The entry for June my personal balance of the year 2021 It brings us the traditional anger of Linus Torvalds with core developers (although this time it was not because of the code), quite negative information about the big technology companies and the disappearance of a project that we will not miss.
June themes
Goodbye and don't come back
The first piece of news that draws attention to the June issues is the definitive disappearance of Glimpse, a project that should never have existed. Glimpse was a fork of The Gimp created with the sole purpose of removing the Gimp name which, for the sensitive souls we live with, can be offensive and detract users.
Supposedly, the reasons were that the main developer's employers thought that dedicating himself to Glimpse would affect his work.o (If true, it would be Oracle's second major indirect contribution to the free software world since they pissed off the OpenOffice developers) They also weren't able to get contributors for non-coding tasks.
The dark world of corporations
Sometime last year I wrote that Big Tech's show of power against Donald Trump was not going to go unpunished. Democrats may rule, but politicians can't stand any power that threatens theirs. And, they took note.
Hence, in 2021 antitrust lawsuits will be activated.
One of them was the one presented by the Attorney General of the District of Columbia. Nothing less than the district where the capital of the United States is located.
The indictment pointed out that Amazon sacrifices profits and manipulates algorithms in order to dominate all the markets in which it participates.. Other questionable practices are forcing sellers to sell at a price equal to or less than that of other portals and charging abusive fees.
The prosecutor asked the court to take effective measures to prohibit these practices.
Black clouds
Oracle's cloud infrastructure division is one of the most successful in the company. However, in June journalistic leaks were revealed that mention that the work environment is not the best.
All guns are pointed at the division's leader, Clay Magouyrk, a former Amazon executive.
Magouyrk, according to the lawsuits against the company, insults people personally and professionally in front of his colleagues and even brings grown men to tears.
Newspaper reports even speak of broken promises to customers.
chinese apples
Another journalistic investigation. In this case, the New York Times tells us about Apple's enthusiastic collaboration to censor content that the Chinese government doesn't want its citizens to see.
The first was the removal of an app dedicated to exposing corruption within the Chinese Communist Party. The application disappeared from the Apple store and software was programmed to identify applications that referred to its creator.
Under the guidance of Tim Cook, its current president, Apple was able to enter the protected Chinese market and a large part of its value comes from sales in that country. But, that was not free.
In return, Apple had to set up two data centers to store the files that Chinese users keep in iCloud. The management of that data is in the hands of Guizhou-Cloud Big Data, a company owned by the government of Guizhou province, The administrator has access to all data stored to users and can share it with the authorities.
Linus and the vaccines
The Linux world was no stranger to the controversies over Covid. It occurred to a certain user to raise his doubts about the safety of vaccines based on mRNA modification.
Linus Torvalds decided to take the bull by the horns and prevent the issue from going any further:
Save your insane and technically incorrect anti-vaccine comments to yourself.
You don't know what you're talking about, you don't know what mRNA is, and you're spreading idiotic lies. Maybe you do it unknowingly, out of rudeness. Maybe you're doing it because you've talked to "experts" or seen YouTube videos of charlatans who don't know what they're talking about. But damn it, regardless of where you got your misinformation from, I'm not going to let your nonsense go unopposed on any Linux kernel discussion list.
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