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