Leadership in Free Software
Don't let IBM lead. It's a terrible flag bearer.
Some hours ago across the road from us Stevie Wonder argued better leadership is needed. It had me thinking about software because seeing that many Free software projects let themselves be controlled by Microsoft in GitHub, they simply don't get the basics. They exclude many people and reward bad people.
This weekend we published a couple of articles related to this [1, 2]. The core argument was, for society to be better off it needs to be inoculated against bad people. Self-governance was revisited on US Independence Day when we argued that "independence in the digital realms means abandoning platforms like GitHub, not just rejecting proprietary software". There's also a message somewhere in there about IBM and Wayland, not to mention the fan club of Microsoft GitHub. It's called Rust. See, "Wayland People" and "Rust People" want us to think that GIAGAM (GAFAM+IBM) will lead the way and we'll all be followers. For half a decade already Rust even banned or censored Microsoft critics. That's how bad it is.
After Igor Ljubuncic complained that Wayland wasn't ready and we should not follow, based on his famously extensive reviews, he wrote another piece. To quote portions of what he said: "Recent news in the Linux world around the forced deprecation of the X11 session in upcoming Gnome and, consequently, Ubuntu releases prompted me to write this article. [...] I feel sad and alarmed, and I want to take a look at the Linux tech landscape, to see where we are, why we are where we are, and if perhaps the future holds anything good and bright and meaningful for the Linux folks. Let's chat [...] I love me a good mystery. Although I'm not happy and I'm rather worried about the direction the Linux home desktop is going, AKA forced deprecation of X11 before its would-be successor Wayland is truly ready, there's some small joy in telling a good story, replete with numbers. Indeed, after I published my Plasma 6.4 review, which showed Wayland being less optimized even for truly basic stuff, I decided to dig in and expand more on that early test and its troubling findings."
Hours ago Stevie Wonder said "we have the opportunity to lead [...] for everyone [for people] to be fairly treated".
IBM grew a lot when it worked on eugenics (flagging people like Stevie Wonder to "save us" from mixed-race couples). That even predates IBM's work for actual nazis. IBM was never a nice company. It's not a good leader. Forget about "Red Hat". It's dead. This is IBM. Stop accepting IBM's decisions and instead focus on what people like Theo say. "The writing has been on the wall a very long time," he said about "Gnome is dropping X11", "that some people believe their role in the ecosystem is to reduce software choice and push everyone into vertical software monocultures."
IBM is dictatorship. It's trying to dictate to people what to use and how to use that (it bans those who don't agree). In that sense, it is a lot like Microsoft. Don't be led by dictators. Show IBM the way out.
IBM not only ignores the needs of blind people. It also attacks people like Richard Stallman, the founder of GNU/Linux, because according to his own words, "since my teenage years, I felt as if there were a filmy curtain separating me from other people my age. I understood the words of their conversations, but I could not grasp why they said what they did. Much later I realized that I didn't understand the subtle cues that other people were responding to. Later in life, I discovered that some people had negative reactions to my behavior, which I did not even know about. Tending to be direct and honest with my thoughts, I sometimes made others uncomfortable or even offended them -- especially women. This was not a choice: I didn't understand the problem enough to know which choices there were."
Put another way, IBM is a lot like the "original nazis". It doesn't tolerate people who are not "normal". Do you want IBM to be in charge of everything? I certainly don't. My distrust or lack of trust for IBM is a fairly new thing because I was mostly fond of it in the 90s and when it promoted OpenDocument Format (ODF) two decades ago. IBM has since then changed for the worse again. It's getting worse every year. █