So the chores local and remote are dealt with and although I woke after about six hours in the lately common way, I did go right back to sleep, uncommonly, and packed on a total of ten or so. That was the perfectly healthy thing to do, absolutely, and also circumstantial evidence that I’m running away a little from the true work of these few free days.

The running theory is supported by a detour in the late waking morning to the usual places. I watched a football game and it was political football of course.

Here’s what I found.

The Young Turks had some good video about the true politics of Bill Gates. They headlined it stupidly and analyzed it without much depth, but the fact remains–Gates was asked directly about whether he’d vote for Trump or that evil taxing witch Elizabeth Warren, and he dodged the question.

I’m sure he is a nice man and charitable, just like John D. Rockefeller passing out shiny dimes to worthy children, but he is of course no friend of mine. He’s a capitalist and he made his money by employing monopolistic practices, literally red-baiting the free software community, and co-opting the public education process with his products.

The video is just a stark reminder that the soft values of one’s political stance (‘sure I’m all for gay marriage’) melt like snow before the greater burning importance of the hard value of cash in this country. Even when you have more cash than you could ever spend, and even when you spend some of it in nominally good ways, in the end making it, holding onto it, and living large is what really matters to this ugly societal consensus we live in. So Bill has to be circumspect, think about it, when someone asks him this kind of question. When he’s asked who he’d vote for, he has to think first about who would be best for his money, and not who would be best for a poor child in Malawi or Mobile, Alabama.

For people like Steve Jobs and Tim Cook of Apple, or Michael Bloomberg and Tom Steyer for that matter, the calculus is essentially the same. It comes dressed up a little prettier. Apple is far better than Microsoft or Google on privacy issues, for example. But there’s not enough difference to matter, from my position on the outside.

None of that will be too surprising to you if you know me. But let me go a bit further. Running Linux is no kind of guarantee that your tech will be aligned with true virtue.

Yes, thanks to Stallman, we have the GPL and that goes a long way toward curbing the baser parts of our nature. But the GPL, the GNU tools, the Linux kernel and other monuments to beauty have been wildly successful, precisely because they are beautiful, morally. But moral beauty or even legal protections will never stop the impulse toward greed completely. Inevitably, there will be a large class of people out there who will see this beauty as primarily a marketing tool.

Thus we have the re-branding of free software in the original sense of liberty into the more palatable ‘open source’. The people who invented the term did so explicitly to make the beauty more ‘business friendly’, and it worked wonders. So we have companies like Red Hat, who made billions doing what was essentially the right thing==but it wasn’t enough for them, of course, and now they have to hold onto those billions and make them grow into still fatter stacks.

So we have ‘The Linux Foundation’.

The head man of this foundation doesn’t use Linux. He runs around to his conferences with an Apple laptop.

The board of this foundation has many seats, and those seats are filled exclusively by rich corporate donors. When the true guerrilla Karen Sandler expressed an interest in running for the sole token ‘community’ seat on the board, the Foundation responded to the threat by just abolishing the community seat.

The people who pay Linus Torvald’s salary, and contribute most to the kernel today (Red Hat, Intel) are by this means just another consortium of corporate interests, a bunch of rich people trying to stay rich and get richer.

The proximate cause of this rant is a story I’m not going to get into. It involves a clutch of not-very-pleasant people getting ‘canceled’ from an LF event; canceled as well by their book publishers, online teaching platforms, and so on.

I don’t have a lot to say in their defense specifically. I do have a deep brooding feeling about what ‘Linux’ is, and is increasingly becoming in the public mind, and about the kinds of GNU-Linux I will run and support and preach about.

Bringing this full circle, I am thinking hard right now about how and when and why to out myself for who I really am. Thinking about identity; thinking about how it relates to money and how much money I need, thinking about what I’m willing to do for it.

And at last, avoiding all of those considerations on a Saturday afternoon by amusing myself with what progressive media (more or less) has to say about Bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg and even Bernie Sanders.

The self-diversion stops here and I will see you on the other side in a day, or two, in a post that may or may not concern itself with where I went during this particularly shimmering lovely Long Uninterrupted Stretch of Time, which I refuse to waste in its entirety on critique and nonsense.