06.19.20
Gemini version available ♊︎2 Years After Microsoft Hijacked GitHub for Monopoly Fedora Still Has Well Over 100 Projects in Microsoft’s GitHub (Not Even Counting Red Hat’s and Systemd)
Summary: The Fedora project will fail to attract participants if it continues being some kind of hostage of Microsoft and proponent of vendor lock-in; we take a quick look at where this project stands today
THIS thing called “PLANET FEDORA” has been pretty much dead lately. Almost nothing there, except some Red Hat staff (one needs to be familiar with the names; affiliations undisclosed), a few postings in Arabic, status updates about everything being offline amid datacente migrations, and links to Microsoft’s GitHub (to alert people about releases/updates). It wasn’t like that a number of years ago. I know it wasn’t as I followed it closely, every day, for a very long time.
Will volunteers be willing to work for free for IBM (through Fedora)? News reports say IBM plans to lay off thousands in 5 states, including North Carolina (NC) where Red Hat is based. A victim of IBM’s takeovers once told me that based on his analysis every time IBM buys a company it waits two years before laying off people and canning projects/products. Two years he told me, naming half a dozen examples. The Red Hat takeover goes back to autumn of 2018.
“Will volunteers be willing to work for free for IBM (through Fedora)? News reports say IBM plans to lay off thousands in 5 states, including North Carolina (NC) where Red Hat is based.”The GitHub issue quite frankly bothers me the most. They’re supposed to compete with Microsoft and Windows. I have long examined and commented on it publicly. I really underestimated just to what degree Fedora had been ‘outsourced’ to Microsoft. Fedora Infrastructure alone has 124 repos in Microsoft’s GitHub, IBM’s and Red Hat’s stuff not included (or even Systemd, which has its own dedicated account). What proportion of the code is now controlled, ‘owned’ and surveilled by Microsoft?
Less than a day ago Phoronix wrote about Red Hat and modularity. Systemd wasn’t mentioned (it’s an attack on modularity, it’s vendor lock-in too). To quote Michael Larabel’s polite post, “Red Hat continues to invest in the modularity concept for packaging and will be embracing it “where it most makes sense” for Red Hat Enterprise Linux 9. [...] Fedora Modularity has been getting better, but it still has some criticism and open issues from both users and the developers/packagers. Red Hat though is continuing to invest in it and recently shifted the Modularity effort off to a new development team.”
“Nice “Open Source” company you got there… with proprietary hosting and no vendor neutrality when it comes to core parts of the system (which became just systemd).”“Modularity” is even capitalised now. See above. Have they trademarked it yet?
Aren’t they being consciously cynical and ironic? Systemd eliminated compatibility with many things, reducing modularity like no other thing in GNU/Linux history. Moreover, to participate in Red Hat/Fedora as a developer (technical capacity) they nowadays expect people to set up an account with Microsoft.
Nice “Open Source” company you got there… with proprietary hosting and no vendor neutrality when it comes to core parts of the system (which became just systemd). Thanks for the laugh, Red Hat. Get better soon. █
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