YESTERDAY Red Hat (IBM) promoted Microsoft Azure (no kidding) and even GitHub (it's a partnership with Microsoft). It's frustrating to see CentOS being effectively abolished (Sam Varghese rightly believes Fedora is next) while IBM helps Microsoft's monopoly.

"IBM is a symptom of the sort of problem we'll need to cope with in years if not decades to come."Varghese already wrote two articles about CentOS (we mentioned those the other day) and now he says: "All the Fedora user complaints, fixes and mailing list posts would serve as excellent free labour for the CentOS Stream. And that is essentially the point. In true gig economy fashion, Red Hat will be getting developer hours free."

And this is what it's all about now. "GNU/Linux was once an operating system around which there was some idealism," he continues. "Now, Red Hat has ensured that the only thing one sees when looking at a penguin is the greenback."

To be frank, those recent events serve to reaffirm our arguments (from recent years) and embolden us. We need to rethink our strategy, seeing the increasing consolidation and exploitation. "Open Source" is effectively dead; it's just openwashing and large monopolies looking to harvest free labour of non-employees. People need to start speaking about Free software; not GitHub accounts, "clown computing" and all that other nonsense. IBM is a symptom of the sort of problem we'll need to cope with in years if not decades to come. ⬆