effect giving more control (over GNU projects) to companies such as IBM. We're talking about this at this very moment in IRC. There's a lot at stake because licensing and copyright assignments are a very big deal from a legal perspective. As somebody put it this week, "MsPL has a clause added specifically and only to make it incompatible with the GPL and related licenses." It's about giving more control to monopolies. ⬆

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