ONLY SEVERAL weeks ago we wrote about Salesforce that "[r]eaders must recall that this is the company whose head staff was pushing not only to oust [Richard] Stallman but everyone who supported Stallman as well (collective assassination)," taking note of someone who according to our job survey earns somewhere between £80,000 per annum to a lot more; a new job opening here in Greater Manchester says "£500 - £600 per day". Alex Oliva was next in the 'firing line'. I've long objected to separating workers from their paymasters when they express their views on matters directly related to their job. If a technical person writes something about politics, then fine, it would be unfair to hold the employer accountable for it (the person isn't a politician after all but a technician or similar). But when you have some troll from Salesforce defaming Stallman repeatedly, and Salesforce has something to gain from demonisation of Stallman, then yes, it kind of matters.

"If a technical person writes something about politics, then fine, it would be unfair to hold the employer accountable for it (the person isn't a politician after all but a technician or similar)."It matters even more and it's worse because of money that Salesforce was moving around Stallman at the same time. A widely circulated and controversial storm of tweets (maybe over a hundred of them) said that not only should the FSF kick Stallman out but also kick out (from the FSF) everyone who still supported Stallman. Imagine the audacity. The person who said that wasn't some 'low-level' employee but a high-level person. Ironically, Salesforce was also a top sponsor of CopyleftConf, along with Google and Microsoft. Copyleft is one of Stallman's babies; so while pushing to remove Stallman and everyone who thinks like him Salesforce was also interjecting itself into a conference on copyleft. Copyleft-hostile companies funded the event, almost exclusively, and the person who set up the event... is now the GM of the OSI, i.e. the only salaried member of staff at the OSI. Something doesn't pass the smell test, does it? It's almost like a conspiracy by GPL violators and haters to weaken enforcers and make infringement acceptable. As today's OSI mostly boosts Microsoft's proprietary GitHub, which is GPL-hostile, one can draw and then connect dots.

Salesforce said nothing about Stallman in its capacity as a company (formal); even Red Hat was careful in the wording (it did mention "diverse"), as was the FSFE. A female worker did all the slandering, defaming Stallman repeatedly using faked 'evidence' that incited many people and gave momentum to the hashtags. Of course this female worker used "chauvinism" as a weapon, so to defend Stallman would instantaneously be seen as chauvinistic. Even if women who actually know Stallman (e.g. as a colleague) defended him at the time.

"We understand that this is a difficult subject to a lot of people because it's often conflated with right-wing politics."As we noted before in our Linux Foundation collection (chronologically sorted), Linus Torvalds is now bossed by several Microsoft employees, almost all of whom are female (perhaps all, 3 in total), so to moan about Microsoft would be risky; we've already seen what Sharp and other trolls did to him using the veil of "tolerance" (even half a decade ago). To misuse causes like this can actively harm those causes, especially if the underlying motivation has nothing to do with those causes. It can be an indirection.

There are similar examples in the EPO wiki (sorted both chronologically and by topic/theme, plus concise introduction at the top). The gist is, the EPO loves hiding its crimes and corruption behind the cover of "diversity" and then it can accuse people who ask hard questions of "abuse" or "harassment".

We understand that this is a difficult subject to a lot of people because it's often conflated with right-wing politics. People who are new to this topic quickly find a compelling reason (or many reasons) to distrust those who speak about the modus operandi, not the organisations/executives who leverage these methods, even though evidence can be extensive with no lack of examples of misconduct. We recently showed several from Debian. We need to spend some time organising these examples in a wiki page (where the titles alone give a gist for content of pertinent items/examples).

Last month Sharp's sidekick, who attempted several times (in vain) to 'cancel' Torvalds, entered our IRC channel with bad intentions. He's still lurking there, perhaps looking for a trigger event, having already demonised yours truly by attributing to me a position I do not hold (and never held). These are troublemakers and provocateurs; this one describes himself as "social justice warrior" (complete with a flair that says so in Reddit) and he receives his salary from Google.

"People start with false claims and then start an uproar (over their manufactured falsehood/s), in turn directing this uproar to employers (to force a resignation if not a humiliating firing)."Considering the nature of articles we've been publishing lately, it's understandable that there will be attempts to shoot the messengers and harm the site's credibility (e.g. by falsely claiming that it defends rapists). We're no encyclopedia, we have nowhere near the budget of CommonDreams (or the corporate media, typically owned and controlled by selfish oligarchs), as we're just a small group of volunteers with limited time and zero corporate strings.

This whole 'cancel culture' thing (Twitter's 'business model', where the above troll demonised us last month) is why I no longer engage in Twitter. For a number of weeks the above troll kept messaging me with entrapments (loaded questions in Twitter); since I no longer participate in Twitter, as a matter of policy, he then came to our main IRC channel. The motivation and the methods remain largely the same. People start with false claims and then start an uproar (over their manufactured falsehood/s), in turn directing this uproar to employers (to force a resignation if not a humiliating firing). ⬆