What the Silencing of Neatnik Tells Us About Linus Torvalds Inside a Microsoft-Dominated 'Linux' Foundation

posted by Roy Schestowitz on Feb 10, 2025

Related: New IRS Filing Shows That the Most Dominant Company in the Linux Foundation is Microsoft

PEOPLE are being silenced (censored) all the time, but we aren't told about it. That's just the very nature of the silencing. A lot of self-censorship means not removal but proactive silencing. It's just a sub-type of blackmail.

How about Linus Torvalds? Is Linus Torvalds free to express his mind as he wishes about every topic, even just any technical topic?

No, Linus Torvalds is an employee and licensing-wise the Linux Foundation - his employer - does not promote GPL (the licence of Linux) and typically outsources source code to a proprietary platform, Microsoft GitHub. Linus Torvalds has a thing or two to say about outsourcing code to proprietary platforms because it happened to him before (he blamed "tridge").

Why isn't Linus Torvalds more vocal about important issues? Even pressing issues? He's very selective in what he talks about because there are boundaries; those aren't his.

Well, consider Adam Newbold writing the other day about a C&D. "Today," he said, "I had another conversation with my attorney, who reiterated her guidance that I need to not talk about any of this, period."

What about? It does not say. He said: "I'm not going to do it. If you were in my shoes (with kids and college and a mortgage), you wouldn't, either."

Well, "kids and college and a mortgage" are somewhat of a choice and are connected to one another.

So do we know what was removed? Not exactly, but we have got a complete copy of pages that recently disappeared from his blog. They help explain the nature of the threat. We've checked our archives and found two missing pages; it "looks like the IA pages were purged too," an associate said. Thankfully we have a program to keep copies of every page we link to.

"I suspect that the visible SLAPP suits are merely the smallest tip of the iceberg," the associate noted.

Here are some of the recent blog posts (past year):

• URL as a sentence

• Motive as a filter

• Neatnik Notes · A Fediverse, if you can keep it

• Neatnik Notes · Reply Cards

• The discomfort litmus test

• Neatnik Notes · Gotta block em all

• Neatnik Notes · Spake

• Fedicache

• Passkeys are not passwords

• Call me, maybe

• Making a pledge, taking a pledge

• Everything is a web page

• Framing Federation

• Blog Question Challenge 2025

• About the cease and desist notice

At least two of these went missing (perhaps more; additional pages can be deleted any time).

So which of these went missing? The ones which talk about being a good or better person and pledging to improve.

Is this related to what goes on inside the US Government right now and does he work for the US Government?

We don't know for sure, but we can only guess. "I can't tell," an associate said, "but the pledge was about promising to treat people well. I suppose there is a third or fourth post missing which might explain it all..."

Based on these archives, the main or only pages that got removed are:

The discomfort litmus test

There’s an interesting thing that happens when someone is confronted with information that makes them uncomfortable. It’s not quite a fight or flight response—it’s more like a complex internal reaction based on any number of variables (the number and nature of which will differ based on the situation). The interesting part is that ultimately, whether we realize it or not, we draw a crisp line directly to our perceived source of the discomfort. It’s human nature to make those connections, to match effect with cause, and to give ourselves a clear thing to point to and say “that’s what’s making me feel the way I feel right now.”

I don’t think we always take enough time to explore how we define our discomfort, and I think we often do ourselves a disservice as a result. When something that you take for granted turns out to be something else entirely, it can be a jarring realization. No one likes that feeling. The desire to resolve that feeling swiftly is totally understandable, but in our rush to do so, we rob ourselves of a rich opportunity to learn and grow.

The discomfort litmus test is a pretty simple one: in the face of information that makes you feel uncomfortable, do you attribute your discomfort to the subject at hand (or your relationship to it), or to the source of the information?

Doing the latter is easy. Don’t like what you just heard? Fine, shoot the messenger and carry on with ignorance. Or maybe try to fool yourself into thinking that it’s not the messenger that you don’t like, but the way they delivered the information, or some other related aspect of the situation. Either way, you get to dodge the underlying issue entirely and evade your discomfort. Problem solved.

It’s far more challenging to sit with your discomfort and contemplate it. But that’s the space in which we can learn more about ourselves and the world, explore what really matters to us, and ultimately improve ourselves. None of that is overly enjoyable, and it takes a lot of time and energy to do. But it’s very much worthwhile, especially if you prefer to see the world as it truly is, as opposed to as how you fashion it for yourself.

[...]

Making a pledge, taking a pledge

I’ve been sitting with some strong negative feelings over the past few months. My usual instinct would be to ascribe these feelings to external sources, to cut lengths of metaphorical yarn and tie them to each of the things that I think are making me feel this way. But I know better: all experience is preceded by mind, led by mind, and made by mind. The way I feel comes entirely from within, and it’s also a choice. I’ve sat with anger and frustration because I chose to do that instead of doing something else.

I did try to do something else, but it was a struggle. I spent a lot of time thinking about some heavy stuff: the frightening ease with which people can be so incredibly cruel to one another, the pain and suffering people endure over harmless fundamental differences, and the concept of allyship and what it really means. I tried to do something with all of this, to turn it into something useful somehow. I threw hundreds of words at it, and found myself drafting and re-drafting dozens of attempts at bottling everything up into something understandable and actionable. After hundreds of words became thousands, and the meaning of it all was no longer recognizable, I walked away from it. Until yesterday, when I opened the file once again, deleted everything, and started over. I wrote 50 words that finally felt right.

Now it’s finished. It’s a pledge; The People Pledge. It’s simple and anyone can take it.

I’m finished with my own internal source of negativity on this topic. I’ve replaced it with this, a source of positivity. Instead of criticizing others who would think less of a person because of something as harmless as their gender identity, I want to show how easy (and nice!) it can be to, you know, just not do that. I don’t want to live in a world where people are clubbing one another for their moral failures; I want to live in a world where people are lifting one another up and helping others to become better.

I’m starting with me. I made this pledge, and I’ve taken this pledge. I hope you do, too.

That latter one links to https://people.pledge.party:

I pledge to recognize the dignity and worth of all people.

I will not discriminate against or devalue anyone because of their age, race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, disability, social class, faith, neurotype, or physical appearance.

I commit to treating others fairly and rejecting prejudice in all its forms.

[...]

This pledge was written by Neatnik on December 1, 2024.

So that's him 2 months ago, weeks after Harris conceded. Here's a screenshot:

Why was the page promoting this site deleted? Another one was deleted and the two posts are connected.

My best guess is that he's afraid of retaliation and maybe his employer said something. He mentions "kids and college and a mortgage" (it's common knowledge that debt has killed or silenced activists, student debt generally kills much-needed student activism).

The associate said: "It's not uncommon for Microsoft to put pressure on employers and many employers are eager to suck [up] to the point that they'll eagerly turn against their own employees with little to no encouragement in order to try to curry favor."

"RMS wrote about debt as a lever to prevent dissent," the associate recalls, but many others mentioned the same (also at MIT).

my gut feeling is, he upset someone who pays him by publishing the pages above. Although reproducing it would likely do no good to him, we should clarify that the above reproduction is in no way endorsed by him. It's outside his control. The associate said "it is important to note the silencing [as] it is an ongoing, long term problem".

Similarly, going back to Torvalds, he cannot talk about LF scams critically ("and by extension Microsoft because LF -> Microsoft," the associate added). Nothing except praise.

And "as mentioned before," the associate said, "it is still possible (legally and technically) for LT to take his trademark and walk".

"He'd spend the rest of his time until retirement settling in, but it could be done. Unfortunately he seems to just be keeping his head down and hoping that appeasement will cause them to let him be in peace if not also his code base. From the ongoing Rust attacks, we see that the latter is not happening. There was a recent blog post in Links about rust undermining Linux."

From what I've seen in videos, any time Torvalds says something a little critical of LF (in videos where he speaks to Dirk) he's quick to backtrack and then offer praises in LF-funded publications. It's clear that he's afraid of retaliation, more so after what happened in 2018.

As a reminder, Sirius threatens me for writing the simple truth about the company and what it did to colleagues. It committed crimes against my colleagues. Why should one keep silent about it? As if people are not permitted to talk about and to honestly oppose crimes, based on simply facts. I shared the documents that proved it.

The world if full of apathetic people who wish not only to lecture people not to talk against crimes (while they themselves reap the fruits of people who expose crimes) but also defend those who commit the crimes, usually in expectation of some reward. █