Linux.com as Spamfarm of the Linux Foundation, Partner of the Gates Foundation
THE Linux Foundation fired all the staff (including editors) of Linux.com. They didn't "cost" much*. But they promoted GNU/Linux and that's a "no-no"; managers of the Linux Foundation don't use GNU/Linux and don't care for it; the "Linux Foundation" is about exploiting the brand, e.g. selling "Linux" as a badge of openwashing. It's also about enabling enemies of Linux exercise control over it. Remember that board seats are literally up for sale (it's openly advertised as such) and Microsoft bought more board seats than any company is allowed to, based on the Linux Foundation's own rules. This abject violation of rules has gone on for several years already. Who enforces the rules? The corporations enforce a CoC, but nothing else. It hardly surprised us when the Gates Foundation also "bought some shares". It's all about control. It's relatively cheap (to someone like Gates). If you contribute to Linux and have a Russian passport, then go away; if you attack Linux and say you're on a "Jihad" against it, welcome!
We didn't forget all the good writers who had been sacked without prior warning. It happened more than 6 years ago. What has Linux.com become since? This:
They no longer publish articles. 2 days ago they published this:
It links to a Clownflared site (because nothing says "Linux" like outsourcing to proprietary spyware) that sells many "Cloud" bundles. It's basically a sea of buzzwords, e.g.:
Linux is never mentioned.
The other day there was a ridiculous puff piece by/for Jim Zemlin, the proud "boss" of "Linus" (or "Linux") (and he proudly insists that his wife, Sheela Microsoft, controls him). To quote directly**:
“At the Linux Foundation, we have specialists who work in vertical industry efforts, but they’re not lawyers or copyright experts or patent experts. They’re also not experts in running large-scale events, or in developer training,” Zemlin said.
Right. They're marketing people like Jim Zemlin. They run the show. Some of them get their salaries from Microsoft. █
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* Running Linux.com with about a dozen casual contributors would only cost about 0.1% of the total budget of the "Linux Foundation" (two years ago it spent 185 million dollars in one year). But everyone got the boot and replacements (sometimes former Microsoft) too got discarded. It's almost as if the goal was to just kill the site, period. If that was the goal, then it succeeded.
** There's a lot of nonsense in this piece. “Computing is entering a world dominated by two platforms: Linux and Windows,” Zemlin is quoted as saying.
Right. Tell that to Apple, Google etc.
Ryan responded to this assertion by stating: "More like exiting the world dominated by Windows. It's a remaining value product that is hardly even tended to. Farmed out to India and on life support, working less and less each time they send out updates, that shuffle around what's broken. Assuming you don't get hit with one where the computer won't even start that time. Even in the Windows XP era, Windows at least wasn't anywhere near as temperamental as it is now. When you're in the C-Suite, you apparently see things like in-house testers as expendable, so the product can push updates that don't even barely work. Almost everyone I know that uses Windows has had to become proficient at spending all their time backing up files, planning that it could go out at any minute. Then hours restoring from the backup image every so often. Truly modern computing doesn't work like this, where the OS is so rotten and horrible that you have to plan on it failing outright at least once a year. We left that era a while ago, in Free Software and otherwise (Chrome OS and Mac OS). People want one thing from Windows and that's for the version their particular workload depends on to stay running. I know an optometrist that still has Windows XP on an air-gapped computer. He says the vendor refuses to fix the software so it works on a supported release of Windows, because they can hold it over his head as a reason to buy a new $40,000 machine. Meanwhile, supported versions of Windows have definitely changed enough so that they can't run that program. Why? Microsoft paid to throw a lot of trash on top of a system that was basically working in the past 20 years. Why would you pay thousands of people to deface something that basically worked and may need a few updates here and there? I figure if they just kept developing something that was basically Windows XP, people would still go along with it. You know, does process scheduling and memory management have to be better than XP? Yes, does sound and graphics APIs? Sure. But like over 90% of what they've done since XP is just trash. And it's causing the platform to age badly and in ways they can't even hide anymore. I would literally rather deal with a mid 90s system with one of the OEM releases of Windows 95 than what they've created now. We've moved out of the Windows world. You go to Walmart even, they have more Chromebooks and even a Macbook. Over 50% of the laptops there are not running Windows. So if they're being almost forced out of the market even at the "cheapo bargain basement shit" level, what does that say? When not even Walmart customers will tolerate it, increasingly. Walmart has never been beholden to Microsoft. They'll sell whatever they can make good margins on and that people want. If the market for consumer products wasn't shifting to Chrome OS and Mac OS, then it would still be a bunch of poorly designed clunky PC laptops with bad firmware, Windows, and two dozen pieces of bloatware to try to recoup some of the licensing fees. I just don't see Microsoft ever recovering in the consumer market. They're treading water and trying not to go under on the low end of the market now. It's sort of like how empires die, you know, like the British, or the US one. First you control or influence 80% of the world. Then there are some setbacks. But people still fear or respect you. For a time. Then next thing you know, you have an island and you're still finding new ways to lose. When you have a brexit and then you have a close call with Scotland, you know. And then they want another go at it. If you look at Microsoft in the last 15 years, it was clear even in the [Steve] Ballmer era that they knew they had to be something else, they just couldn't figure out what."
Notice how Zemlin and the "Linux" Foundation never promote GNU/Linux for the desktop (or laptop) and never say something like, replace Windows with GNU/Linux, Vista 10 support is soon over, so move to GNU/Linux. It's just so easy to feel like the "Linux" Foundation is controlled by Microsoft. Because it is partly true.