Bonum Certa Men Certa

History of Software From Minsk (SaM), Belarus by Proxy

Video download link | md5sum b2582a7f369824cd9e78519aa4cff764 Who Made SaM Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: Essential EPO work has been outsourced to Belarus by Benoît Battistelli and now António Campinos, Battistelli's friend, has the audacity to claim the EPO has moral high ground (while funneling EPO funds to Belarus)

TODAY we've finished covering about a third of the series, which started this past Saturday, almost exactly two months after Putin had invaded Ukraine with help from Lukashenko (who isn't particularly popular in Belarus but is ruling by force just like Putin). The video above says a few things not covered in Part 5. Those are mostly personal thoughts.



Here are the first 5 parts for some further context:

  1. From Belarus With Love — Part I: Schizophrenic EPO Policy
  2. From Belarus With Love — Part II: “Techwashing” an Autocratic Regime?
  3. From Belarus With Love — Part III: Apps From the Dictatorship
  4. From Belarus With Love — Part IV: “Software from Minsk” via Gilching and Rijswijk
  5. From Belarus With Love — Part V: From Start-Up to Success Story...


There's a lot more to come. Tomorrow we'll show or explain what Lukashenko means to Belarus.

Benoît Battistelli and LukaThere are commonalities or similarities to the EPO, where almost 0% of the staff trusts the President (it was just 3% two years ago).

There's an important staff survey going on (with deadline ending this coming Friday; hopefully almost everyone will participate). In Belarus, like in the EPO, opinion polls that aren't controlled by the dictator became de facto verboten because they helped disprove the "rule by consent" delusion; in the EPO's case, staff that helped with polls got mentally tortured by Battistelli's 'Stasi' -- to the point of breakdown.

Lukashenko isn't just a name; Lukashenko is a modus operandi.

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