The modern fascism
I think I've read this before, but... I'm copying a post verbatim, but somehow I don't think the author would mind.
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One side of the Atlantic implements an oppressive law, tax, or spy on your own citizens regime, and then the other side of the Atlantic says, see they did it and it was good so we shall do it too and we can do it even better. Repeat over and over and.... BAMMMM ..... you are living in Fascist world.
Both sides of the Atlantic are also passing these same obscene laws because the same multinationals are lobbying, bribing and pressuring politicians the world over to legislate their profitability.
At this point I mostly debate if I lived in a world dominated by Fascist governments or governments which are for all intents and purposes organized crime syndicates, I think a little of both. They are taking vast sums from ordinary people and transferring it to their rich friends and themselves. It boggles the mind that working people in the U.S. are taxed at least 25% income tax and 12.5% payroll taxes(counting the employer half) for 37.5% at a minimum. Billionaire hedge fund operators are taxed at 15%. These same hedge funds manager tax their own clients more than that, over 20% (2% management fees and 20% of profits).
I was watching Frontline on PBS last night on Brookseley Born [wikipedia.org]. A great story. During the Clinton administration she tried to use the authority she had at the obscure Commodities Futures Trading Commission to regulate derivatives. If she had succeeded she might well have prevented at least the AIG part of the recent financial crisis. Instead she was crushed by Alan Greenspan, Phil Graham, Bob Rubin and Larry Summers. Long Term Capital Management collapsed during this period trading derivatives, nearly sparking a major panic, proving Born right and they continued to crush her.
Alan Greenspan supposedly told Born that she was NOT suppose to pursue fraud in derivatives or commodities though it was explicitly in her agencies charter to do just that.
Bob Rubin went on to help lead Citigroup in to complete ruin and billions of tax payer bailouts.
Phil Graham's wife was on the board at Enron, he went to UBS where his Swiss bank ran tax shelters for thousands of wealthy Americans, and was a leading player in the collapse during which he called us all a bunch of whiners.
Larry Summers is now Obama's senior economic adviser.
All four of these people should be run out of every government position, boardroom or any other position of authority because they are a delightful mix of stupid and criminal. Its especially obscene for Larry Summers to be calling the shots on financial matters in the Obama administration. Paul Volcker might actually fix the bankster problem but he has been completely shut out by Summers and Geitner.
CodePlex, the new Microsoft that’s old
The new Microsoft Open Source consortium (CodePlex), as seen from www.consortiuminfo.org (in self Q&A style, emphasis mine) :
Q: So now let’s cover the basics; how is the Foundation set up?
A: Microsoft organized CodePlex under the non-profit laws of the State of Washington, which may be a good neutral choice, or may not. Most attorneys (myself included) aren’t familiar with Washington law, so it’s hard to tell (I always use Delaware law when forming a new non-profit, since its laws are very flexible, and most attorneys have some familiarity with it). Also, CodePlex has not been set up as a membership organization, which is very unusual for an organization operating in an area that usually relies on consensus in order to be credible.
Q: Is that good or bad?
A: In my view, it’s bad, because it means that the Board of Directors not only has complete control, but the Board is also self-perpetuating (i.e., the directors elect their own successors). Moreover, there are no term limits on how long a Board member can serve. In this kind of organization, the Board is not answerable to the participants, and the participants have no say or control at all over how the organization is managed or evolves.
Q: But as long as the Board is balanced, shouldn’t that be OK?
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In this case, individuals and companies that decide to participate in CodePlex won’t be able to vote for the directors at all. At minimum, this means that CodePlex will have to work very hard to convince others that the Board really is balanced, and therefore will look out for the best interests of all stakeholders, and not just the company that is paying all of the bills.
Q: Is there any way to tell from the documents how likely that will be?
A: There’s one provision that particularly concerns me. Currently, the Board has six members, and the Bylaws provide that the successor board that will be appointed within 100 days will have only five members – that’s a very small board indeed.
[...]Q: Why do these templates matter?
A: In two ways. First, the CodePlex site says that the Foundation will be promoting their use throughout the industry. Second, the site states that CodePlex is intended not only to develop and promulgate best practices, but to host open source projects as well. Unless CodePlex is set up in a truly neutral fashion, that will lead many people to worry that Microsoft wants to create and legitimize “their” kind of development environment, where Microsoft can feel safe launching projects (all of the initial projects under consideration are Microsoft projects) under IPR rules, and under licenses, that fit their view of what open source should be all about.
Whether it likes it or not, Microsoft is likely to be held to a higher standard with CodePlex than another company might, due to it’s historical hostility to open source, and to it’s current mixed messaging on the same topic. I expect that unless significant changes are made, many people will conclude that CodePlex is intended to become some sort of “alternative universe” of open source development, populated by Microsoft business partners, where only the more limited types of open source licenses are considered to be good options for developers to use. Those licenses are fine for some purposes, but most developers – and even commercial companies - don’t choose them today. If CodePlex flourishes under this type of regime, I won't be surprised if Microsoft (as would most other vendors in the same situation) begins to tell customers that this type of patent-friendly environment is what open source software is “really” all about.
When you combine this with the assertions at the CodePlex site that a primary goal is to get more software vendor employees participating in open source projects across the board, you can easily see why the community might fear that CodePlex has been formed in part to recruit legions of new project participants that will have a new and different agenda than the existing members of the already existing projects that they join.
Welcome to ConsortiumInfo.org
Wednesday, October 07 2009 @ 06:53 AM EDT
The CodePlex Foundation: First Impressions (and Recommendations)
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Monday, September 14 2009 @ 10:29 AM EDT
Contributed by: Andy Updegrove
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Well, it’s been a busy week in Lake Wobegon, hasn’t it? First, the Wall Street Journal broke the story that Microsoft had unwittingly sold 22 patents, not to the Allied Security Trust (which might have resold them to patent trolls), but to the Open Inventions Network. A few days later, perhaps sooner than planned, Microsoft announced the formation of a new non-profit organization, the CodePlex Foundation, with the mission of “enabling the exchange of code and understanding among software companies and open source communities.”
Not surprisingly, more articles were written about the apparent snookering of Microsoft by AST and OIN than about the new Foundation. But while the tale of the 22 patents is now largely over, the CodePlex story is just beginning. Microsoft says that its goal for the new Foundation is to create an open and neutral environment, and that the formation documents posted and governance structure described at the CodePlex Foundation site can provide a foundation for such an organization. The CodePlex site also makes clear that the Bylaws you can find there are just a starter set, stating, “Our governance documents are deliberately sparse, because we expect them to change.”
That’s good to hear, because I’ve reviewed all of the material at the CodePlex site, and I think that quite a bit of the governance structure will need to change before CodePlex can expect to attract broad participation.
Over the past 22 years, I’ve helped structure scores of open, consensus based consortia and foundations, and represented over 100 in all (disclosure: they include the Linux Foundation; a full list can be found here). In this blog entry, I’ll show where I think the legal and governance structure of CodePlex has wandered off the open path, and offer specific recommendations for how the structure could be changed to give people (other than Microsoft business partners) confidence that CodePlex will be an organization worth joining.
Since there’s a lot of ground to cover, to make it an easier read I’ll use the self-interview approach that I’ve picked up from Steve O’Grady over at RedMonk.
Q: What’s the sixty thousand foot guidance on how to set up an organization that will inspire confidence that it’s safe to join?
A: It’s all about three closely related factors: appearances, control mechanisms, and broad support. What you want to do is to create a structure that you demonstrably _can’t_ control. If you claim that you want the organization you launch to be neutral, and then people find “gotchas” in the documents, you’ve lost the credibility war on the first day of battle.
It also helps enormously to launch with multiple partners, rather than try to add them later after people are no longer paying attention. You’ll never get more press than on the day you do your public launch, and if both competitors as well as allies are standing next to you on the stage as co-founders, that sends a powerful message that the organization really is not under any individual company's control.
For this reason, new organizations traditionally operate in stealth mode until they sign up an impressive roster of co-founders, so that people pay attention, and figure that there is broad industry support for what you want to accomplish. If instead you’re out there all alone, then people wonder why that’s so.
In this case, Microsoft launched without any co-sponsors (it has been theorized by many that the launch date was accelerated to offset the adverse publicity generated by the disclosure of the sale of the 22 patents), which I think was a mistake. If you go through the CodePlex site, you also learn that, while additional sponsors will be welcome, Microsoft has provided $1 million in funding for the first year’s operation. Microsoft will also provide the staff that will run the organization.
While it’s good that Microsoft is willing to provide so much economic support in times like these, it’s not helpful in building trust that the organization really will be independent and neutral. For better or worse, if all of the money and all of the staff come from one company, it will be hard for most folks to believe that CodePlex it will really be neutral in action.
Perhaps most significantly, when you go through the formation documents in greater detail, you also start running into “gotchas.” Some of these can be easily changed, and perhaps were meant to be open for discussion. But others (such as the decision not to form CodePlex as a membership organization) are so fundamental that I expect that Microsoft doesn’t intend for them to change.
The bottom line is that forming a successful consensus-based organizations is a bit like stepping through the looking glass – you win by giving things away, not by extracting value from others or controlling them. You have to create a place where people can be expected to conclude that it's safer to be a part of the organization, than to stay outside. Consequently, if it looks like you've kept too much control, the best you can hope for is to form a glorified user group. I’ve written extensively on how to form an organization that is convincingly open, for example here and here.
Q: So now let’s cover the basics; how is the Foundation set up?
A: Microsoft organized CodePlex under the non-profit laws of the State of Washington, which may be a good neutral choice, or may not. Most attorneys (myself included) aren’t familiar with Washington law, so it’s hard to tell (I always use Delaware law when forming a new non-profit, since its laws are very flexible, and most attorneys have some familiarity with it). Also, CodePlex has not been set up as a membership organization, which is very unusual for an organization operating in an area that usually relies on consensus in order to be credible.
Q: Is that good or bad?
A: In my view, it’s bad, because it means that the Board of Directors not only has complete control, but the Board is also self-perpetuating (i.e., the directors elect their own successors). Moreover, there are no term limits on how long a Board member can serve. In this kind of organization, the Board is not answerable to the participants, and the participants have no say or control at all over how the organization is managed or evolves.
Microsoft got distracted
This is old now, but I didn't register it here, so
a) Someone might actually find it here. Yeah, I think you (the readers) are all in my head, but ok;
b) Personal archive.
So... Story at linuxfountadion.org
The details are that Microsoft assembled a package of patents “relating to open source” and put them up for sale to patent trolls. Microsoft thought they were selling them to AST, a group that buys patents, offers licenses to its members, and then resells the patents. AST calls this their “catch and release” policy. Microsoft would certainly have known that the likely buyer when AST resold their patents in a few months would be a patent troll that would use the patents to attack non-member Linux companies. Thus, by selling patents that target Linux, Microsoft could help generate fear, uncertainty, and doubt about Linux, without needing to attack the Linux community directly in their own name.
Microsoft has "changed". That one never gets old...
Red Hat had this to say, emphasis mine:
The Open Invention Network (OIN) learned recently that Microsoft was planning to auction off some of its software patents, which we understand it marketed to trolls and some other non-practicing entities. It also used marketing materials that highlighted offensive uses of the patents against open source software, including a number of the most popular open source packages.
This looked to us like a classic FUD effort. To unleash FUD, you assemble a lot of patents of uncertain value, annotate them with a roadmap for the companies and products to be targeted with the patents, put the lot in the hands of trolls schooled in patent aggression, and then stand back and wait for the FUD to spread with its chilling effect.
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