Bonum Certa Men Certa

A Look From the Inside: Open Source Initiative's Voting Process is a Sham, Large Corporations Are in Charge

Video download link | md5sum a054cb54824c30e259b1ff0412d9ee8b OSI Controlled by Billionaires Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0



Summary: The Open Source Initiative (OSI) is dominated by openwashing, self-serving giant corporations that are neither Open Source nor tolerant of the Free/Open Source community (they mostly try to dominate or overthrow the community, using money and smear campaigns)

"STEP ASIDE, Richard Stallman, we'll take it from here!"



"Move over, Bruce Perens, we'll do a much better job! Everything is now Open Source!"

"Go away, ESR, we know better what we're doing. Leave it to the professionals, the rich adults in the room!"

That's the sort of attitude we nowadays see in the OSI, which wasn't always this bad. According to part one of this very long write-up, the voting process too is a sham, and not purely due to technical reasons -- a subject we've covered here many times before.

In the eye of an 'insider', Willis: "So it’s a troubling ballot to look at. There’s an ostensibly non-profit organization that’s an official OSI affiliate trying to run its CEO as an individual candidate while also running a second member (a board director) on the appropriate, affiliate ballot in the same election. There’s also two financial sponsors running candidates on the individual ballot, one of them (Red Hat) running two candidates at the same time for the two open seats."

"The OSI is willing to berate and banish even its own founders. Criticism isn't permitted."LWN has already mentioned this, but there are no comments at this time. "Nathan Willis," LWN says, "took a long look at the Open Source Initiative's 2022 board election and wasn't entirely pleased with what he saw."

If Willis said this about the Linux Foundation, there would be disciplinary action. As we noted recently, the Code of Conduct (CoC) Committee received “2 reports of concern that several CNCF ambassadors were airing grievances about not having talks accepted at the event, which belittled the work of the program committee”.

So merely questioning a process is a CoC violation?

Anyway, this is where we stand now. The OSI is willing to berate and banish even its own founders. Criticism isn't permitted.

"They know who bosses them. The oligarchs bought and paid for both of those institutions, in effect rendering them lobbying apparatuses for the billionaires, who use the Code of Conduct to ban people who criticise them."The OSI is already sold (to Microsoft mostly, as that's where most of the OSI's budget goes). Like the so-called "Linux" (only in name) Foundation, community is now something to be marginalised and "disciplined". The corporations are concern-trolling us. They wait for a reaction and then they attack the community.

The OSI and the so-called "Linux" (only in name) Foundation are broken beyond redemption. They cannot be redeemed anymore because everything in them is controlled by corporate money. Their chiefs are a mix of corporate employees and people hired using corporate money. They know who bosses them. The oligarchs bought and paid for both of those institutions, in effect rendering them lobbying apparatuses for the billionaires, who use the Code of Conduct to ban people who criticise them. Openwashing is being force-fed now. Polluters are "green", proprietary spyware is "open", and racist corporations working for the Pentagon are all about inclusion and diversity (they claim).

LWN says Nathan Willis "wasn't entirely pleased with what he saw." What an understatement! We've not even seen part 2 yet. I express my views on the matter in the video above.

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