12.18.22
Gemini version available ♊︎Linux Foundation: Monopolies Versus Monopolies, Always at the Expense of Communities of Volunteers
Video download link | md5sum e76bf04a018fc14e649df5eb0f66efc4
LF Monopolies
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0
Summary: The Linux Foundation continues to privatise the Commons or basically turn community-developed work into corporate “assets”
THE vast majority of the public does not understand that “Linux Foundation” has very little to do with Linux (a very minuscule portion of its budget is in fact devoted to Linux). Put another way, Linux Foundation just exploits the powerful Linux brand to sell its openwashing (PR) services.
The Linux Foundation is hardly new to us. We’ve been covering it since its birth in 2007 (not 2000 as Wikipedia erroneously claims) and wrote about 500 articles about it. In more recent years things got a lot worse. The Foundation was actively helping Microsoft against Linux and against activists for patent reform (e.g. abolishing software patents). This Foundation is financially connected to Microsoft also through the Zemlin family, which engages in fraud [1, 2, 3].
Over the past couple of days we’ve gathered nearly a dozen headlines and articles about a new Microsoft-, Facebook-, and Amazon-led front group. It’s being falsely described in the media as “Linux” and TomTom is only sometimes mentioned as a participant. The “journalism” about this has been so shallow (it boils down to parroting really) that it can easily qualify as misinformation, as the video above explains. As Ryan said in IRC a few moments ago (in reference to this shoddy ‘journalism’): “An operating system kernel teams up with its partners to kill Google Maps!” MinceR said that “someone suggested that this might be aimed at killing OSM [OpenStreetMap] [...] knowing the “Linux” Foundation, it sounds entirely plausible.” He called it “Alliance of Monopolists in the Defense of Monopoly”.
A rename of the Linux Foundation is long overdue. The same is true for FSFE.
“The “journalism” about this has been so shallow (it boils down to parroting really) that it can easily qualify as misinformation, as the video above explains.”The video reminds people what the OSI’s cofounder Bruce Perens said about the Linux Foundation — a trade association that shuns the community (people who built GNU/Linux) whilst proactively wooing Microsoft.
Nowadays, in this age of “Microsoft loves Linux” (lie) the misinformation writes itself and then reposts itself across the Web. We’ve found many headlines that say “Linux” instead of Linux Foundation and we need “to correct those headlines,” an associate has remarked. “The Linux Foundation, despite the name, does not represent or advance Linux but instead represents corporate interests inside Linux. It has had a hostile, antagonistic relation with the community since disposing of community representation back in 2016,” this associate has noted. It “then gave a voice to Linux’s most aggressive competitor *on the board of directors*” (we covered this before). █
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