The poor if not utterly appalling attitude of IBM, an arrogant strategy which wrongly assumes that IBM is "too big to fail", is definitely going to fail IBM; many people already leave in droves (an exodus, never mind the layoffs), making recovery or rebound improbable and maybe infeasible.

"Isn't it funny that the same companies which are working hard to ban/remove the word "master" are themselves treating people -- even volunteers -- like slaves (with masters being those conceited, self-righteous companies)?"Last week we wrote about Fedora blacklisting Persians; several other people have pointed out the same thing, albeit in harsher terms than ours (comparing Fedora/IBM to Hitler, which means suppressed IBM truths). As a matter of policy, Techrights cannot recommend GNU/Linux distros from IBM anymore; RHEL 8-based distros/clones are OK and the same is true for Arch Linux, Debian, Gentoo etc. (not Ubuntu though) because those who master the distros matter more than the underlying technical details. Isn't it funny that the same companies which are working hard to ban/remove the word "master" are themselves treating people -- even volunteers -- like slaves (with masters being those conceited, self-righteous companies^*)?

This morning we published "5 Months Later People Still Remove Their Names From the Slanderous Anti-RMS Petition, Managed by IBM Staff" (related to "IBM is NOT a Friend of Free Software"). We've added this to examples of IBM "Attacking Communities/Volunteers" examples (see our IBM wiki). It's mostly visual with names occluded (it's nothing personal!) because the paymaster is what matters. A lot of people do what they're told by their bosses because they want to pay the bills (or a massive mortgage they should never have taken in the first place).

"The severe issues associated with staff morale cannot be overcome; it's years too late already and the attacks on the founder of GNU/Linux are going to make it very difficult to hire geeks."Today we discuss the defamatory letter crafted more than 5 months ago by IBM-funded front groups that still want to weaken the Free Software Foundation by taking away its founder and its copyrights (GNU Project copyright assignments) because IBM -- unlike Red Hat -- does not seem to understand how copyleft works (which would help explain the self-harming decision to abandon CentOS users). Based on what IBM and insiders write anonymously online, IBM has no future, only lots more layoffs. It has a very severe staff retention crisis and it is unable to recruit the necessary talent. IBM, once the sole giant of computing, is now worth less than AMD and SAP; it's trying to split the company to manufacture an illusion of growth (profitability has been down by about 50% in the past half a decade alone), but that's just classic 'creative accounting' (shuffling the buckets -- same thing Microsoft does). The severe issues associated with staff morale cannot be overcome; it's years too late already and the attacks on the founder of GNU/Linux are going to make it very difficult to hire geeks. Yes, geeks aren't stupid and many view those attacks as collective.

In the video we walk through some recent discussions about the company (mostly existing and former staff in thelayoff.com) since the media is failing to report on these things. It's too busy looking for corporate sponsors instead of covering corporate abuse, including deception. Due to the scale of IBM (historically), there are still loads of "ex-IBM" folks out there; some of them worry about their IBM pensions and remember fondly some of the things IBM did actually invent (mostly hardware). But that IBM is long gone and now it's mostly a financial manipulation instrument in service of managers and grifters, not engineers. IBM's President Jim Whitehurst left the company and went back to his home state; he could see the writings on the wall...

"The attack on Stallman came less than a year later, coinciding with a Bill Gates scandal at MIT (he, unlike Stallman, was actually very closely connected to Jeffrey Epstein)."For quite some time now IBM has been trying to privatise GNU and Linux so as to make volunteers' hard work their own monopoly (of course they will fail, but they still try!). Microsoft has been trying the same when it bought GitHub. One source of ours has insinuated for more than a couple of years that the attacks which led to Torvalds' removal from his own project (to see therapists) was caused by IBM-connected media and this was likely motivated by an effort to reduce the buying price of Red Hat (the time of those two events was almost the same; there was overlap), but the source was unable to verify this with 'smoking gun'-type evidence. The attack on Richard Stallman came less than a year later, coinciding with a Bill Gates scandal at MIT (he, unlike Stallman, was actually very closely connected to Jeffrey Epstein). ⬆ _____ ^* ZDNet, which kept telling us "master" as a word is offensive, published "Master" in its headline only moments ago (very first word in the headline). They keep putting their hypocrisy and double standards up on display.