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Posted in Free/Libre Software, GNU/Linux at 6:53 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz
Infighting isn’t helpful and it helps the foremost detractors/adversaries
Summary: Lesser threats and greater threats to Free/Open Source software or why we aren’t entertaining particular stories/drama
THE WORLD of GNU/Linux has changed profoundly. Back in 2006 when this site was born GNU/Linux had already come under legal attacks from SCO; then came the Novell/Microsoft patent collusion and later came lawsuits such as Microsoft v TomTom. Microsoft wasn’t the sole threat, but it often co-opted other companies (like SCO and Novell in the aforementioned examples) in an effort to help Microsoft derail software freedom, promote software patents etc.
“Civility within the community and across/among communities generally makes us stronger in the face of proprietary software giants.”We have a great deal to say about what happened to the Linux Foundation, what systemd may do, the threats posed by centralisation (e.g. GitHub), what IBM’s takeover of Red Hat may mean, and all sorts of cultural wars against the Freedom of Free software communities, including free speech. Those are divisive issues, however, so we might limit what we say on those topics. Last year we explained that the CoC of the Linux Foundation, for instance, didn’t harm Linux as much as the wars/arguments over it. Mutual reconciliation is often a lot better than confrontation as long as those whom you do not agree with are more or less on the same channel technically speaking. To use an example, if one random person is in favour of GNU/Linux and the GPL but disagrees about women’s rights, is that really the person worth picking a fight with? Rather than people who are pushing Windows, smearing copyleft, and sometimes even bribing officials for GNU/Linux to be abandoned? For similar reasons we barely bring up politics (there are political news picks in our daily links, but we don’t comment on those).
A reader once asked us why we never write articles about systemd. It is not a priority. The assumption was that we would say negative things about it, but that would be counterproductive. At the moment there are many threats to Free/Open Source software (back doors, surveillance, the ‘cloud’ trap, openwashing and entryism to name just a few) — threats much greater than one another. Civility within the community and across/among communities generally makes us stronger in the face of proprietary software giants. █
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