Just because you're still on the ropes doesn't mean you're OK, Rocky

FOR those who do not follow our Daily Links or don't keep up/watch closely enough, here's a quick recap. Less than a fortnight after IBM's "Red Bait" move (we're tempted to say "dick move", but that's not polite or even "professional" enough) we saw Canonical keeping up by taking control of LXD (monopoly!) and pushing Snaps at DEBs' expense (not unlike Red Bait with Flatpak). Snaps are a monopoly at the back end and Flatpak facilitates centralisation -- including censorship -- via Flathub (there are both technical and legal issues). It's promotion of proprietary and monopoly. This can hurt forks and derivatives (Linux Mint blocked Snaps and created LMDE for good reasons). Maybe that's the intention and the plan. Then, days ago, IBM found another way to upset the community and piss off slaves (volunteers). It promoted "telemetry" in Fedora [1, 2]. As for SUSE, it only issued some self-promotional words, but don't trust SUSE. It's the biggest pusher of proprietary software of them all, especially for SAP and Microsoft.

"Free software always adapted; now too it must adapt to survive and we need to reject "corporate" distros because they don't have our (the community's) interest at heart."As we put it in Daily Links some days ago: "Telemetry" = we give you some software but still control it remotely, will pull data out of it (by default, as many people do not change these defaults). It's not truly yours, we remotely observe its usage. What next? Remote activation? CSAM detection? Paywalls?

We also said: Snap's back end is proprietary, so Canonical is trying to build a monopoly with non-Free software. Canonical promotes proprietary Microsoft spyware in the installer, casually promotes Windows (after Microsoft 'incentivised' Canonical to do this), and this trend goes years back. It is not a fluke and it won't stop. There are back room deals.

Free software always adapted; now too it must adapt to survive and we need to reject "corporate" distros because they don't have our (the community's) interest at heart. Rocky Linux says it found a workaround, but IBM keeps pulling a fast one and escalating matters every few months (while the Free Software Foundation -- the FSF -- stays idle and silent, probably afraid or shy to criticise sponsors with many employees inside GNU projects). ⬆

"It's certainly a lot more likely that Microsoft violates patents than Linux does [...] Basic operating system theory was pretty much done by the end of the 1960s. IBM probably owned thousands of really 'fundamental' patents [...] The fundamental stuff was done about half a century ago and has long, long since lost any patent protection."

--Linus Torvalds, 2007