Boycott Novell! editor Roy Schestowitz's view, horribly GIMP'd, of FSF "Corporate Patron" Intel...
Boycott Novell!'s editor (and staff?) Roy Schestowitz bites the hand that feeds the "free software movement", by "criminalizing" Intel, a long-standing "corporate patron" of the Free Software Foundation. Intel has been accused—but not found guilty, by any means—of unfair trade practices by the FTC in recent days.
Intel, which derives much of its revenues from the Microsoft Windows economy and ecosystem, has been supportive of community efforts, and active in community affairs, for a number of years. In addition to the FSF, Intel is a supporter of the GNOME Foundation, the Linux Foundation and many other community organizations.
However, Schestowitz has apparently written them off, based on the FTC complaint, whose merits remain to be seen. It's surprising that he's not calling for the Free Software Foundation to turn back the funding it receives from this "criminal" organization, as surprising as it is that the FSF accepts money from a company who makes so much of its business supporting not only "illegitimate" proprietary software, but also the company which Richard Stallman has described as the "sworn enemy of the free software community", Microsoft.
Stallman recently said on the GNOME foundation-list, "I would not encourage anyone to use non-free software, not even to get money to give to a worthy cause." And while Intel has certainly been a good friend to, and a good citizen of, the open source development community, they also have significant amounts of proprietary software available for use in conjunction with their products.
Equally surprisingly, Schestowitz goes on to slam the FSF in a comment, saying of the organization, "The FSF is now apathetic towards ethics", in spite of FSF President Stallman's regularly describing proprietary software as "unethical" as well as "illegitimate".
Apparently, just as the developers represented on Planet GNOME may not be sufficiently pure for Richard Stallman, the FSF is no longer sufficiently pure for Roy Schestowitz.
