11.08.21
Gemini version available ♊︎Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part V — Why Nat Friedman is Leaving GitHub
Series parts:
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part I — Inside a Den of Corruption and Misogynists
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part II — The Campaign Against GPL Compliance and War on Copyleft Enforcement
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part III — A Story of Plagiarism and Likely Securities Fraud
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IV — Mr. MobileCoin: From Mono to Plagiarism… and to Unprecedented GPL Violations at GitHub (Microsoft)
- YOU ARE HERE ☞
Summary: Without giving away any spoilers or teasers, in today’s part we explain one of the more problematic things that Mr. Friedman did, likely ending his 3-year tenure and even ending his whole professional career because of Hubris, stupidity, and insensitivity towards women’s issues
THE last part, Part IV, dealt with one among many GitHub scandals. Days later GitHub's CEO “resigned” (most likely pushed out with a couple of week’s notice). We shall show later in the series that Microsoft had many reasons to dissociate from him as soon as possible, for the same reasons it distanced itself from Bill Gates last year. They’d rather say, “he no longer works for us…” (or, “we already took the appropriate action”)
“We’ll leave all the pertinent details aside until (much) later parts because we’d rather focus on legal and technical issues first.”In today’s part we turn our attention to something we did not plan last week. We sort of leap forward a bit and give a glimpse/preview into what likely led to the downfall of Mr. Friedman, who hired a friend of his from Team Mono. We’ll leave all the pertinent details aside until (much) later parts because we’d rather focus on legal and technical issues first.
Those who read our IRC logs meticulously likely know already that, in the words of one source, “Nat [Friedman] hired a domestic abuser to run Copilot and Codespaces [...] knowingly [and] he’s his best friend and has a widespread reputation for abusing women, sometimes men at work [...] worked at the original Xamarin [...] that’s part of how Nat got the job” (at Microsoft)
The source said “it seemed the point of your article that I came across was the concentration of power through strangling open source [...] my questions is should we putting this power in the hands of someone is historically abusive to women?”
“We’re quite certain that this is one among several contributing factors attributable to the exit of Mr. Friedman, effective next week.”“Miguel de Icaza is more sympathetic to my situation and has been quite open about the character of Nat and Alex, but does not want to speak out publicly,” the source added. “I don’t know what your sympathies are towards feminist causes, but to me this situation speaks volumes to the characters at the helm of Github’s future.”
As we noted here last year, Tom Preston-Werner (co-founder of GitHub) left GitHub after harassment connected to his partner, so there’s a bit of a theme here.
We’re quite certain that this is one among several contributing factors attributable to the exit of Mr. Friedman, effective next week.
In the next part (scheduled for publication on Friedman’s last day) we’ll look at various other scandals and eventually we’ll get around to some of the gory details associated with Copilot, an enabler of GPL violations on a massive scale. █
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