gemini://gemini.tuxmachines.org/n/2022/08/05/The_Creature_Has_A_New

In the week of July 05, 2022, it became public that Lennart Poettering was no longer working for Red Hat, having been hired by Microsoft. Such an event should have no repercussions whatsoever, were it not for who Lennart Poettering is, were Microsoft not the company it is, and were the future of GNU Linux not at stake here.

We must not forget Steve Ballmer's famous quote: Linux is a cancer that attaches a sense of intellectual property to everything it touches.

Now the question remains: Who is the cancer now? Because Microsoft is sticking to everything related to Linux, and like a parasite, will control its host (The Last Of Us sends regards).

However, it has been some time since Microsoft gave up fighting openly against Linux, and decided to infect it from the inside in order to be better able to erode it, with less resistance and more ease.

As Brian Lunduke, in his article Microsoft's growing control of Linux, tells us: Microsoft controls: The largest open source hosting on Earth, a large portion of the Linux conferences, The Linux Foundation, The Open Source Initiative, and prominent Linux developers. (It's not just Lennart who has moved to Microsoft, many open source developers are already working for it: Steve French, Matteo Croce, Matthew Wilcox, Tyler Hicks, Shyam Prasad N, Michael Kelley, Guido Van Rossum, the father of the Python language).

Systemd is just software. It does no harm by itself. The problem is the people (and the corporations that control it).

Since its creation, from how it was conceived, in 2010, it has, in 12 years, achieved a position of dominance in the Linux ecosystem, where other solutions have taken decades, being improved upon.

But, the rush to make systemd a "standard," was, without soft words, a power struggle.

A power struggle between Red Hat and Canonical, which also had a solution, Upstart, that competed with systemd.

Not to mention Github, which, under Microsoft's direction, suffered a mass exodus to other platforms (Gitea, Gitlab, SourceForge, etc…), because Microsoft would abuse the code hosted there (as it ended up abusing).

So, I leave the Ned Stark meme to you the reader, and like him, I say: Prepare for impact!

The Creature Has A New Master...