Bonum Certa Men Certa

The Free Software Credibility Index

At some stage it was realised that an index is needed which tells people who to trust on Free software matters.

The scale has 6 notches. 0 means least credible; 5 means most credible.

Independent

Jeff Gould0
Rob Enderle0
Pamela Jones5
Matt Hartley3
David M Williams5
Beranger3
Ken Starks (Helios)5
Sam Varghese5
Michael Gartenberg0
Carla Schroder5
Thom Holwerda2
Nicholas Petreley5
Vichar Bhatt (E@zyVG)4
Roland Wolters (Liquidat)4
Bob Cringely (pseudonym)3
Mike Dailey0

Information Week

Information Week2
Alex Wolfe0
Paul McDougal1
Charles Babcock2
Serdar Yegulalp3
John Foley2

Analysts

Gartner Group1
IDC1
JupiterResearch0
Frost and Sullivan1
Forrester1
Yankee Group0
Burton Group1
451 Group4
Dennis Byron1
Katherine Egbert1

Linux.com/SourceForge

Bruce Byfield3
Robin Miller3
Tina Gasperson4
Lisa Hoover4
Joe Barr4
Mayank Sharma4

Jupitermedia

Brian Proffitt4
Amy Newman4

ZDNet

ZDNet News (including Australia, Asia, UK)2
Peter Judge4
Mary Jo Foley2
Adrian Kingsley-Hughes1
Dana Blankenhorn4
Ed Bott0
Paul Murphy (pseudonym)2
Marc Wagner0
George Ou0


Security Firms

Symantec3
Secunia1
McAfee0


Miscellaneous



Fox2
CNN1
BBC2
Heise4
Fortune2
David Kirkpatrick1
Tim Berners-Lee4
New York Times2
NBC0
PCWorld/IDG2
Paul Krill4
Shane O'Neill0
Savio Rodrigues2
Zach Urlocker3
InfoWorld2
LinuxWorld4
Timothy Prickett Morgan4
Gavin Clarke1
Kelly Fiveash1
Dan Goodin3
Maureen O'Gara0
MilkingTheGNU (Pierre)5
Caitlyn Martin4
Nick Farrell/Inquirer1
Charlie Demerjian3
Egan Orion4
Preston Gralla0
David Ramel1
Neil McAllister2
Mike Elgan2
Techworld2
Manek Dubash1
Glyn Moody5
Doc Searls4
Eric Lai2
ComputerWorld3
OStatic3
Techcrunch2
Erwin Oliva/Inquirer.net1
David Pearce1
M. Tim Jones (Emulex)5
Rodney Gedda4
Jim Finkle1
Dan Lyons1
Var Guy (JP)2
Penguin Pete3
Gregg Keizer2
Paula Rooney4
Tim Anderson1
Susan Linton5
Andy Updegrove5
The Register2
Ashlee Vance2
Andrew Orlowski1
Gordon Haff2
Matt Aslett5
Don Parris5
Ben Worthen0
Todd Weiss3
Jay Lyman4
Motley Fool1
Jim Zemlin3
Amanda McPherson3
Jonathan Corbet5
Danijel Orsolic5
Rick Lehrbaum (DeviceGuru/LinuxDevices)4
Henry Kingman (LinuxDevices)4
Don Marti5
Jeremy Allison5
Richard Stallman5
Bruce Perens5
John Fontana3
Falko Timme5
Oliver Meyer5
Michael Tiemann5

Paul Allen's C|Net

CNET2
Ina Fried1
Matt Asay3
Dave Rosenberg3
Martin LaMonica2
Stephen Shankland4


Ziff Davis

eWeek3
Steven Vaughan5
Joe Wilcox2
Jason Brooks3
Peter Galli2


2012 Update

Mixed List

Darryl K. Taft2
Zack Whittaker (formerly Microsoft UK)1
Matt Rosoff0
Lance Whitney1
Florian Müller0
Jack Wallen4
Jono Bacon4
Neil Richards5
Swapnil Bhartiya5
Mark Shuttleworth4
Linus Torvalds4
Michael Larabel4
Ted Tso3
Jon Gold0


Recent Techrights' Posts

Links 16/02/2026: Barack Obama Responds to Racist Cheeto and Benjamin Mako Hill Studies Online Communities
Links for the day
IBM Reduces the Thresholds for Acceptance (and the Salaries)
Are chatbots good enough as IBM staff?
When It Comes to Rust, Keep All the Eyes on the Ball (Technical and Legal Perils, Sustainability Questions)
It's not about security or politics
Social Control Media is Just a Digital Weapon
Social control media is not social and not media
 
The Southern California Linux Expo (“SCALE”) or SCALE 23x Becomes Microsoft
It's not supporting the event, it is buying it.
Where Microsoft's Bing Cannot Even Reach 1% "Market Share"
Looking at "I" countries
Microsoft to Focus on Name-Dropping Buzzwords to Distract From Declining Business, IBM RAs (Layoffs) With Staff Stack-Ranked
Calling everything cloud or reclassifying as "AI"
Another EPO Strike One Week From Now, Local Staff Committee Munich to Discuss It This Week
Campinos MIA while Office staff goes on strike at least 4 times
Gemini Links 16/02/2026: Task Completed by Avoidance and "Playing Again With Akkoma"
Links for the day
Happy Birthday (or Anniversary) to SoylentNews
"Happy Birthday SoylentNews"
Techrights' Architecture
Stability is the main goal
Linux Foundation Continues Falling Off a Cliff in Geminispace
Gemini Protocol will turn 7 this summer
Links 16/02/2026: cURL’s Daniel Stenberg Asserts That Slop is DDoSing Free Software, But Still Uses a Plagiarism and GPL-Violating Blender (Microsoft GitHub)
Links for the day
The Techrights Community Never Needed Money, Only Goodwill
We accomplish things by a track record of suppressed facts
"AboutCode" is a Microsoft Proxy and Microsoft's Acquisition of the OSI Advances Via OSI Moles
presenting direct evidence anybody can verify
They Will Call Smart People "Luddites"
Is society "seeing the light"?
Microsoft Amutable Already Reveals That Its Focus Is Not Linux, It'll Promote "Remote Attestation"
This is basically an attack on Software Freedom, even if they toss around the brand "Linux"
More People in Chad Move to GNU/Linux
Last year we began to see GNU/Linux rising there - a trend which continues this year
Dr. Andy Farnell on How Universities and Culture of Education Got Crushed by "Technofascist Nightmare"
Farnell says he "already soft-quit in [his] mind"
Debt of Broadcom Grew by More Than 50%, Broadcom is Deeper in Debt Than Google
Expect many more cuts
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Sunday, February 15, 2026
IRC logs for Sunday, February 15, 2026
Links 15/02/2026: Slop, Politics, and Gemini
Links for the day
Small is Beautiful (in Cascading Style Sheets/Inheritance Rules)
If done correctly, pages can take a tenth of a second to fully load
Microsoft Has Fallen to New Lows in Hong Kong This Year
That Windows "market share" falls there is perhaps expected
Free Software Foundation (FSF) Raised About 1.5 Million Dollars This Winter, Almost 50% More Than in All of 2024 Combined
Verbal advocacy goes a long way
Spread the Word About EPO Strikes and Patent Injustices in Europe
Corruption in Europe is a real thing
The Register MS is Promoting Slop, Promotion Connected to Microsoft (Trying to Replace Judges With Microsoft)
marketing spun as "science"
He Did Not Have Enough Souls
A lot of the subjects we cover here no other site dares touch
"Mix Vale" is a Slopfarm
3 "articles" about "ubuntu"
Links 15/02/2026: Roy Medvedev Dead at 100, Rise of "YouTube Politicians"
Links for the day
Links 15/02/2026: How Alexey Navalny Was Executed by Putin, Erdogan Helping Iran
Links for the day
IBM Fedora Keeps Promoting Slop, Red Hat Has Been Turned Into Chaff and Trash to Help IBM's Stock (With "AI" Storytelling)
Red Hat's Fedora is an old brand (20+ years). It no longer stands for what it meant to people in the Fedora Core days (I was a Fedora user back then).
What IBM Said About 2026 Layoffs and What's Happening in Practice
t'll leave IBM at the very bottom, in due course (customers will notice something profound has changed)
Gemini Links 15/02/2026: "Already Midway February" and Loadbars Remembered
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 14, 2026
IRC logs for Saturday, February 14, 2026
Microsoft's Bing Down to 0.5% in Armenia
Microsoft does not want shareholders to see this
Libel by Bots: Unexplored Legal Area?
Liability can be traced back to the operator
Maybe Obvious, But Merits Repeating: A Lot of "Demand" for Slop is Faked, Manufactured, Fabricated by Dark Patterns, Bundling, Media PR (Deception/Hype) Campaigns
Over the past few years many products and services got rebranded as "AI"
xAI and X (Twitter) Live on Borrowed Time, It'll Get a Lot Worse Fast
Being associated with a child porn site formerly known as "Twitter" is odorous to say the least
Microsoft is Lobbying Brussels via Opensource.org and OSI
The new (GAFAM) management at OSI is not serving the OSI's original mission
Will Lockett's Newsletter: Microsoft became Microslop and Windows users are "flocking" to GNU/Linux "to escape the mess"
"Users are fed up and jumping ship from Windows to Mac or Linux. In fact, it appears that Windows has lost 400 million users since 2022!"
Photographic Collections
There are going to be over 100,000 JPEG, PNG, and GIF files by the time we turn 20
Norway Curbs Social Control Media as It Harms Norway's Society
A decrease from 11% to just 1.87% is possible to reason about
Accomplishments of Our Community
Why I enjoy writing in Techrights
Microsoft Invented a Slop CEO ("AI CEO") Because Real Interest in Slop is Waning, So It's Just Faking Its Prominence
It's noise
Google Promoting Slop, Not Journalism
The truth of the matter is, Google is part of this problem and it doesn't seem to care
Another IBM Company (Spawned by IBM) is Hiding the Scale of Layoffs, Just Like Red Hat and Kyndryl
Why is the scale of the layoffs there shrouded in secrecy?
Links 14/02/2026: Financial Woes in Hong Kong and "Hong Kong Journalists Face ‘Precarious’ Future After Jimmy Lai Jailed"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: Fish Shell and Meta Slash-commands
Links for the day
Links 14/02/2026: "Bias and Toxicity in" Slop, Microsoft's Vista 11 System Update Breaks Systems Again
Links for the day
Links 14/02/2026: "Suppression of Free Speech" and "Climate Change Puts Winter Games on Thin Ice"
Links for the day
EPO "Cocaine Communication Manager" - Part I - Getting the Word Out About What the 'Alicante Mafia' Did to Europe's Second-Largest Institution
Can't everyone in the European media agree that letting cokeheads run Europe's second-largest institution is a terrible idea?
Richard Stallman in the United States - Part I - Huge Audience (Offline and Online), 'Cancel Culture' Attempted and Failed
the comeback of Richard Stallman (RMS) in the United States
GitHub Cannot Survive for Much Longer
Microsoft is trying to just hide the debt
Ed Zitron: Microsoft Is A Decaying Empire That Bet The Future On Making In Excess Of $500 Billion In New Revenue Within The Next 4 To 6 Years From AI — And It Hasn’t Made A Dime In Profit Yet
Microsoft bets its future on a bunch of nothing
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 13, 2026
IRC logs for Friday, February 13, 2026
Gemini Links 14/02/2026: "Throwback VR Headset" and OFFLFIRSOCH 2026
Links for the day