Bonum Certa Men Certa

opensource.com/opensource.net Hiding How Dead They Truly Are After Mass Layoffs at IBM/Red Hat

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 05, 2023,
updated Oct 05, 2023

IBM Thinkpad T20

THERE is a curious story nobody talks about; we've alluded to it in recent weeks [1, 2] in response to spin from the Open Source Initative (OSI).

IBM is betraying the Free Software and/or "Open Source" community, but it doesn't want the public or any Red Hat clients to notice. Being community-hostile is bad for business, especially when many high-profile clients (millions of dollars in budgeted contracts) rely on community-developed code, such as GNU.

To give the gist of the story or some short background, IBM killed a high-profile site about 14 years after Red Hat had founded and ran it (they used the word "supported"). That didn't even surprise us; I've publicly said for years that this was only a matter of time.

Now they claim that some site with an entirely different domain will 'continue' the site. But the former (new) domain starts at 0, whereas the latter got shelved. So whose "brilliant" idea was it? It's like they try to intentionally limit its visibility and reach. Yes, it's doomed to fail right from the very start!

Looking at the new site this morning, they do not advertise an RSS feed (despite WordPress coming with it out of the box; for nearly 20 years already!) and they go out of their way to advertise Microsoft LinkedIn (proprietary), which makes sense because Microsoft controls today's OSI and uses the OSI to lobby for GitHub (proprietary) and shill OSI in LinkedIn. As a reminder, OSI controls this new site now (the word "supported" is used) and OSI staff is too busy to care about it, too busy promoting and defending GPL violations for Microsoft (perfuming those code plagiarism mountains as "HEY HI" as recently as weeks ago).

An RSS feed for the site generally exists, but it is hidden and only possible to obtain from the page source (raw HTML), unless one is good at guessing WordPress URLs (defaults). The RSS feed shows posts in order of age and it doesn't look too good. Of course many won't see this (almost nobody knows how to do this).

From what we are able to gather, they completely abandoned all the followers of opensource.com (RSS, social control media etc.) and they seem to have posted only about one article per week (opensource.com published about a dozen a week for many years).

Does the OSI try to give an illusion of magnitude to the "new" site (opensource.net)? All the articles lack a date on them, the URL structure intentionally obscures the date (they chose a URL scheme very different from opensource.com's) and the front page has no chronological timeline, just "Highlights" and "Resources" (at the bottom of individual posts it has "Trending").

To me it seems rather obvious or at least highly probable and extremely likely they try to hide how dead the site truly is, lacking an RSS feed or "followers" (so it's pointless to publish there, it's like talking to an abyss or a very deep well).

The way we've put it, the site opensource.net is mostly an attempt or late effort to just change history and save face, making it seem like IBM did not kill OpenSource.com in the waves of layoffs back in April (when it killed another long-running site, "The Enterprisers Project", after nearly a decade).

opensource.net has only 100 followers in Mastodon (only 9 "toots" there). Many are likely bots or dupes. So it's a tiny niche, nothing like opensource.com.

opensource.net is not even particularly welcoming; about 10% of the "content" on the site is just them pushing "Code of conduct" at the bottom of every page, signalling that megacorporations are enforcing a censorship regime on everything. The page says: "We reserve the right to reject or redact any comments or posts that violate the spirit, as well as the letter, of our policies." The rules are so broad yet vague that just about anything can be deemed a violation if it challenges the status quo. And that's how they like it: full editorial control over comments, too (based on perceived and possibly wrong motivations, as Alex Oliva noted last week).

Other Recent Techrights' Posts

Promoting Microsoft Windows With LLM Slop
What is the policy at BetaNews regarding LLM slop?
Alex Oliva, the Potential 'Successor' of RMS, Has a New Web Site
More freedom for Alex Oliva
 
Links 16/02/2025: Nostalgia for Physical Media and the US Government Actively Promotes Pro-Kremlin Politicians in the EU
Links for the day
Gemini Links 16/02/2025:Life, Cynicism, and languages
Links for the day
Links 16/02/2025: Oligarchs "Collect Your Data and Control Your World", Global Temperatures Shoot Up
Links for the day
Links 16/02/2025: "Microsoft Is Laying Off Employees" and Internal Dissent Brewing at Facebook Over Regime Complicity
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Saturday, February 15, 2025
IRC logs for Saturday, February 15, 2025
Links 15/02/2025: Harms to Health, Public Domain, and More
Links for the day
Gemini Links 15/02/2025: On Autistic People, AuraGem Over HTTPS
Links for the day
The Cyber Show (C|S) Speaks of the "Rise of the Nerd Reich."
This 'Valentine Episode' is quite good
Azure is Turning 17 This Year, Still Losing Money and Staff
Hallmark of pyramid schemes, deriving "value" out of things that do not really exist?
Strong Momentum for the Free Software Foundation (FSF) as Winter Approaches Its End in Boston or in the Northern Hemisphere
FSF's founder, Richard Stallman, gives another talk in Italy in 9 days from now
The 'Drunken Plagiarists' Are Harming Journalism About GNU/Linux
They lessen the incentive to do real journalism abut GNU/Linux
Female Nazis and racist Swiss women
Reprinted with permission from Daniel Pocock
Richard Stallman on RISC-V and Free Hardware
Invidious is under attack by Google
Links 15/02/2025: Erasing of American Science and Tesla SLAPPing Critics
Links for the day
IDG 'Reviews' of GNU/Linux Now Contain LLM Slop
It's typically ads or commercials... or sometimes spin disguised as news
Gemini Links 15/02/2025: Spectacles and "Before Sunset", Moving Domains Out of the US
Links for the day
Microsoft Has Only $17,482 Million Left, "Cash on Hand" Sank 40 Billion Dollars in 2 Years
Microsoft runs low on money in the bank
YouTube Layoffs Mean That YouTube is Still Losing a Lot of Money (Net Income or Profit Almost Definitely Negative)
In more recent years Google defunded many vloggers
In Gopher and Gemini Protocol People Abandon Services Based in the United States
There's no resistance whatsoever
Python and Microsoft: Pandas Should Have Known OpenDocument Format (ODF) and Microsoft Excel Are Different and Competing Things
now we're meant to think that in order to open ODF files we need some functions with "Excel" in their name
Not Only Windows, Surface, and "Hey Hi" PCs; Microsoft's Hardware Ventures Are a Dumpster Fire; HoloLens Mixed Reality Hardware Now Axed Altogether and Staff is Miserable
Microsoft is in a terrible state
Certificate Authority (CA) Let's Encrypt Now Down to TEN (0.3% of the Whole) in Geminispace
The number of capsules that use Let's Encrypt is, according to Lupa, about to fall to single-digit figures
Links 15/02/2025: University Price Hikes and Copyright Action Against Slop Companies
Links for the day
Slopwatch: All Those New 'Articles' Are Fake and Crafted by Chatbots (LLM Slop)
Google News is promoting these as "Linux" news; they're not even made by humans
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Friday, February 14, 2025
IRC logs for Friday, February 14, 2025
Gemini Links 14/02/2025: Mysterious Friend and "Eight by Eight"
Links for the day
They Will Never Leave Linus Torvalds Alone, Rust is Just Another Way to Cause Instability and Infighting in Linux
We already identified the Rust "community" as troublemakers more than 5 years ago and we wrote about the evidence
Apple: Social Justice or Social Nationalism?
Remember to buy Apple, folks
Links 14/02/2025: Mass Layoffs at Sophos, Chatbots Failing Very Badly, "DOGE as a National Cyberattack"
Links for the day
Moving Away From Certificate Authorities (CAs) Like Let's Encrypt Means Taking Away From the US Government the Power to 'Censor' Sites by Revoking Certificates
Gemini capsule is cheap to run and easy (easier than a Web site) to maintain. More people disillusioned and frustrated with social control media flock to it.
BetaNews' Managing Editor Wayne William Took Charge of GNU/Linux Articles and His Articles Are Real (He Actually Wrote Them)
We are frankly relieved to see that Wayne William recognised the problem and did something about it
Links 14/02/2025: Publicity Rights Violated (ByteDance), Bribes to Trump Passed via Social Control Media 'Settlements' Again
Links for the day
Gemini Links 14/02/2025: Constitution, Cosmic DE, and More
Links for the day
Slopwatch: Anti-Linux Articles Published by Bots, Dominating Google News
So a lot of the Web is Microsoft chatbot-generated anti-Linux FUD
Links 14/02/2025: Measles Outbreak in Texas, Zelensky Warns Russia Will Attack a NATO Country
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, February 13, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, February 13, 2025