07.27.19
Microsoft’s Takeover of GitHub Already an Attack on the Four Freedoms in Service of Empire
Microsoft’s institutional racism/xenophobia in GitHub is showing; censorship is nowadays based not on actions or views of pertinent users but their country of birth/origin.
Summary: Microsoft’s source of shame is spreading; this vicious corporation may have become the world’s most racist technology company and this racism of Microsoft is now impacting even the Free/Open Source software (FOSS) world through GitHub
RACISM at Microsoft is a very big problem. We wrote more than a dozen articles about it over the years. Sexism is also rife and rampant and some lawsuits against Microsoft (over sexism) used Techrights for evidence, which was mentioned in these lawsuits. Microsoft likes to project these despicable things onto FOSS, accusing the alternative to Microsoft (namely Free software) of the very negative things Microsoft itself is guilty of. That’s more or less like Donald Trump trying to paint his critics as "racist".
Microsoft’s deep connection to the nation’s most imperialistic agencies and even racist agencies isn’t an hypothesis but a fact. Microsoft started PRISM with the NSA and months later it added Skype to it, shortly after it had paid many billions for the European company. Later we’ll come to ICE, the Pentagon, and agencies that are literally violent.
“Microsoft’s deep connection to the nation’s most imperialistic agencies and even racist agencies isn’t an hypothesis but a fact.”This morning (yes, a weekend) quite a few people link to CBS tabloid ZDNet, mentioned by Linux Foundation a few hours later with this GitHub page that says:
My GitHub account has been restricted due to US sanctions as I live in Crimea.
Microsoft is an imperialistic censorship platform and it recently did a ‘morality police’-type censorship of FOSS, as we noted in this article, deleting FOSS based on ‘taste’ or corporate agenda. Now there’s this:
Kashkin uses GitHub to host his website and GameHub, a launcher for Linux systems that combines games from Steam, GOG, and Humble Bundle in a single user interface.
Kashkin says GitHub advised him this week that it had restricted his account, pointing to its page about US trade controls, which lists Crimea, Cuba, Iran, North Korea, and Syria as countries facing US sanctions.
So they discriminate not only based on the project but based on the developer’s nation (not even the developer himself/herself). How is that not racist? Microsoft’s monopoly is fast becoming an extension of US imperialism/exceptionalism, so no wonder the US government passes military budget to Microsoft by the billions. GitHub is yet another imperialistic tentacle, this one gripping/gnawing at FOSS through repositories (GitHub is also used for openwashing of Microsoft’s lock-in tool whose sole purpose is to render developers stuck with Microsoft). It’s just the latest among several ‘shotgun weddings’.
“There’s plenty of money at stake. 10,000 million dollars.”Let’s remember that it’s Microsoft which commits very serious crimes and then bans from GitHub those who committed no crimes at all. Is it because Microsoft is racist and obscenely partisan? Microsoft’s institutional racism/xenophobia in GitHub is based not on actions of pertinent users but their country of birth/origin. Nationalism and racism by Trump’s facilitators isn’t a problem that will simply ‘go away’. It’s just too hard to ignore the Microsoft profits (which it publicly brags about) from carpet-bombing imperialism/military projects (“JEDI”), concentration camps and crimes against children (putting them in cages). Bill Gates and the rest of Microsoft’s Board (which Gates dominates) selected a guy from India to represent the company; as if that alone can ‘prove’ that they cannot possibly be racist! Microsoft is nowadays a facilitator of this administration’s racism (Gates and Trump are friends) and a foreign-looking CEO cannot mask that.
Is Microsoft ‘playing ball’ for the Pentagon a way of signaling that it wants to be ‘bailed out’ by “JEDI” (military budget)? A sign of blind loyalty? If so, to whom? There’s plenty of money at stake. 10,000 million dollars. █
“I think he [Bill Gates] has a Napoleonic concept of himself and his company, an arrogance that derives from power and unalloyed success, with no leavening hard experience, no reverses [...] They don’t act like grown-ups!”
–Judge Thomas Penfield Jackson
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