muckrights-sans-merde
bonum fabula frat
### muckrights---like-open-source---is-a-shell-game
*originally posted:* oct 2021
at muckrights, truth is fungible and all findings are pandering: http://techrights.org/2021/10/07/ibm-vs-fsf-is-a-failure/
> techrights-news #ibm declares defeat/failure, 'shuts down' campaign of anti- #richardstallman rhetoric (defamation)
ive compared open source to a shell game before; you cover up the "prize" (in this instance, its the truth) with a cup and then move the cups around, and ask people to guess where it is-- before taking their money (or wasting their time).
the con is in hiding the prize so that no matter what cup is lifted, theres nothing there.
this sums up muckrights take on the coup against free software.
even with all my notes on the subject, it would take a considerable amount of work to produce even a nearly-comprehensive list of examples where muckrights has moved the cups around and changed its story. part of the reason there is a timeline:
=> timeline-of-muckrights.html timeline-of-muckrights
is to help show how theyve done this.
of particular shame (or shamelessness) is the way that muckrights has used this to keep readers in the dark about the coup. ive been complaining about this since i started ewwfs in january:
=> how-muckrights-will-help-the-anti-stallman-coup.html how-muckrights-will-help-the-anti-stallman-coup
and by april i was complaining about how muckrights had decided to bullshit the public about the coups (very obvious) shift in venue, from staging areas on the gnu or fsf website to the new home on the gnu.fools website:
=> what-muckrights-wont-tell-you-about-the-coup.html what-muckrights-wont-tell-you-about-the-coup
roys take on it:
```
schestowitz another failed coup effort Apr 22 07:32
schestowitz very much failed Apr 22 07:32
```
it was especially pointless and stupid to have this sort of chestbeating about it, when he had just downplayed the secession of several gnu contributors from the gnu project, in an act of blatant trademark fraud and a dictatorial approach towards who could contribute to gnu (these people were never in charge of the gnu project, but they may have gone as far as faking stallmans resignation) including similar threats to free speech as the one that kicked the ORIGINAL coup off in 2018.
these are people who have spent the past THREE YEARS leading coups against the fsf, libreplanet, and the gnu project, and roy is only stupid enough to treat this long-running campaign as isolated incidents when it suits his fucking ego.
specifically, he downplayed the largest phase of the coup against the gnu project specifically, after i covered it first.
but he cant get away with that narrative all the time, or people will realise hes full of shit.
so the way that you get around this? act stupid! OH THE COUP IS STILL ONGOING, HE SAYS! (of course it is, but here we go)--
and what is the coup? i mean, he was stressing ibm as the coup, hes said that the coup was "infiltrating open source" when actually open source has done the infiltrating (open source was infiltrated years ago, any infiltration being done now is closer to home and free software itself-- BUT MUCKRIGHTS HAS REPORTED THIS DIFFERENTLY, as though the coup is somewhere in the distance, not RIGHT HERE on our own turf) not two weeks ago, on the 25th, the coup was not over: http://techrights.org/2021/09/25/coup-gnu-linux/
"The Corporate Coup Against the Soul of the Free Software Community Is Not Over"
and that article will be addressed in more detail in a moment-- lately roy has shifted the definition of the coup to be more linux-foundation-centric than ibm-centric, but ive complained bitterly in the past that he was blaming ibm (even if theyre the biggest player, debian plays an enormous role that roy really doesnt talk about, because hes a shill-- and osi was cofounded by a very early dpl, and a very early dpl also joined the gnu.fools coup, but roy has remained pretty quiet and "diplomatic" about this) and now hes just moving the cups around again. from the october 7th article:
> IBM Declares Defeat/Failure, 'Shuts Down' Campaign of Anti-Richard Stallman Rhetoric (Defamation)
i mean, this is absolutely shameless. ive looked for any indication that ibm has ceased any of its attacks, and AS FAR AS I CAN TELL roy is simply conflating DOING ANYTHING ELSE (ibm is a pretty small company you know, they cannot have two things going simultaneously, so starting one thing means ending another?) with CEASING a completely unrelated activity.
in other words, as far as i can tell roys argument is that if this week theyre doing something about vaccinations, that means theyre "shutting down" their campaign against rms.
fucking WHAT?
> No more Bully de Blanc (fired), no Deb (OSI, stepped down ), no more IBM-led hate letter against an opponent of its darker agenda
this is roy playing fucking make-believe.
first of all, youd think from reading that, something happened to the "IBM-led hate letter"-- note that just calling it the "IBM-led hate letter" helps shield gnome and debian, who together probably have as much to do with this as ibm. but thats an old (still valid imo) complaint of mine.
the letter is still online, so what the fuck is roy talking about? HE DOESNT SAY. i honestly think he just made it up. (id be happy to correct this if i can find any reasonable cause for him to say these ridiculous things). roy is misleading the public, about the coup, once again!
and this is right on the heels of a post about how the coup is still ongoing:
muckrights late september: coup still going (three years in-- it started with the 2018 libreplanet petition, not the 2019 resignation)
muckrights early october: ibm has moved on! (cue dancing crabs)
the most intolerable thing about muckrights is its constant if-by-whiskey bullshit.
> IBM and Red Hat will now focus on getting medical records of staff * and forcing everyone to pull up the sleeve, unconditionally (the subject of ongoing uproar at IBM ); This isn't software freedom or even freedom in general . What happened, IBM? Got tired of removing signatures ( that's all that was happening there; people removing their own names )?
false dichotomy much?
this sort of chestbeating article will be followed up in irc with various post-hoc innuendo attributing most of the "positive" changes (including imaginary ones) in free software to muckrights having even mentioned them. a recent example is when roy stated that red hat stopped making flatpak a vector for systemd after muckrights "complained" about it.
since im more focused on real alternatives, not chasing the erosion of gnu linux at the sellout line (i already did that for years, and now that roy has temporarily latched onto the concept FINALLY, after everyone serious about fixing this has moved on, hes talking like gnu/linux can somehow fork themselves away from it, ignoring the past several years of failure to do just that) i am not following flatpak/systemd closely, but my understanding/assumption goes likes this:
you can somehow do flatpak without systemd, most likely (perhaps not!) but it was always MORE of a vector for systemd than not, so any "progress" or "erosion" there is most likely imaginary-- when they "took our advice" (meaning they allegedly gave a shit what roy thinks about it) it was a little easier to avoid systemd and use flatpak, and now they have gone "back" on this.
the fact that flatpak and systemd are both designed to be hegemonies in the first place (and that people who design such things are dicks who would lie to your face about what theyre trying to do-- 'OH ITS JUST AN INIT SYSTEM, WHATS THE BIG DEAL???? MOST PEOPLE DONT EVEN CARE ABOUT THAT') are all things roy is overlooking.
in other words, partial/quasi dependencies of a bloated packaging system REPLACEMENT (by fiat) is NOT merely an extension of the typical bullshit that has taken over gnu/linux in general, no-- it is SOLELY a function of developers caring what roy thinks-- and then going BACK on their word (probably just one dev bullshitting like always, but that hardly suits roys narrative that big decisions like that rest on a word from muckrights alone!)
i mean, i know that people sometimes have doubts about shit like this. thats why this website exists-- no, its not just you who are curious about these things.
anyway, the recent article then mentions some irrelevant restructuring at osi as evidence that ibm has "moved on", but the only entity that has actually done so is roy, because his narrative is about as stable as a nuclear isotype. (nist really should take advantage).
the restructuring at osi (if relevant) goes against roys own bullshit anyway:
september: roy already covered the osi restructuring
late september: coup is still going on
early october: ibm-led coup is now linux foundationy
early october: osi restructuring (from last month) suddenly means that ibm is moving on from the coup?
again, wtf?
the moral of the story here is that roy just pulls various events together, says that x y z -> b or a -> x y z and none of it is really supported with much of anything other than handwaving, if-by-whiskey and other assorted, irrelevant bullshit. not that the coup itself is irrelevant, just that roys coverage of it is ad-hoc, post-hoc and chock full of crap.
but even in the (longer) article from the 25th, which says the coup is still ongoing, "doctor" roy prescribes a hefty dose of bs to solve problems that just wont go away (because no one is seriously going to address them, not even doctor roy):
> These two gentlemen and their friends spent decades developing a system which some have dubbed "revolution OS" -- an operating system (OS) which gradually replaces proprietary ones in every sector, whether it's servers or small devices (like phones). With locked-down things like handheld consoles and Chromebooks -- not that they advance freedom in any meaningful way -- this "revolution OS" (GNU/Linux) is fast becoming the de facto standard everywhere.
this is handing way too much credit to linux, as if its "half" of an operating system.
gnu itself was designed to be an os, linux took an os and "made an os" from it by adding a kernel, and gnu was never designed to depend on (require) a single kernel. today, linux is a tail that wags the dog.
linux has (since the 90s) been used as a way for corporations to "take over" and co-opt the original free software operating system (its true of course that unix and bsd go back farther in some ways, but the free versions of bsd really do not).
linus has remained from the beginning, basically a shill in all of this-- he has never defended our freedom, stood for our freedom, he has always been a poster-child for co-opting (it is this very co-opting that muckrights frequently defends and often even denies, while pretending to stand against it).
and today, when linus is being outmoded and replaced with even worse shills, roy pretends that he is someone we should look to for hope. its an absolutely stupid idea, but muckrights isnt built on sincerity or truth anyway-- its built on pageviews, rewriting history and attributing all contributions to itself (not unlike linux).
> It's not too shocking that the big corporations are trying to control both GNU and Linux. But in order to accomplish this they've been trying to implement coups, a slow process by which they gradually weaken a community role or ownership ( Linux Foundation is all about passing ownership to its sponsors).
guess what? thats what linus was all about, too. maybe less than jim zemlin, sure. but just because zemlin is a bigger hypocrite, co-opter and shill doesnt mean those words dont sum up torvalds as well.
then again, roy likes to say that torvalds is a reader of muckrights. who fucking cares? what kind of bullshit will we be reading if jim zemlin starts reading it, too? i mean, hes THE BOSS of torvalds! isnt THAT kind of impressive? (not really, no).
so whats the plan, then? (and its never a plan-- roys assessment of the situation remains years behind and his solutions consist of failed ideas that people already were talking about years ago, but like zdnet and other idg bullshit it still gets pageviews) move gnu away from a corporate shit kernel that has always been a centrepiece of co-opting gnu?
OF COURSE NOT! look to a near-retirement torvalds to go back to PRETENDING to give a shit about freedom, and:
> We need to resist the coup. This means we need to support the founders, even those we don't always agree with .
LINUS IS NOT A FOUNDER OF GNU!
gnu actually resisted the entire notion of gnu/linux (as it should do again) and finally gave in to peer pressure, siding with marketshare.
its completely understandable that gnu finally allowed itself to be swept away by gnu/linux bullshit, but the way that story most likely ends is that gnu dies WITH linux.
the narrative that gnu/linux are a "team" needs to DIE, for gnu to survive. but it wont, and gnu probably wont either.
either way, linus was never an ally. he was always a shill, a co-opter, a douchebag. only its a lot more obvious now that we have decades of proof and a glimpse of the outcome, than ever before. roy and trsec are hanging the future of free software on lesser-evilism, but its really only same-as-always-evilism. for some ridiculous reason, they conflate same-as-always-evilism with progress. even if we "support" linus, what the fuck is that actually supposed to do? nothing, its just roy talking out of his arse.
linus is done, linux is done, and its going to take gnu with it. it might help to decouple the two-- since the "integration" of gnu with linux is (and always was) the largest threat to the former, but dont expect roy to figure that out yet-- give muckrights another half decade so that in 2026 we can be reading stories like:
"gnu really needs to get away from linux as fast as possible".
its too late, dipshit. but even if im wrong, youre still WAY behind. if youre going to keep up this nonsense, and your readers actually believe it, theyre going to be behind too. hopefully they know better.
at least, i know that some of them do. its the ones that we dont know about-- the readers who dont say anything, that may or may not be truly suckered by this shit. the readers who dont comment make up the bulk of roys audience.
meanwhile, muckrights says we need to "resist the coup"-- thats a ridiculous thing to say, when hes spent most of 2021 downplaying it, like he did once again, just yesterday!
if you really want to save free software, try resisting the bullshit-- bullshit is one of the favourite weapons of the coup, and roy is going out of his way to supply them.
i understand that he supplies both sides, of course. a little for the coup, a little for stallman, a little for readers, a little for himself-- roy has more than enough bullshit to go around. hes like a defence contractor, but of bullshit. theyll sell that shit to anybody, if they profit in some way. for roy its not about the money, its just about pretending that somehow sucking up to linus is going to help. well, i guess it LOOKS GOOD. until you think about it.
muckrights: sucking up to linus will help save gnu!
i dont even think linus himself could figure out how the fuck thats supposed to do anything now. so who is roy kidding?
OPEN SOURCE IS the coup.
roy cant say that (he cant even disclose his affiliations, which would help explain why he cant admit that open source itself is the coup) so he has to keep moving the cups around, sacrificing various players (then moving the cups around once again) to keep people from realising who is actually doing what. muckrights will keep giving little pointless teases of the truth, then "we move on" to the next swindle: bait and switch, bait and switch.
a well known political strategy for keeping people from demanding anything of importance is to to give them "just enough" to shut them up, or at least to deny that you neglected it this is the scraps from the table approach; for muckrights, the thing no one can demand is the truth-- it was already covered in a previous article! and an upcoming one. but never in the present one.
=> https://muckrights-sans-merde.neocities.org