FSF Richard M. Stallman and the gangsters of the globe

There is much talk these days about RMS, the founder of FSF returning to the board of FSF and IBM refusing to have him, popular demand, vote, or otherwise.

I could list countless articles here as a detailed research on the matter, but the plethora of them TOTALLY MISS THE ISSUE.

Who decides and how is a decision made?  Is it influence by rational arguments or is it a choke-hold maneuver that even his (RMS’s) dearest of friends can’t escape?

The rational argument by IBM, and their fellow mutually interested global giant corporations, is “YOU DO AS WE SAY, OR NO MONEY COMING TO YOU“.

Search term that lead someone to sysdfree (this site)

In most cases there is not much to talk about.  The vast majority is people seeking information on distributions that use init systems other than systemd.  In most cases people end up looking through the list of distributions, occasional reading specific stories on a specific distribution or a general review.  It is not very often out of the thousands of hits to get any feedback in what else people might be interested in that we can provide information on.  But here is a search that breaks our monotony.

“fedora without systemd”

We don’t want to make fun  of whoever was running the search, after all, it is a possible combination of variables across the open and free/non-free universe of linux and non-linux unix world.  What would be impossible to search for would have been systemd without systemd.  Even redhat without systemd is a possibility. 

kernelKurtz: What’s up with the hate towards Freedesktop?

kernelKurtz, aka kK, has been a supporter and contributor of this site since its inception.  This came as a comment to an article by FigOSdev on dbus but it deserves its own space.

Here he takes a shot at Freedesktop and gang.

reddit:  What’s up with the hate towards Freedesktop?

It’s not about hate, random reddit OP. But it is about a severe difference in what people think is important.

These corporate persons want standardization and homogeneity on their own terms. They want open source cachet and finding a way to monetize it, and they don’t give a rat’s ass about the four freedoms, or what happens to the people that Bill Gates once sneered at as “hobbyists”. They are Google and Microsoft and everyone else who can afford to buy a seat on the board of the Linux Foundation. Red Hat probably too, sad to say. Their motto is do no evil, until evil is profitable, and then pick another slogan, because buttering the bread is what life is all about.

U/EFI secure boot and debian/microsoft-ization

A short story: In recent years PCs have increasingly shifted from having a bios in charge of booting, whatever system can possibly boot from, to a system called EFI.  EFI in brief seeks a boot partition on disk that can be edited and filled with OS instructions on how the kernel of a system will be initialized and built.  A UEFI is a more specific form of an EFI that also introduces secure boot.  This means that only certain systems that are considered as “safe” can boot and such systems are certified and are issued a key (for a hefty fee of course).