04.16.20

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Put Your Hands Up in the Air (Surrender to Microsoft)

Posted in Deception, Microsoft at 5:52 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Free GitHub. Raise your hand if you feel free.

Summary: This week the media heralds to us that GitHub is “Free” (because Microsoft calls its proprietary software prison just that); but it’s as free as or “Free” in the same sense slavery was “free shelter”

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A Single Comment

Canta said,

April 16, 2020 at 12:34 pm

This week I’ve received an email from github. It said that I can now have private repositories without having to pay for it. Put that with all the “open source communities are toxic” articles we’ve been seeing around from about one or two years now, and we all know what will follow in terms of culture: nothing good for free software.

This is something that bothers me about the anti-GAFAM popular rethoric I see everywhere: it seems to focus mostly on “they have your data, and can do whatever you what with it”. Which, don’t get me wrong, is serious stuff. But I believe doesn’t focus enough in “this is enabling a very crappy culture”.

I still encounter people that talk to me about “Visual Studio Code” goodies as if they where irreplazable disruptive novelties, explaining to me that they choose VSCode for that reason, when 99.9% of the cases I can do all of that stuff with Geany (which I use on a daily basis for everything) on a Pentium 3 since ~2008 and they don’t even know what software I’m talking about. That’s not people looking for functionalities: it’s people getting on with the culture of their peers. The same happens with all the “toxic” talk, and the not-so-new problem with centralization of open source repositories: they talk a lot about “functionalities” (even in terms of “how does this community works”), and not in term of “principles” (which involves ethics).

GAFAM doesn’t (just) “steal our data” or “break our privacy”, and Microsoft is not (just) “bad/evil/bloated/expensive/ripped software”: they’re culture crackers. This is about power, politics, ethics, and sustainability, and not (just) about functionalities or easyness of use. And sometimes I feel the anti-GAFAM front could do better on that.

No idea how to fix it, just wanted to complain.