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Old 09-08-2018, 05:24 PM   #1
tekra
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The future of FOSS in a world of political ponerology.


Whether viewed as a technological achievement, an art-form, a social movement or a community service, FOSS and Linux are undoubtedly the greatest achievements of the worldwide computer community. That they get no recognition whatever from the corporate-controlled media is no mystery to its long-term advocates, who know that they are viewed as a threat to the philosophy and business models of TNCs (TransNational Corporations) and what will here be called the Deep State (DS). It is vastly more creative, community friendly and commercially productive when compared to the anti-competitive monopolist preferences of Big Business.

Ten years ago there were a dozen or more Linux-related magazines on every news-stand. Today, most have disappeared. It is obvious that FOSS and Linux are passing through a nexus of some sort, yet there is little explicit discussion of this. A topic of such breadth, depth and complexity will obviously explode into a myriad of competing ideas without a focus of some sort. That presented here is the desirability of forking development into two distinct but complementary branches: Personal Linux and Corporate Linux. Each can be defined quite clearly enough to permit and sustain such a fork. However, its necessity is best illustrated by a terse, selective summary of the history of FOSS.

Richard Stallman founded the GNU Project in 1983 so that people could use free software. He established the non-profit Free Software Foundation in 1985 to organize it more formally. He also devised CopyLeft, a legal mechanism to preserve the "free" status of a work subject to copyright, and implemented it in the General Public License. These allowed FOSS to escape the first attempted assertion of ownership by AT&T, who falsely claimed that it duplicated their own source code. Stallman simply stated his now-famous recursive acronym: "GNU's not Unix".

The release of Windows 3.1 in 1990 marked the real beginning of the graphical desktop. However, its successor - 3.1 - contained the first of many "undocumented features". Although Microsoft's DOS led the market, DR-DOS was a superior product. Microsoft added code that caused Win 3.1 to malfunction erratically with any DOS other than its own. This was formalized in Windows 95 and resulted in a major lawsuit against them by Caldera.

Linus Torvalds announced his intention to write a new kernel in 1991 that eventually became what is commonly known as the Linux Operating System. A series of internal Microsoft documents leaked in 1998 identified Linux as a major threat to its business, and the company subsequently contributed millions of dollars to lawsuits attempting to have Linux declared illegal. The staunchest defender of FOSS at this time was Eben Moglen, who remains a leading advocate of the entire Open Source movement.

The release of Windows 97 brought another revelation. A final pre-release step had been skipped, resulting in human-readable labels remaining in the final code. One of these, in a security driver named ADVAPI.DLL, was "NSA Gateway". It was subsequently revealed that major software companies had long been including undeclared backdoors for USA government agencies.

Having failed to seize ownership of FOSS during its first decade, and to outlaw it during its second, the DS tried ignoring it during its third. Hardware manufacturers were persuaded not to release drivers for it, but they were written instead by volunteers. The mainstream media deliberately ignored it, education departments worldwide were cajoled and bribed by Microsoft to use its proprietary products in preference, and major corporations tried to avoid it. However, with some 70% of servers using some flavour of Unix/Linux, this policy worked in the front office but often failed in the back.

Things took a nastier turn in 2015. Having failed to persuade Torvalds to put a back door in the Linux kernel, it appears that a similar approach to Ian Murdock, the founder of Debian, the largest Linux distro, was equally unsuccessful. Murdock died in such bizarre circumstances that one is forced to remember the long-standing, long-ridiculed research into psychotronic warfare by USA government departments, most infamously MK-ULTRA. A few months later, Microsoft and Ubuntu, the largest Debian-based distro, announced the sort of partnership that had previously been considered unthinkable.

It appears that the latest DS strategy is first to merge corporate and FOSS developers, and then to turn loose an army of inexperienced software engineers on the public codebase, resulting in its becoming an undocumented morass of increasingly dysfunctional, bug-ridden eye-candy, whilst retaining a clandestine repository of functional code. Evidence of this is already appearing.

Despite vehement ridicule and denial of the above by DS and corporate shills, the facts remain. If FOSS is to survive and develop further, deliberate action will be needed by its users and advocates to protect it from determined attack by those who, behind a veil of legitimacy, are criminals and sociopaths. The question is how best to do this.

Rather than clutter this thread with notes, references and explanations, I've posted some references on my blog, and will add to this if it facilitates discussion:

https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest.../tekra-537243/

Last edited by tekra; 09-08-2018 at 06:14 PM.
 
Old 09-09-2018, 02:09 AM   #2
ondoho
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Quote:
Originally Posted by tekra View Post
Whether viewed as a technological achievement, an art-form, a social movement or a community service, FOSS and Linux are undoubtedly the greatest achievements of the worldwide computer community.
i was going to say "careful with superlatives", but you phrased it so well, and specified it so precisely, that i can wholeheartedly agree with this statement.


Quote:
That they get no recognition whatever from the corporate-controlled media is no mystery to its long-term advocates, who know that they are viewed as a threat to the philosophy and business models of TNCs (TransNational Corporations) and what will here be called the Deep State (DS).
...and off we go.

Linux does get recognition from the media, and much more nowadays than, say, 15 years ago.

You must understand that this will never be a mainstream media thing. While most people know what Windows is (or think they do), they have only a very vague concept (and even less interest) of what an operating system is, or why an alternative to Windows might be a good idea.
They barely hang on to how things work now, and there's a justified fear that they would understand even less if one were to change that OS to something else.

Among those non-techies that do know about it, Linux also has a reputation for being buggy.
We know most distros aren't any more or less buggy than, say, Windows, but the notion is not unjustified!
Linux usually does not come preinstalled, and is not in bed with hardware manufacturers, so there's that.
And the GPL is very convenient in that respect; a manufacturer can slap Linux on one of their devices and remain completely unconcerned about whether it actually works, or will survive even a single upgrade.

I can understand that a complete non-techie prefers to stick to windows if it guarantees that the computer will continue to work (if much slower), and things stay where they have always been.
I can understand that most people have little interest in computers.

All this is changing - Linux does get recognition from the media, and much more nowadays than, say, 15 years ago.

There will always be cases where some corporate entity deliberately tries to stifle media coverage, but a blanket statement like the one quoted above is nonsense.
I will not react to any further mention of DS without any proof tha this is actually a thing (but i'm sure others will).

Quote:
Ten years ago there were a dozen or more Linux-related magazines on every news-stand. Today, most have disappeared.
they went digital, duh. and i bet there's many more nowadays than there were 10 years ago.
god, who's still getting their news on paper? i certainly ain't.


Quote:
It is obvious that FOSS and Linux are passing through a nexus of some sort, yet there is little explicit discussion of this.
it isn't obvious to me - things have been happening ever since the first distros came out at the turn of the millenium, and haven't stopped. why is now different?
all i see is continuous growth.
there's more of everything now than 20 years ago:
more distros
more users
more discussion
more linux use cases
-and of course also
more controversy
more criticism
more FUD
etc.
If you broaden the definition of computer to anything that can run an operating system, then the vast majority of devices runs on Linux nowadays.
And it's not only because of Android, there's also loads of embedded devices. Whether those are actually GNU/Linux, I will leave that discussion to others.
And servers of course.

these links do nothing to back up all the statements you made here.
most of them just wikipedia articles.
if you want us to even consider this conspiration theory, you need to show us something much more precise.
 
Old 09-09-2018, 02:24 AM   #3
tekra
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> if you want us to even consider this conspiration theory, you need to show us something much more precise.

As I stated in another thread, we're undoubtedly of very different philosophical persuasions. I've not the slightest interest in persuading you or anyone else of the state of transnational politics. That the world is now run by enormously wealthy and largely unknown individuals who use such organizations as the Trilateral Commission, the Brookings Institute and others to further their agenda has long been known to those who get their news from sources other than the mainstream media.

That people such as yourself prefer NOT to know about these things is quite understandable. DS agents don't THINK that the general public are spineless, apathetic, ignorant halfwits: they know it full well, and have decades of experience to prove it. The contempt with which the public is treated today by corporate heads, politicians and the media is proof enough of itself.

To suggest that such people would NOT be interested in something as important and game-changing as FOSS is ludicrous. And since the idea of being challenged by a malodorous mob of obese, pizza-slurping, beer-guzzling coders is merely a source of mirth to them, they feel free to do as they wish.
 
  


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