Bonum Certa Men Certa

How "Open Source" Became Microsoft (But It's Actually Proprietary, OSI is an Openwashing Front Group Now)

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Jan 25, 2025,
updated Jan 26, 2025

They're still trying to rewrite history, but it's harder when Richard Stallman (RMS) is alive, receiving accolades and academic/high recognition, except from GAFAM

Richard Stallman gave a lecture at a university in Peru

THE FSF's licensing head honcho, Krzysztof Siewicz, has just blasted GAFAM (nope, not only Facebook does this!) for openwashing with fake "licences" on "hey hi" (AI) stuff and fluff. Unlike the OSI, the FSF did not bag and then brag about bribes from Microsoft... and it does not promote the Ponzi scheme, either.

At the moment, this blog post from the OSI (published by a Microsofter at the OSI) - and the sole comment on it - is revealing; the OSI struggles to run elections (hardly a new problem; this has gone on for years) and they're desperate for candidates.

OSI’s board of directors in 2025: details about the elections

My wife very quickly noticed that they had even outsourced their communications to Microsoft and proprietary platforms. Stay classy...

If one looks at the sorts of people who ran the OSI in recent years (after several failed rounds of elections and resignations), it's hardly community-centric, it's just GAFAM and IBM* (Josh Berkus, the sole person to comment, is from IBM).

A decade ago Hong Phuc Dang focused on the "F" in FOSS(Asia) or FOSSASIA ("FOSSASIA was founded in 2009 by Mario Behling and Hong Phuc Dang," their site says). She was one of the more community-centric components inside the OSI's Board of Directors, as was Christine Hall (she resigned for personal reasons that she told me about in person).

Richard Stallman (Free Software Foundation) and FOSSASIA‘s Hong Phuc Dang

Thankfully she (Hong Phuc Dang) did not sign the malicious petition against Richard Stallman. It seems she quit at a good time, too.

Anyway, the world moves on, society moves on, social control media mobs are fizzling (Twitter has gone "nazi salute" and AfD booster). There are still some people who talk about Dr. Stallman in Twitter, like this one from yesterday:

if you bring a cookie to class, you have to share it with everybody: richard stallman

Dr. Stallman (RMS) has at least 4 talks in January, yet only one video of his 2024 talks was uploaded to or listed in this GNU archive. Maybe they can belatedly catch up. If RMS can keep up this relatively rapid pace of public talks, then he can do 50 this year (average of one per week).

______

* Now the OSI leaves out the employers (employing companies, paymasters) of the pertinent board members and instead adds pronouns (it seems spurious, as nobody there is trans). One has to do some legwork to know who gets a salary from where - as that's what actually matters, not pronouns. The Linux Foundation is inside there too.

Board of Directors at OSI

As we said and showed way back in 2021 (when the OSI tried very hard to censor and even deplatform yours truly), at the OSI "Only 4% of the Revenue Comes From Members (People, Not Corporations)" and it has probably gotten worse since. After all, all the blog posts from the OSI are Microsoft posts. That alone quite suffices; it really says a lot. It's simple to see whose interests are in control.

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