Bonum Certa Men Certa

Focus on the Concepts, Not the Brands

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Oct 31, 2023,
updated Oct 31, 2023

Cults don't improve people's lives, they typically con people for their hard-earned money (to the point people borrow money that they lack so as to signal loyalty to brands)

Computer, Notebook, Coffee

THE truth of the matter is, Apple is not the opposite of Microsoft and just because it's not Microsoft does not mean it's a human rights-friendly company. It never was.

Apple's marketing was always made to mislead. That's just what marketing does.

As we noted yesterday, don't look for Google to redeem us from Microsoftism, even if somehow it completely obliterates Microsoft. Google hired many Microsofters and it still shows. The problematic people merely relocate, bringing ideological baggage with them.

The problem is not limited to Apple, Microsoft, Google, or even "GAFAM" (a term I coined with Julian Assange about half a decade ago). There are also the O (Oracle), the Is (Intel, IBM), and many others.

The problem is primarily proprietary software. IBM has been taking Red Hat further and further in this direction, which is why Alex Oliva left the company (he publicly said they had moved towards proprietary clown computing, which he deemed unethical).

Society needs to move towards transparency, sharing, collaboration and cooperation, not monopolisation, consolidation of power, and price-fixing cartels (mostly "validated" by patents).

Remember not to focus too much on the brands. If we keep focusing on brands, then people will just "hop" from one brand to the next, never liberating themselves or emancipating their data. What we're seeing in RHEL (Red Hat) is the sad fact or belated realisation that even choosing GNU/Linux distros these days should be a careful process. Canonical values Microsoft more than it values your freedom and IBM values nothing but money. With "CentOS Going Away" and Fedora probably next to get the 'chop' (even if there's a repeatedly-delayed release next month), we really need to "take the hint" and mass-migrate to community-run distros rather than "vertical software [integration] monocultures" (this was what Theo de Raadt said about Wayland earlier this month).

The enemy or the threat isn't some brand (heck, companies can change their names at any time like Facebook did, turning GAFAM into MAGMA) but the actions. Talk to people about what the companies actually do that's wrong. Promote the way out of those behaviours, not just away from the brands. Each GAFAM company has its own variant (or brand) of listening devices, chaffbots etc. and what's inherently wrong is not "Alexa" or "Siri" or "Cortana" but the snooping itself.

Last year Richard Stallman explained to Andy and I that one issue he noticed was, unless we collectively refuse to "fixate" on only Microsoft, people might flock to Apple, not GNU or software that's freedom-respecting. Seeing what happens in richer nations like Australia, this sort of makes sense. Many people believe that escaping Microsoft to some other "master" will leave the problems behind. But no, in practice that creates new or other types of problems.

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