Linux Foundation Buys Misleading Puff Pieces About Itself, Earns Some LLM Slop to Accompany the PR (Openwashing and Propaganda as a Service, With the Brand "Linux" Needlessly Borrowed)
It's already 2025 (GNU/Linux almost 5% "market share" in laptops/desktops) and IBM, Canonical, OSI etc. aren't doing promotions of GNU/Linux. They're totally not doing anything to promote GNU/Linux, even amid the "end" of Vista 10 - a "lost opportunity" until one realises that the company controlling most of their operations is Microsoft. They're basically paid not to compete against Windows.
The other day one person in Linux Questions said: "In the USA, on Craigslist, there seems to be a surplus of used business laptops, with the price dropping to well under $200 for 16GB ram & 500Gb SSD, almost half of what the price was a year ago. 8GB ram (plenty for non-heavy uses) is closer to $100. And when Win10 'dies' in 6months, another 50% drop will probably make them not even worth the resellers' time! Meanwhile, Win11&inflation will drive prices of new PCs to 10x 1,000% of an equally-functional Linux (used) PC. I can only hope that the 'common' public discovers this, as they cut back on spending. It would be nice to see 2026 to be the year Linux usage goes over 10%" (if only it was promoted by resourceful vendors like IBM and Canonical).
The state of GNU/Linux journalism is rather bad. A lot of it is slop (LLM spew) and spam. Case of point: all this fake coverage about OpenInfra. A lot of it was sponsored, e.g. in ZDNet, by the company it is covering (pay-to-say coverage). It's basically an ad in a site funded by the Linux Foundation, authored by an operative of theirs. Days ago he did the same in another site funded by them ("Open Infrastructure Foundation Joins Forces With Linux Foundation"); funding from LF and Microsoft omitted, lacking disclosure about this anywhere in the page. It's also "disinfo / wrong", an associate has said, but consider what else he published in ZDNet. We're talking about Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols here, but we don't wish to make it too personal. It's a general issue with the media, much broader than him alone. Follow the money. The publishers/editors have clients ("brands", not readers).
So we now see loads of fake 'articles' and actual ads disguised as journalism, e.g.
Of course it's fake:
Just like the other new fake 'article':
Yes, fake.
There is no lack of other fake articles, even this one from 1-2 days ago:
He is a repeat offender or Serial Slopper:
Looking at Google News, we've caught 4 new examples of fake (produced by "LLMware") 'articles' just hours ago:
The images and the text are both slop, the two sites work together [1, 2, 3] to plagiarise real articles. Here's another pair of fake articles from them:
Days ago we mentioned many fake layoffs articles [1, 2]. This morning we caught another one.
Presented by Google News as new information, there's this one today:
Misleading, outdated and shallow, this is just LLM slop:
Isn't it funny that after the "LF" (misusing the brand "Linux") flooded the Web with press releases and fake articles (that it had paid for) it now gets some LLM slop doing the same?
What has the Web become? Jamie McClelland has just said "that large language models are having a significant impact on the world wide web (or, for a less technical account, see Forbes articles on bots)."
LLMs are a net negative. Unless you're some cheater and vandal. People who publicly admit they use LLMs typically discredit themselves, perhaps without even realising it. █