11.05.21
Gemini version available ♊︎EFF Has Been Hijacked, and Just Like Mozilla and the Linux Foundation It Doesn’t Fight for What It Was Originally Made to Achieve
Video download link | md5sum 3dcd8fde06e9f18238d3e50f3a9252c5
Summary: Institutions too frightened or hesitant (or simply compromised) to pursue their original goals are doomed to perish; EFF seems to have “joined the club”
IT really pains me to say this, but the EFF isn’t an organisation I feel safe to support anymore as it is culling the people who I’ve long argued keep the EFF honest, sometimes. It looks like “reformist” (mainstream/conformist) elements are taking over, turning revolutionary collectives into corporate shills.
Take for example the Microsoft-serving Linux Foundation; it’s all about money and it's good at losing money. It pays massive salaries to people who undermine Linux itself. They just use the “Linux” brand to enrich themselves.
These are the same people who had Linus Torvalds sent to therapists and forced to write an apology (on the face of it this was imposed, not really willful, as a condition to him getting back to his very own project!) and we’re meant to think this is perfectly normal because of corporate trolls.
“They just use the “Linux” brand to enrich themselves.”At the same time, as we noted here back in April, today’s EFF is shilling Microsoft proxies, giving EFF awards to Microsoft employees, and viciously attacking Richard Stallman for political reasons. Several hours ago Dr. Stallman wrote: “Cancellationists seek universal support for their political stances, not by convincing everyone that they are right, but by bullying everyone who states any doubts.”
They don’t even attack their target based on technical grounds; they look for some phony pretexts and sometimes distort the facts to get people online riled up, demanding removal based on misunderstandings, misinterpretation, or selective (narrow) focus.
To me, personally, the last straw was the EFF removing its co-founder John Gilmore with face-saving spin like “Board Member Emeritus”. They’re fine with truly troubling people inside the Board, but not the person who founded the whole thing! In the Linux Foundation pretty much every single Board member is an employee of a proprietary software company!
“In the Linux Foundation pretty much every single Board member is an employee of a proprietary software company!”In the video above I use Mozilla/Firefox as an example or as an analogy that’s timely. They’ve used similar tactics. Cancellationists (to borrow Stallman’s term) removed a technical leader for political reasons, putting in his place the people who abandoned Mozilla’s “open Web” vision, choosing instead to put DRM in the browser (Brendan Eich openly opposed this) and putting people from Microsoft inside their board. If Google wanted to slowly diminish Mozilla to nothing (that’s cheaper for Google, which pays based on the number of Firefox users), that would be beneficial to Google.
People like Jim "Open Source loves Microsoft" Zemlin and Mrs. Baker aren’t geeks, but they’re being put in positions of power, just like the EFF’s Cohn. The EFF’s IRS filings in the coming years (after the death of Barlow) will be interesting to read. Their donors gave them a lot of money, but whose agenda will be served?
To quote our Ryan, who is gay, “homophobe turned also proprietary browser vendor with DRM based on Chromium pushing crypto to crackpots.”
“Google sees this thing of making Mozilla rely on them as attrition. Every year they pay them a ridiculous amount of money to keep them hooked on the money while they lose more users. Eventually they just stop paying them any money and let what’s left of Mozilla die off. If they defy Google, they get cut off now. So they keep doing what Google wants and feeding on the trough, knowing Firefox is a dead end. It’s possible someone can come and fork the state of Firefox when Mozilla goes under and turn it back into a community project. It used to operate more like one. What scares the hell out of companies like Microsoft and Google, although they would never admit it openly, are communities. Because it’s easier to corrupt a corporation. You just go to the corporation and talk their language, money.” █
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