“Linux is about freedom. It’s about the little guy sticking it to the big guy.”
Meanwhile, The Linux Foundation board of directors…
https://www.linuxfoundation.org/en/about/board/
🤔️
@aral uhhhh...*walks away slowly* - do you have a better suggestion? BSD?
@calculsoberic @aral I left Linux behind around 2003 and use FreeBSD since then (for servers, no GUI) and never looked back. Only lately i was forced to use Linux again when i moved all my VMs to a Proxmox cluster, but i can stand the pain for these hosts. In fact the pain is less than with a super big commercial competitor in the virtualization business i used before.
@aral My goodness...
@aral where's Linus ?
@aral holy crap
@aral Yeah, if you look at board, it's like the Vampires All Stars
@aral Isn’t most work on the kernel done by individuals employed by big companies who sell Linux related services or use Linux on a massive scale? At least it used to be true. If true, this is not surprising.
@aral wow, facebook, tencent and huawei. might as well get palantir and skynet on there too and be done.
@aral wtf 😢 this ain't right
@aral The Linux Foundation does not represent the development community of Linux, though. It's merely an industrial alliance.
When they say "Linux" they are actually referering to the GNU system. And GNU system was specifically developed for user freedom. Linux Foundation, Linux and open source do not represent us or our ideals.
Linux (the kernel) and open source never stood out for user freedom instead it co-opted the movement and weakened it.
@aral Remember "Revolution OS" from 2001? A documentary about Linux with a story that ended in celebration of victory when valinux / red hat entered the stock market and made ESR a lot of money?
The Linux Foundation pretty much exists to make business deals.
It's not analogous to the Linux kernel itself, which is indeed unarguably FOSS.
Of course different distros are better for privacy and security than others, but that's down to the teams maintaining those distros.
The Linux kernel is indeed "about freedom" by definition because it's FOSS.
And what would your suggestion be instead? Use Windows 10 with its "telemetry"?
@aral Linux was never about that though! People might have attached irrational thought to it. But it's a kernel for an OS. Lot's of people agreed that having a "universal OS" was a *good* thing, including bedroom hackers and IBM, but it was never about "sticking it to the big guy" except in a few people hallucinations.
@aral So what the corporations are now trying, is to give us the impression that we are already surrounded by corporate volunteers.
@aral The Linux Foundation can be viewed as companies who sell Linux servers paying Linus to continue maintaining the kernel. They do a few other things, but that's mainly it. It also explains why some LF people don't even run Linux on their laptops and couldn't really be considered to be part of "the community" in any meaningful sense.
@aral not sure the Linux Foundation is for for purpose though.