"The Microsoft/GitHub highly controversial contract with ICE makes perfect sense once you understand who runs this company."The exodus of (original) GitHub staff was likely motivated by more than just the ICE contract, which was maybe "the last straw"; the culture inside GitHub was changing and people don't wish to be associated with it. Even this past week we saw job vacancies inside GitHub, indicative of brain drain and an urgent need to fill positions.
Today there's a docket (in court) following the arrest of Copilot's "chief architect", who days ago deleted his Twitter account. He was "generally thinking he's above the law and social norms," one person who knows him has told us. There are countless storyies that show a pattern, but we won't share them all in one single installment because they're of a very diverse nature which merits lots of discussion.
As far as can be determined from my end, he recently deleted/deactivated his Microsoft/LinkedIn account as well.
Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley's LinkedIn account this morning
Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley must be getting anxious...
"Violence against women isn't Mr. Graveley's only abuse."The average person might not be a GitHub user in a development sense (or even a mere downloader), but it's important to recognise the sorts of people Microsoft hires and keeps.
As a reminder, Nat Friedman has pretty much served Microsoft wholeheartedly since the 1990s, usually externally. After he had interned at Microsoft he and Miguel de Icaza were boosting .NET (Ximian), they entered Novell, they helped Microsoft take control of Novell (Miguel de Icaza was personally involved in the Microsoft/Novell patent collusion), then there was CodePlex, there were the Xamarin days, and now Microsoft//GitHub. These people have basically served Microsoft for over 20 years, mostly by infiltrating communities which Microsoft was battling (see the Halloween Documents).
Friedman is an interesting character in its own right. Friedman built quite a network of companies and VCs; Honeycomb, for example, are "also are heavily connected to Nat [Friedman]," a source recently told us, being a "start up with lots of people from the friend group [...] Nat's involved with lots of startups..."
"Friedman himself is a bit of an enigma, aside from some personal photos of his (in Flickr)."It started with Friedman himself; we called them "Team Mono" after they had already made and sold Ximian ("Team Mono or whatever you want to call it," a source has told us, is still "alive and well"). For those who never heard of "Mono", it's basically a Microsoft Trojan horse, designed mostly to undermine the Free software community. We wrote a lot about technical and legal aspects of it. That was ages ago (I was a student back then), so we ought not repeat all that was said and the evidence presented back then. Regarding Mr. Graveley, it's not just some random person hired by Friedman; a source told us that, "from my understanding Alex [Graveley] wasn't even 18 when this stuff started [as he] dropped out of high school at 15 [and] met Nat [Friedman] through an IRC linux channel or something" (he also met Miguel de Icaza there; "on LinuxNet, the IRC network that Friedman had created to discuss Linux," according to Wikipedia).
Friedman himself is a bit of an enigma, aside from some personal photos of his (in Flickr). He worked for Microsoft as an intern (mid 1990s), but little is known beyond that; basic stuff like, "where did he grow up?" Wikipedia sheds no light, either. Our source notes, "he hides that and I wonder why?"
We do know that he worked for Microsoft after and even while studying at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology predators), which is where he obtained a Bachelor's degree. "As an intern at Microsoft Friedman worked on the IIS web server," which was proprietary software; he would then attack Free software through shells and proxies until his big reward (getting cash infusions for worthless companies and then a large salary as CEO of GitHub for 3 years; 29th of October 2018 until last month).
"We do know that he worked for Microsoft after and even while studying at MIT..."I know almost nothing about his personal life except his marriage and nepotism, which will be the subject of a separate part; Stephanie Friedman (née Schatz) benefited a lot from connections and as a social/career climber she would take full advantage.
As we explained a year ago, Friedman never truly believed in software freedom. He just took advantage of it and his latest (recent months) endeavour in GitHub was leveraging people's volunteer work -- under the guise of "hey hi" (AI) -- to encourage licence violations at a massive scale while promoting Visual Studio, which is proprietary software. These toolsets or toolchains (so to speak) were covered here in prior parts, with focus on GPL violations they enable (that's the role of Balabhadra/Alex Graveley).
While we can do a 20-part series or a 30-part series on this topic, we've decided to entirely separate the 'meat' of the story from more personal views and news updates (people have little patience and short memory span, so we need to partition the facts, we need to break down into smaller bits whatever parts we have and carefully determine the order in which they're presented).
"It's good to present hard proof from verifiable sources to avoid unnecessary scrutiny and doubt-shedding by online trolls."Finally, we assure readers that the nature of the sociopathy and the media's failure to report the facts will be the subject of later parts (the media ignoring or gaslighting victims fits at the very end, demonstrating what happened to so-called 'journalism'); we still assemble more evidence. It's good to present hard proof from verifiable sources to avoid unnecessary scrutiny and doubt-shedding by online trolls. We saw Microsoft boosters attempting to do this when confronted with facts about Mr. Graveley. Alex's legal name is Balabhadra Graveley and just to further clarify he is a white man and not Indian despite the sound of his name (because of hippie Hare Khrishna parents).
In the next part we can hopefully show more of the sick nature of Mr. Graveley (after we demonstrate the merit of the claims; verification is sacred to us). The court has him in the docket today, and maybe soon the dock, too. He's being prosecuted. ⬆
