01.31.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVI — The Attack on the Autonomy of Free Software Carries on
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)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part V — Why Nat Friedman is Leaving GitHub
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VI — The Media Has Mischaracterised Nat Friedman’s Departure (Effective Now)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VII — Nat Friedman, as GitHub CEO, Had a Plan of Defrauding Microsoft Shareholders
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley’s Long Career Serving Microsoft’s Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub’s GPL Violations Machine)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IX — Microsoft’s Chief Architect of GitHub Copilot Sought to be Arrested One Day After Techrights Article About Him
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part X — Connections to the Mass Surveillance Industry (and the Surveillance State)
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XI — Violence Against Women
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XII — Life of Disorderly Conduct and Lust
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIII — Nihilistic Death Cults With Substance Abuse and Sick Kinks
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIV — Gaslighting Victims of Sexual Abuse and Violence
- Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XV — Cover-Up and Defamation
- YOU ARE HERE ☞ The Attack on the Autonomy of Free Software Carries on
Summary: In spite of clear misuse of code and of copyrights, some people are trying to export OpenBSD to Microsoft; maybe they’re ill-equipped with facts, so here’s a much-needed (and very timely) discussion of some of the issues at stake
A NUMBER of weeks from now Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley will be in court again (arrest record here). He’s a big part of the attack of Free software — an attack that he has helped his “best friend” (his words) Nat Friedman with. But today we leave Graveley aside and instead focus on the toxic legacy of his work.
As we noted earlier in the series, Graveley enabled plagiarism disguised as “Hey Hi” (AI). Graveley himself has quite a history with plagiarism, as we explained in earlier parts of the series.
“GitHub was never about sharing. It’s about hoarding, controlling and censoring aside.”It’s therefore imperative that all Free software projects think twice or thrice before “mirroring” anything in GitHub; yet more, they might as well be very wise to at least consider removing any existing mirrors. A mirror at GitHub is basically a major legal liability.
GitHub was never about sharing. It’s about hoarding, controlling and censoring aside. It wants to just swallow everything and then add some vendor lock-in such as “Issues” (with uppercase “i”; it’s like a brand, a proprietary extension to Git for bug reports that Microsoft controls and won’t let you export, at least not easily).
We recently grew concerned about efforts by unknown persons to ‘outsource’ OpenBSD to Microsoft or at least make babysteps towards that. As a reminder, Microsoft began offering funding for OpenBSD when the project was desperate for money. This is a well-documented fact and we wrote about it in 2015 when it started [1, 2]. Microsoft started this ‘funnelling’ of cash (a very high level of sponsorship) around the same year "Microsoft loves Linux" started as a ruse to Microsoft hijacking a large chunk of Free software projects by taking over GitHub (which it had started ambushing the prior year). At the moment Microsoft is listed as “Gold: $25,000 to $50,000″ (see “Microsoft Corporation”), but back then it wanted to port parts of OpenSSH to Windows, irrespective of the security lapses and back doors in Windows. As our associate put it, “Microsoft tossed them some chump change; it’s a large sum for openbsd, but for a marketing company [Microsoft] it’s so small an amount that probably no one needed to sign off on it.” Among those who donate to the OpenBSD Foundation we see Gulag (at the top), but at least Gulag isn’t promoting something like Windows or GitHub (proprietary). No project really needs GitHub; it’s just a brand and a trap. Alternatives include Sourcehut, Codeberg, and of course self-hosting with something like Gitea (we’ve coded our own in Gemini Protocol). Also viable but less freedom-oriented are Gitlab and Bitbucket, though our associate is “not sure SourceForge is still worthy” as it had its share of scandals and trust issues.
“As a reminder, the people from Microsoft do not limit themselves to the BSDs.”For Microsoft, any control over any BSD would usher in so-called ‘features’ that would mostly be beneficial to Microsoft and to Windows. There’s already discussion in progress about unwanted features that can add bloat and/or compromise security/readability (those two things are connected; the code can become less elegant and thus a lot more risky).
“We had two Gold contributors in 2020 Camiel Dobbelaar and Microsoft,” says this page in the OpenBSD site.
As a reminder, the people from Microsoft do not limit themselves to the BSDs. They had a go at Linus/Linux as well. Microsoft employees inside the Linux Foundation‘s Board, together with Microsoft operatives inside the media, tried to push Linux towards GitHub about 1.5 years ago (we wrote many articles about it back then).
Torvalds pointed out, albeit not so explicitly, that “contributions” (so-called ‘PRs’) from GitHub would likely come from people who don’t know how to use Git and E-mail, which means that the quality of the code is low and origin/motivation suspect. Didn’t we learn enough already from the University of Minnesota debacle?
“There’s moreover the risk of putting a foot in Microsoft’s doorstep (or vice versa), letting momentum be built up in the wrong platform — a platform you do not actually control, as noted by Blender well before Microsoft had ambushed GitHub (2014) and then bought it (2018).”As a rule of thumb, opening up to more people (when more code does not necessarily mean “better”) isn’t a measure of success, especially if it’s something like a kernel where security is paramount.
There’s moreover the risk of putting a foot in Microsoft’s doorstep (or vice versa), letting momentum be built up in the wrong platform — a platform you do not actually control, as noted by Blender well before Microsoft had ambushed GitHub (2014) and then bought it (2018). Remember what Blender’s ‘daddy’ Ton Roosendaal wrote.
Well, Copilot, as noted in earlier parts (we’ll come to that again some time later) will enable people to plagiarise OpenBSD code without even being aware of it. Don’t forget what Intel did to MINIX code, which was licensed as non-reciprocal. The user-hostile M.E. was secretly crafted using MINIX code; no credit or notice was given.
Thankfully, there’s some resistance to the few entrants who foolishly think “new blood” (not just blood) would come through Microsoft’s proprietary GitHub:
On Fri, Jan 21, 2022 at 11:42:08AM -0600, joshua stein wrote: > Maybe we can do something radical like enable GitHub pull requests > to let people submit changes against the ports repo on GitHub Cringe. I sincerely hope that this doesn't happen. Just look at the typical quality of the projects hosted on GitHub, and you'll see how relying on a set of third-party managed tools to do your work instead of taking the time to learn the basic tools, (tar, diff, an email program, etc), yourself can lead to laziness and poor quality. If people can't be bothered to do things themselves or make their own tools to automate a process, how dedicated are they likely to be? > I believe that the GitHub repo can be configured to also email > ports@openbsd.org on any submissions/comments there, so the mailing > list would still be in the loop on everything for anyone that > doesn't want to use GitHub. So the mailing list is going to be flooded with automated mails from GitHub, that become tedious, leading people to just skim over them or OK them without really reviewing the content. Honestly, I think we all want to keep the quality of the ports tree as high as possible, and if learing to use tar and diff as a barrier to entry for some people is doing that, I suggest we continue as we are.
Here’s more:
On 21/01/22 11:42 -0600, joshua stein wrote: > On Fri, 21 Jan 2022 at 18:29:27 +0100, Marc Espie wrote: > > In my opinion, our main issue is the lack of new blood. > > > > We have chronically fewer people who can give okays than ports waiting. > > > > One big "meta" stuff that needs doing is pointing out (especially from > > new guys) what can be improved in the documentation of the porting process... > > sometimes pointing people in the right direction. > > > > Informal poll: what thing weirded you guys out the first time you touched > > OpenBSD ports coming from other platforms. > > > > What kind of gotcha can we get rid of, so that "new ports" will tend to > > be squeaky clean, infrastructure-wise, and ready for import. > > > > Maybe we'd need an FAQ from people coming from elsewhere explaining the > > main differences to (say) deb, rpm, freebsd ?... > > Using CVS and dealing with tarballs is probably pretty > ancient-feeling for many outsiders. I don't know that more > documentation is really the problem. > > I personally tend to ignore most ports@ emails that aren't diffs I > can easily view in my e-mail client because it's a hassle to save > the attachment, tar -t it to see what its directory structure is, > untar it in the proper place, try to build it, then provide feedback > by copying parts of the Makefile to an e-mail or doing some other > work to produce a diff. > > Maybe we can do something radical like enable GitHub pull requests > to let people submit changes against the ports repo on GitHub, do > review and feedback on those on GitHub, and once it's been approved > by a developer, that developer can do the final legwork of > committing it to CVS and closing the pull request (since we can't > commit directly to the Git repo). > > I believe that the GitHub repo can be configured to also email > ports@openbsd.org on any submissions/comments there, so the mailing > list would still be in the loop on everything for anyone that > doesn't want to use GitHub. > Big NO. We use CVS, deal with it. If you want to help people who are lazy to cvs diff and send an email, write a script that that does a submission for them automatically in a format we prefer. If you want to use git, fine, you can send git diffs to the mailing list. If someone does not have enough brain to figure out how to do things our way then we probably do not want that submission either. On the other hand, I think the issue here is not the version control system or the development method we are using, but the lack of interest or need. The openbsd ports and packages are quiet good compared to others and things just work. There is always room for imrovement of course.
Marc Espie received this reply:
On Fri, 21 Jan 2022 at 18:29:27 +0100, Marc Espie wrote: > In my opinion, our main issue is the lack of new blood. > > We have chronically fewer people who can give okays than ports waiting. > > One big "meta" stuff that needs doing is pointing out (especially from > new guys) what can be improved in the documentation of the porting process... > sometimes pointing people in the right direction. > > Informal poll: what thing weirded you guys out the first time you touched > OpenBSD ports coming from other platforms. > > What kind of gotcha can we get rid of, so that "new ports" will tend to > be squeaky clean, infrastructure-wise, and ready for import. > > Maybe we'd need an FAQ from people coming from elsewhere explaining the > main differences to (say) deb, rpm, freebsd ?... Using CVS and dealing with tarballs is probably pretty ancient-feeling for many outsiders. I don't know that more documentation is really the problem. I personally tend to ignore most ports@ emails that aren't diffs I can easily view in my e-mail client because it's a hassle to save the attachment, tar -t it to see what its directory structure is, untar it in the proper place, try to build it, then provide feedback by copying parts of the Makefile to an e-mail or doing some other work to produce a diff. Maybe we can do something radical like enable GitHub pull requests to let people submit changes against the ports repo on GitHub, do review and feedback on those on GitHub, and once it's been approved by a developer, that developer can do the final legwork of committing it to CVS and closing the pull request (since we can't commit directly to the Git repo). I believe that the GitHub repo can be configured to also email ports@openbsd.org on any submissions/comments there, so the mailing list would still be in the loop on everything for anyone that doesn't want to use GitHub.
They seem to rather conveniently overlook a very big problem; the moment they put their code in GitHub they give Microsoft implicit if not explicit permission to misuse this code. In the case of copyleft/GPL-licensed software, it facilitates widespread GPL violations/infringement of one’s code, without even being aware of it. That’s the dimension (mission creep) added without prior warning some time last year. You cannot opt out. Don’t people take that as a clear warning, universally (irrespective of a project’s licence)?
“They seem to rather conveniently overlook a very big problem; the moment they put their code in GitHub they give Microsoft implicit if not explicit permission to misuse this code.”GitHub needs to go the way of the dodo, not adopted for so-called ‘mass appeal’ (a fallacy; coding isn’t for the masses at the level of kernel).
In the words of our associate, “the e-mail messages are myopically focused on the technical aspects as per the public lists; what is equally important is to observe reuse of Microsoft tactics to disrupt and control” (a subject we wrote about a very long time ago, partly based on internal Microsoft documents).
Our associate concludes that “it is important to highlight the control that self-hosting of version control and bug tracking gives. Also for those that do not want to or cannot self-host, then there are many alternatives which are far better than Microsoft GitHub. See the list from earlier.” █
“A couple of years ago this guy called Ken Brown wrote a book saying that Linus stole Linux from me… It later came out that Microsoft had paid him to do this…”
–Andrew S Tanenbaum, father on MINIX
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