Showing headlines posted by schestowitz

THE GNU/Linux operating system was created in the 1980s by communities, for communities (even literal basement dwellers). The operating system became so robust and attractive that a trade group of corporate actors (mostly proprietary) formed malevolent fronts through which to promote toxic waste like Hyper-V and exFAT.

It’s completely laughable for companies calling others freeloaders, when in fact, we are the contributors, developers, laborers of love and take ownership volunteering our time to projects these companies use.

How can the Linux Foundation not see the glaring issue of panel stacking in its committees? The above should never be allowed to happen in a healthy, vendor-neutral organisation. Remember that Microsoft has more board seats than any other company! Because the seats are for sale (as openly admitted in the IRS filings).

WordPress makes useless updates that just break the site in SeaMonkey for no reason.

This has prevented me from logging in with SeaMonkey because instead of the log in page, you’ll just see the WordPress logo.

Today we examine which countries have the least Linux adoption (% shown above) and which ones have close to 90% Linux penetration (mostly Android), based on July 2023 data from statCounter (here’s the spreadsheet with the chart)

Lately we've demonstrated the explosive growth of GNU/Linux or just Linux in Africa, based on some firm's Web-derived data. Here's one way to present this data for all countries, based on July's numbers.

The enigma behind Proxima Systems deepens further; where does the Linux Foundation funnel its money and what exactly for?

After nearly 40 years we’re seeing GNU/Linux flourishing on the client side (not just mobile phones, servers, supercomputers etc.); it’s important to remind ourselves what the actual goal is

A contractor paid over $2,500,000 per year seems to be running Linux.com these days. The terrifying thing is, there’s no actual content added, just links, and it's seldom about Linux; they’ve turned the domain into a sort of linkfarm of the so-called ‘Linux’ Foundation. It’s worth noting that the ‘Linux’ Foundation has gone very quiet lately, like it was struck by lightning or simply does not wish to be seen. “They are probably trying to kill off the brand,” one reader told us, “at least that is how they have been acting under Microsoft Zemlin.” With only 2 posts in 2 weeks, and moreover everything being just an LF link/plug (not an actual story), it’s hard to see how Linux (kernel or GNU/Linux) gets promoted at all. Why did they fire all the writers and all the editors in early 2019? The site used to be a very valuable resource with information and news about GNU/Linux.

The direction taken by Canonical in recent months has upset a lot of people, and rightly so; we kindly remind people that alternatives exist and Linux Mint already explores some of them

IBM, with its notorious army of aggressive lawyers and mountains of software patents, is trying to make RHEL proprietary and render Fedora ‘spyware’ (they know it’ll put off existing and potential users; later they can claim “reduced demand” for it and mothball the whole thing, rebranding it as “CentOS” after they had already fired Fedora management and then abandoned OpenSource.com and OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice); Canonical keeps up with evil by doing some of its own and they don't compete with Microsoft, so we can trust neither of them

What seemed like an 'explosive' piece in the making seems to have been aborted; we urge the community to be vigilant of corporate shills with an axe to grind, even those who call themselves "journalists" (but lack professional training in journalism)

Windows is losing its dominance and monopoly rents; the good news is that GNU/Linux (not ChromeOS but the freedom-respecting distros) is among the victors or among the platforms to gain, with considerable share gains in the global south

We’ve seen it all before; the concern trolls and ‘cancel culture’ warriors try to pass off their brigading as “help” and “advice” to the target of brigading; today we give some more concrete details

In a manic rush to crucify the father of Free software (who had started the GNU/Linux operating system almost 40 years ago) thousands of delirious people signed an utterly ludicrous petition (full of distortions and lies) — a petition managed by an employee of IBM. Now, years later, some of them want their names to vanish.

In his speech at the University of Pisa on June 7, Richard Stallman addressed the topic of machine learning systems (so-called “artificial intelligence”) and answered the question of whether the training data should be released. 29:00 – 54:00 and 58:40 – 1:04:00 in the video.

The Linux Foundation is gradually becoming a shadow of Microsoft, just like the Open Source Initiative, where most of the money comes from Microsoft and the official blog promotes Microsoft, its proprietary software, and Microsoft’s side in a class action lawsuit over GPL violations (with 9 billion dollars in damages at stake). So it all started with one Board member after the “Microsoft loves Linux” PR charade (money passed to Jim Zemlin, who gives talks at Microsoft and is ‘married’ to Microsoft); then it became two (more money paid for the second seat; the Linux Foundation openly advertises that Board seats are up for sale with upper bound of 2) and now it’s three through the loophole (subsidiary to evade membership limits being exceeded, just like at the OSI and Redmonk). It’s like a completely covert takeover in slow motion and the “AT-LARGE DIRECTOR” is also a Microsoft employee (all 3 are female, so talking about this hostile act of entryism will get baited as being sexist); Mr. Mason is no longer there, so no geeks or Linux developers left in the Board (it’s just ‘suits’ and corporate actors). As a reminder, Microsoft is also in the Technical Advisory Board of the Linux Foundation and its current Board members keep pushing for Linux to be outsourced to Microsoft's GitHub despite being fiercely anti-GPL (the licence of Linux), totally proprietary, and having already had two rounds of layoffs this year. It’s not like Microsoft is even the sole problem in that board.

The Linux Foundation must be spending tens of millions of dollars on contractors, so what does its own staff do all day long?

A couple of years ago the Linux Foundation paid almost 6 million dollars a year for an overpriced office space (vanity; no practical advantage) following a relocation to one of the world’s most expensive places; the figure has since then jumped by nearly 2 million dollars

The Linux [sic] Foundation‘s tax filings (divulged by the Nonprofit Explorer) show that it now pays “CHRIS ANISZCZYK” and “JAMES ZEMLIN” more than it pays “LINUS TORVALDS”, sans bonuses. Torvalds fell to third place already. Mr. Zemlin pays himself over $1.2 million a year.