05.24.22

Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XX — Entering Phase II

Posted in Deception, Microsoft, Mono at 8:57 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Series parts:

1. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part I — Inside a Den of Corruption and Misogynists
2. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part II — The Campaign Against GPL Compliance and War on Copyleft Enforcement
3. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part III — A Story of Plagiarism and Likely Securities Fraud
4. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IV — Mr. MobileCoin: From Mono to Plagiarism… and to Unprecedented GPL Violations at GitHub (Microsoft)
5. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part V — Why Nat Friedman is Leaving GitHub
6. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VI — The Media Has Mischaracterised Nat Friedman’s Departure (Effective Now)
7. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VII — Nat Friedman, as GitHub CEO, Had a Plan of Defrauding Microsoft Shareholders
8. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley’s Long Career Serving Microsoft’s Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub’s GPL Violations Machine)
9. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IX — Microsoft’s Chief Architect of GitHub Copilot Sought to be Arrested One Day After Techrights Article About Him
10. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part X — Connections to the Mass Surveillance Industry (and the Surveillance State)
11. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XI — Violence Against Women
12. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XII — Life of Disorderly Conduct and Lust
13. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIII — Nihilistic Death Cults With Substance Abuse and Sick Kinks
14. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIV — Gaslighting Victims of Sexual Abuse and Violence
15. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XV — Cover-Up and Defamation
16. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVI — The Attack on the Autonomy of Free Software Carries on
17. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVII — Backsliding Into 1990s-Style Digital Slavery by Microsoft
18. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVIII — The Story of NPM
19. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIX — The Collapse of Team Mono
20. YOU ARE HERE ☞ Entering Phase II

Summary: We’re about to resume the long-running series about the sick clique which ran GitHub until the assault on women became too much of a liability (among other wrongdoings and PR blunders)

LAST year when we started this series (in wintertime) we said it would go on well into spring. Later we said summertime. We still have a lot of material, but we’re waiting for the strategic time prior to publication. Months ago we published the arrest record of Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley and soon afterwards we saw Miguel de Icaza leaving Microsoft, though Nat Friedman had left also. So a lot has changed since we started and we probably won’t comment on Friedman’s wife (nepotism). Privacy aspects outweigh public interest at this point.

“Months ago we published the arrest record of Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley and soon afterwards we saw Miguel de Icaza leaving Microsoft, though Nat Friedman had left also.”That series, however, will resume shortly. The Friedmans are still doing things and de Icaza isn’t really retired. It’s just scandals piling up, rendering them liabilities, even in Microsoft’s books.

So expect a lot more to come, many more parts (there might be over 30 in total) although bear in mind these will likely be published at a more strategic time. Team Mono has been ejected from Microsoft (Friedman, de Icaza, Graveley) and there’s a lot more to come regarding the overall strategy of GitHub. If you’re still using GitHub at any capacity, stop now. It’s never “too late” to leave.

“If you’re still using GitHub at any capacity, stop now. It’s never “too late” to leave.”Friedman’s departure spared him and his wife lot of public embarrassment. “This is Nat Friedman’s high school,” a source recently told us. “Boarding school outside of DC; his father was not always a stockbroker…”

Further, the source told me: “I have noticed there is a pattern of switching back-and-forth between the intelligence community and finance…”

Nat Friedman has some ‘spooky’ — as in surveillance — patents, as noted much earlier in our series (yes, those were software patents), but that’s not the important point. As noted in Part 18, there’s a lot of overlap between GitHub and the NSA. This, in turn, relates to a lot of FUD we’ve seen in the media lately, seeking to portray the “Open Source” so-called “supply chain” as the real issue, not the back doors found in the most commonly used proprietary software. And a lot of this “supply chain” is Microsoft (NPM, GitHub etc.) so the finger should be pointing not at victims or attackers but the party transmitting the malware. Microsoft facilitates the security breaches. It’s the essential bridge.

“This, in turn, relates to a lot of FUD we’ve seen in the media lately, seeking to portray the “Open Source” so-called “supply chain” as the real issue, not the back doors found in the most commonly used proprietary software.”A source has further suggested that we “should consider looking into the Stripe mafia bolt thing.”

Incidentally, Stripe provides similar services to those offered by Sheela Zemlin (Bakkt, ‘first lady’ of Linux Foundation, a GitHub outsourcer), also sponsored by Microsoft.

“All comes back to Nat Friedman,” the sourced noted, naming the culpability of YCombinator (so-called ‘Hacker’ so-called ‘News’), which Graveley too was involved with, not to mention Gab’s founder Andrew Torba and the disgraced chief. Graveley is very likely going to spend some very long time in prison, not corporate life, so his dad would be spared the embarrassment (albeit he too is connected to the military). █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

03.13.22

What We Need to Remind Ourselves of (and Tell the FSF About Microsoft’s GitHub and Copilot)

Posted in FSF, Microsoft, Mono at 7:34 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum 2b51652540fdf4eca194c53bc1234b7b
FSF Warned
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is well aware of the threat posed by “Copilot” (a misleading misnomer with hype and false promises), but there are internal Microsoft stories that the FSF needs to take into consideration as well, mostly because it is a lot worse than the Free software supporters have cared to realise lately

WE HAVE just published part 19 in the Microsoft GitHub Exposé series. It was prepared yesterday (Sunday) and a video was recorded to accompany it.

The person behind Mono is now unemployed. He won’t be at Microsoft. The whole affair exploded pretty badly, with broken hearts a real possibility.

Miguel de Icaza was speaking about Nat Friedman (both worked at Microsoft)

Anyway, it remains to be seen what happens next. Miguel de Icaza will turn 50 on the 23^rd of November.

In the video above I explain some of the background to all this; we’ll elucidate further in future parts of our very long series. Knowing that Miguel de Icaza and Nat Friedman are now “between jobs”, we’ll see what happens next.

Nat Friedman having a blast. Photo by Laura de Icaza (Friedman deleted all of his).

Contact-tracing goes a long way in investigative journalism. It’s not just a pandemic-induced ploy to spy on people. █

The real MIT problem was not Dr. Stallman (FSF’s founder) but Bill Gates; see older evidence-based articles, e.g.: Mansion of Pedophilia – Part II: Dr. Stallman Defamed in the Media One Day After Request Made for King County Sheriff’s Office to Divulge Information About Pedophilia in Home of Bill Gates (2019)

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIX — The Collapse of Team Mono

Posted in GPL, Microsoft, Mono at 7:08 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Series parts:

1. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part I — Inside a Den of Corruption and Misogynists
2. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part II — The Campaign Against GPL Compliance and War on Copyleft Enforcement
3. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part III — A Story of Plagiarism and Likely Securities Fraud
4. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IV — Mr. MobileCoin: From Mono to Plagiarism… and to Unprecedented GPL Violations at GitHub (Microsoft)
5. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part V — Why Nat Friedman is Leaving GitHub
6. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VI — The Media Has Mischaracterised Nat Friedman’s Departure (Effective Now)
7. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VII — Nat Friedman, as GitHub CEO, Had a Plan of Defrauding Microsoft Shareholders
8. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley’s Long Career Serving Microsoft’s Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub’s GPL Violations Machine)
9. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IX — Microsoft’s Chief Architect of GitHub Copilot Sought to be Arrested One Day After Techrights Article About Him
10. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part X — Connections to the Mass Surveillance Industry (and the Surveillance State)
11. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XI — Violence Against Women
12. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XII — Life of Disorderly Conduct and Lust
13. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIII — Nihilistic Death Cults With Substance Abuse and Sick Kinks
14. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XIV — Gaslighting Victims of Sexual Abuse and Violence
15. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XV — Cover-Up and Defamation
16. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVI — The Attack on the Autonomy of Free Software Carries on
17. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVII — Backsliding Into 1990s-Style Digital Slavery by Microsoft
18. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XVIII — The Story of NPM
19. YOU ARE HERE ☞ The Collapse of Team Mono

Summary: Although much of Team Mono no longer works directly for Microsoft, we shall have to remove what it installed inside Microsoft; this includes Copilot, basically a plagiarism tool

ALMOST a couple of weeks ago we published the story of Mr. de Icaza's departure. ZDNet did the mop-up job for him, so don’t expect to easily know what really happened; not a single publisher has mentioned the arrest of Mr. de Icaza's friend Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley and publishers were in fact gaslighting his victims — a story which we shall tell later this year.

While this series has slowed down somewhat (due to a lack of time), it’s not stuck. There’s no impasse and we have literally thousands of lines of material in store.

Mr. de Icaza has said goodbye to Microsoft Corp. but he has not kissed goodbye the ‘Microsoft agenda’.

In spite of several people online accusing Miguel de Icaza of being gay, he is happily married with children, so we’ll refrain from propagating baseless gossip, rumours, and hearsay. There are many real issues for us to focus on instead.

The ‘Microsoft agenda’ includes attacks on the GPL, the revolutionary, ‘flagship’ licence of the GNU Project. Everyone who has read this series (hitherto lasting almost half a year) knows that there are aspects to that in Copilot. We’ve covered that in previous parts already.

As a short recap, Copilot isn’t an assistive, practical tool; it’s a GPL violation tool. It helps people remove themselves from liability or awareness of GPL infringement. That’s all it does. It’s like code search, sans the attribution/link/names (developers, projects and so on). Our source explained that “the original plan for Copilot sounded like a code auditing tool [but] Alex [Graveley] actually got mad whenever I said that’s what it sounded like…”

“Then I kind of looked into it and GitHub had an audit tool already,” the source noted. It wasn’t the idea of just one person; “Alex was saying that he and Nat [Friedman] had this idea. Honestly it was probably more Nat’s idea because Alex couldn’t really explain it to me in a way that made sense. He explained it as something that could find code based on the code you put into it and see if something similar was out there. He never used the words auto generate code for you, which makes me think he didn’t know what the fuck he was talking about…”

“This probably means that Team Mono, or specifically GitHub’s CEO (Microsoft’s decades-long stooge and mole inside our community), came up with this agenda, helping to push proprietary IDEs like Visual Studio.”So it was likely the idea of GitHub’s CEO and his longtime friend Nat Friedman, who left months ago — not too long before the rest of Team Mono!

This probably means that Team Mono, or specifically GitHub’s CEO (Microsoft’s decades-long stooge and mole inside our community), came up with this agenda, helping to push proprietary IDEs like Visual Studio. Microsoft cannot make money from GitHub (same issue as GitLab) without selling some clown computing stuff (“Azure”) or paid subscriptions. They try to teach people not to worry about GPL compliance, especially developers who can cause these issues without being aware (they think it’s some “Hey Hi” (AI) magic). “The original plan was to have Alex build it as a start up and then Microsoft would require it, which sounds a bit like fraud,” our sourced alleged, but “Alex was not in any place mentally to do this, as “Alex was in AA” (Alcoholics Anonymous).

“He also said that he had a pain killer addiction after a surgery,” the source added. “AA is a cult but that’s a different story [as] Alex has a history with cults. His parents were arrange married in Hare Krishna because they were top recruiters…”

“Oh God one day he had a panic attack… Because DropBox went from $24 to $18 in a day. He hadn’t sold any of his shares…”

“Have the goalposts been moved for the purpose of harming Free software some other way?”But the character of Alex aside (temper and drug issues), the above issue about GPL violations is very much relevant and it was discussed a lot by the FSF lately (over IRC and in papers published as well as funded by the FSF).

Our associate reminds us that “Copilot violates licenses, not only the GPL, but others as well.”

Sure, it’s a real attack on all Free software, not just the portion of it that’s GPL-centric or copyleft-leaning.

Code auditing tools are nothing new. Several other companies did it already, even 15 years earlier. Why slant that as “Hey Hi” (AT) all of a sudden? A war on copyleft/reciprocal licensing? And as an important side note, Miguel de Icaza openly complained about one such product (from Black Duck) almost 10 years ago. He said it was terrible and I still remember that.

Have the goalposts been moved for the purpose of harming Free software some other way?

“So I was reading up on GPL violations because I didn’t really completely understand the context of that phrase,” our source told us. “So I think the way that Alex described what he was trying to build with Copilot. [...] I think it was actually intentionally built with GPL violations in it. Because what he originally told me about it sounded like a code auditing tool. He said it would compare code and see if already exists. This was August 2019 so Github‘s actual code auditing tool had just been released.”

“So I told him that that product existed already. Then he basically told me I was stupid and we didn’t talk about it again. I’m not sure what he called me. It was pretty much constant at that point.”

“Copilot is most likely the mastermind’s (Friedman) way of attacking the Freedom of Free software.”Well, Copilot is no “code auditing tool” but a tool to encourage plagiarism and hide the evidence of it.

“Oh yeah,” our source added, saying: “I knew that worked at Samsung was on a project using something that for embedded software. I found it fascinating because I come from JavaScript where everything is plagiarized or open source anyways. It’s a lot more important for embedded because it’s almost impossible to fix later.”

We were told some unknown (to the public) stories about violations, but they fit better later in this series.

The good news is, Team Mono got sort of ‘orphaned’; it became too great a liability to Microsoft, which was trying to cover up several scandals at the same time. But it’s up to us now… to eradicate Copilot and anything which tries to emulate/replicate it. Copilot is most likely the mastermind’s (Friedman) way of attacking the Freedom of Free software. █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

03.05.22

”Miguel de Icaza may be gone, but the walls and bars of proprietary software he helped create remain, for now. Dismantling them is up to us.“

Posted in Microsoft, Mono at 8:47 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Video download link | md5sum cd8cc6e42e403a194c9abc421b4d210a
Miguel de Icaza is Gone, But Not the Damage He Caused
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Microsoft lover Miguel de Icaza has left the Microsoft family because according to him the other (lesser) family is suddenly a priority, even in his 40s (he turns 50 this year)? It seems possible that he too — just like his friend, Nat Friedman — got pushed out

THE end of an era? Maybe. A Microsoft booster from ZDNet has helped the arse-covering; we have good reasons to suspect that Miguel either got the boot or got too depressed given recent developments. The video above explains what happened and below we have a long list of articles for some background on Miguel’s harm:

Microsoft de Icaza (1997 job interview^* until the 2022 exit)

2022

• The GitHub Fallout? Miguel de Icaza is Out!

2021

• Teaser: Don’t Worry, Miguel, the Press Will Never Find Out… (About Nat Friedman)
• Teaser: Microsoft GitHub: Miguel de Icaza’s “HOLY SHIT”
• Teaser: Miguel de Icaza on CEO of Microsoft GitHub
• Teaser: What Miguel de Icaza Really Thinks of the CEO of Microsoft GitHub

2020

• Miguel de Icaza Came to Bruce Perens/Debian (“Permission to Use Debian’s Resources”) Just Months After His Job Interview at Microsoft

2014

• Miguel ‘Advocates’ GNU/Linux by Bashing it Again
• Miguel de Icaza and Xamarin Become More Tightly Integrated With Microsoft

2013

• Microsoft Has Taken Over Mono Development, With Miguel de Icaza’s Consent
• Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza Finally Quits GNU/Linux; Even He Does Not Want Vista 8, Samsung Dumps Vista 8 Tablets

2012

• Miguel de Icaza on Microsoft ‘Embrace and Extend’ of JavaScript
• Xamarin and Miguel de Icaza Help Microsoft

2011

• Not News: Miguel de Icaza is Working for Microsoft
• Techrights Was Right About Mono Being Open Core, Now Miguel de Icaza Admits It
• Funding Behind Xamarin is Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza; Fresh Concerns About Attachmate
• Why Microsoft’s Guy Miguel de Icaza Pushes for C# at Apple, Which is Not Successful
• Miguel de Icaza is at Microsoft, Attacking Ubuntu GNU/Linux
• Ostracise Miguel de Icaza Like Stephen Elop Should Have Been Ostracised From Nokia
• Miguel de Icaza Helps Show He is an Enemy of GNU/Linux

2010

• Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza Does Not Know What Will Happen to Mono
• Mono is for Microsoft and Microsoft F# Loves Miguel de Icaza
• Miguel de Icaza Was Wrong About Silverlight and .NET
• Is Miguel de Icaza Preparing for a Career at Microsoft?
• SD Times Removes Miguel de Icaza’s Admission That Mono Has Patent Problems and de Icaza Mocks Jeremy Allison
• Microsoft MVP de Icaza: Microsoft “Shot the .NET Ecosystem in the Foot” Because of Patent Threats
• Señor de Icaza Meets Other Microsoft MVPs
• Former Microsoft Employees and Boosters Call Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza and Other Microsoft Apologists “Most Powerful Voices” in Open Source
• Microsoft MVP Miguel de Icaza Leaves CodePlex Foundation Board
• Alex Brown, Miguel de Icaza, and Full-time Microsoft Employee Smear ODF Again
• New Opinions on Mono, Miguel de Icaza, and the “Windows Stratagem”
• Miguel de Icaza Groomed by Microsoft with MVP Award

2009

• Miguel de Icaza: “We Have Removed All of the GPL Code” (MonoDevelop)
• Novell’s de Icaza on VMware’s Potential GNU/Linux Distribution
• Miguel de Icaza Compares Richard Stallman to George Bush
• Groklaw Groks Mono, Miguel de Icaza, Microsoft, and More
• Miguel de Icaza “is Basically a Traitor to the Free Software Community,” Says Richard Stallman
• Miguel de Icaza Joins Microsoft

2008

• Quick Mention: Miguel de Icaza Loves .NET, Dislikes GNU GPL

Miguel isn’t a happy puppy. See the screenshot below. And to quote George Orwell, for anyone who doesn’t even know what doxing means (this is not anything remotely like it): “Journalism is printing what someone else does not want printed: everything else is public relations.” █

_____
^* “In summer of 1997, he was interviewed by Microsoft for a job in the Internet Explorer UNIX team (to work on a SPARC port), but lacked a university degree to obtain a Visa,” according to this page.

“Gates may be gone, but the walls and bars of proprietary software he helped create remain, for now. Dismantling them is up to us.”

–Richard Stallman

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

03.04.22

The GitHub Fallout? Miguel de Icaza is Out!

Posted in Microsoft, Mono at 11:57 pm by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Summary: Miguel de Icaza is the next to fall

• Xamarin Co-founder Miguel de Icaza Says Goodbye to Microsoft

  Following Microsoft’s acquisition of Xamarin, De Icaza became a Distinguished Engineer at Microsoft. According to ZDNet, De Icaza was recently working on the Open Neural Network Exchange (ONNX), an open standard for representing machine learning models created by Microsoft and a community of partners.

• Former Xamarin co-founder to leave Microsoft after six years

  Miguel de Icaza, the former co-founder of Xamarin and current Microsoft distinguished engineer, will leave Microsoft in the near future. De Icaza informed ZDNet’s Mary Jo Foley of his decision on March 2, 2022. Before moving to a new role, De Icaza will take a break and spend time with his family.

• [Old] Miguel de Icaza: You are disgusted

  I inform you before you read: This is a post where I will reflect my very personal opinion. If someone admires or defends the ideas of Miguel de Icaza and you may be offended by what comes next, I advise looking to the side.

• Tech Moves: Xamarin co-founder leaves Microsoft; OfferUp adds execs; and more

  Miguel de Icaza, who joined Microsoft after the tech giant acquired Xamarin in 2016, is leaving the company, according to a report from ZDNet. He was co-founder and chief technology officer at Xamarin, a mobile app development platform founded in 2011. Xamarin co-founder and CEO Nat Friedman left in November. de Icaza, known as a leader in open source software development, was a distinguished engineer at Microsoft. He will take time off before deciding where to land next, ZDNet reported.

Some background needed? See the following:

1. [Teaser] Nat Friedman and Alex Graveley “Best Friends”
2. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VII — Nat Friedman, as GitHub CEO, Had a Plan of Defrauding Microsoft Shareholders
3. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley’s Long Career Serving Microsoft’s Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub’s GPL Violations Machine)
4. Nat Friedman Has Deleted His Flickr Account After More Than 15 Years
5. Microsoft’s Team Mono: One Happy Family
6. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part XII — Life of Disorderly Conduct and Lust

Also of relevance:

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

12.21.21

Microsoft’s Team Mono: One Happy Family

Posted in Microsoft, Mono at 5:50 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley, Miguel de Icaza, Nat Friedman, and Stephanie Friedman as captured by their own photographs [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10, 11], which might disappear at a later point

Summary: Now that the Friedmans are deleting their own photos we must preserve some of the key photos, which connect them to a massive liability (they knew what he had done)

Nat Friedman has deleted his Flickr account. It happened recently, but the exact date is difficult to pinpoint. But Stephanie’s Flickr account is still up. She’s the wife of Nat and will be the subject of a later part in the long-running series that may in fact run until springtime. It’s an ongoing and fast-developing story. Microsoft’s Chief Architect of GitHub Copilot, Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley, was in the docket yesterday after assaulting women (not the first time!) and there’s certainly a lot more to come for us to integrate into the series.

“It’s an ongoing and fast-developing story.”For the sake of ensuring the integrity of the series (along with evidence) we’ve captured key photos and share some of them above. We’ll come back to that later. Alleging that this is a privacy violation would be ludicrous given that they’ve shared all this publicly for over a decade and people who engage in misconduct don’t deserve exemptions from self-incriminating things, more so if they themselves upload everything online in bulk. █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

12.08.21

[Teaser] Rape is Not a Joke

Posted in Microsoft, Mono at 6:31 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

The context does matter; more soon (and yes, it’s about Nat Friedman, GitHub’s recent outgoing CEO)

Summary: Having just uploaded a police report (more here and here), we’re starting to move the ongoing series to the next phase, which will still be — for the most part — weekly installments on Mondays (for months to come)

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend

11.29.21

Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VIII — Mr. Graveley’s Long Career Serving Microsoft’s Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub’s GPL Violations Machine)

Posted in GNU/Linux, Microsoft, Mono, Novell at 7:24 am by Dr. Roy Schestowitz

Series parts:

1. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part I — Inside a Den of Corruption and Misogynists
2. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part II — The Campaign Against GPL Compliance and War on Copyleft Enforcement
3. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part III — A Story of Plagiarism and Likely Securities Fraud
4. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part IV — Mr. MobileCoin: From Mono to Plagiarism… and to Unprecedented GPL Violations at GitHub (Microsoft)
5. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part V — Why Nat Friedman is Leaving GitHub
6. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VI — The Media Has Mischaracterised Nat Friedman’s Departure (Effective Now)
7. Microsoft GitHub Exposé — Part VII — Nat Friedman, as GitHub CEO, Had a Plan of Defrauding Microsoft Shareholders
8. YOU ARE HERE ☞ Mr. Graveley’s Long Career Serving Microsoft’s Agenda (Before Hiring by Microsoft to Work on GitHub’s GPL Violations Machine)

Summary: Balabhadra (Alex) Graveley was promoting .NET (or Mono) since his young days; his current job at Microsoft is consistent with past harms to GNU/Linux, basically pushing undesirable (except to Microsoft) things to GNU/Linux users; Tomboy used to be the main reason for distro ISOs to include Mono

THE LAST part took note of Nat Friedman and Alex Graveley (“best friends” in Graveley’s eyes; Miguel de Icaza said they go back 20 years). Today we look more closely at what Mr. Graveley had done before Microsoft/GitHub enlisted him to promote a GPL violations tool (a tool for encouraging — not detecting — copyleft violations).

“All this stuff needs daylight, as the media completely failed to report about what had actually happened earlier this year.”Based on long conversations with a source, “on LinkedIn [he makes] claim to Copilot,” but that goes further back to things we covered over a decade ago. “It sounds like you might know more about that than me,” the source said, as “the timeline starts with the Tomboy stuff.” (We called them “Team Mono”)

That was ages ago, but many of the same people are still involved and they are officially under Microsoft’s umbrella, with a salary from Microsoft as well. “From my understanding,” the source noted, “Alex wasn’t even 18 when this stuff started” because he “dropped out of high school at 15″ and later met “Nat [Friedman] through an IRC[-based] Linux channel or something…”

They also did some podcasts together (Friedman and Graveley), as we noted here before. Friedman had worked for Microsoft as an intern (mid 90s, seems to be when he met Miguel de Icaza). It took many years before he worked directly for Microsoft once again. A lot of the time was spent hooking up companies like Novell with Microsoft and then promoting .NET through Xamarin, which also led to a “payday” from Microsoft.

Our source said, “he hides that and I wonder why?”

He would then attack Free software through shells and proxies, the latest of which was GitHub. We’ve already covered a number of scandals related to this. “I know almost nothing about his personal life,” our source noted, but Richard “Stallman [said] that his dad was a stock broker though…”

“I just thought that was super weird,” the source said, “saw on some email to Richard” [Stallman] that said: “It seems that your efforts to build resistance to Amazon’s ludicrous one-click patent are really paying off! My father is a stock broker, and tonight he showed me a news item which came over his company’s internal wire service describing (fairly accurately) the boycott and your roll in it. Apparently it has been widely distributed among the brokerage firms, and AMZN was down 7 points today on the news (at least, there was no other readily-apparent reason for the downturn). Perhaps now that Amazon is getting hit in the pocketbook, they’ll pay more attention.”

Mr. stock market…

But this series isn’t so much about Friedman but about the issues, notably Copilot (connected to GitHub and proprietary spyware for desktops, Visual Studio). We’re going to focus on GPL violations they enable and who’s promoting this practice; that’s the role of Alex Graveley. Visual Studio ‘Code’ is proprietary spyware (the so-called ‘telemetry’ has become notorious enough) and a certain “Nathaniel Dourif Friedman” has a software patent on spyware. Spyware like this: “During the course of a computer session, many actions may be performed on a computer. For several reasons, including increasing workforce productivity, it may be desirable to monitor these actions.”

If it sounds like a SOFTWARE patent, bear in mind it is with Novell, which openly bragged about its software patents and tried to leverage them to attack rival GNU/Linux vendors in collusion with Microsoft. Our moral objections aside (those are patents which we oppose), Mr. Graveley too has such patents. All the Hackpad patents are listed there. “For clarification, Alex’s legal name is Balabhadra Graveley,” our source noted, and “to further clarify he is a white man and not Indian despite the sound of his name” because of his “hippie Hare Khrishna parents…”

His LinkedIn (Microsoft) account suggests he still works for Microsoft:

“Team Mono or whatever you want to call it,” our source noted, is “alive and well…”

Except Friedman is gone, likely forced to resign to save face.

All this stuff needs daylight, as the media completely failed to report about what had actually happened earlier this year.

One less important aspect of it all is, Alex Graveley was inadvertently the subject of many old posts of ours. Because of Mono and Tomboy. Readers might want to get some context, assuming they never heard about this controversy before. Here’s an article from 2013:

• Canonical Neglects Tomboy (Mono)

And half a dozen (among more) from 2009:

• Gnote is a Lot Faster and a Lot Lighter Than Tomboy
• Tomboy is Afraid of Gnote, Its Mono-free Sibling
• Red Hat Replaces Tomboy with Gnote, Removes Mono Dependency
• Did Tomboy Learn from TomTom? Project Forked, Moves Away from Microsoft ‘Standards’
• Announcement: Mono-Free Tomboy Replacement (Gnote) Releases Version 0.2.0
• In Fedora, Tomboy and Banshee Depend on Winforms

“I do have this message where Alex calls Tomboy his life’s work,” our source said. The above articles spoke about technical issues, not just legal issues. And sure, those are old… as the site was a lot younger back then (about 2.5 years old) and nowadays we do deeper investigations. It certainly seems like Friedman and others set him up for richness; by sucking up to Microsoft, with Mono, he was swimming close to the sharks.

Tomboy as a piece of software is junk. That’s why someone else from Novell (alumnus) rewrote it in C++; there’s just nothing special about it, which makes sense considering he wrote it as a high school dropout with little experience in software engineering.

“I’ve seen his code,” the source said, calling it “very procedural”.

Gnote’s developer rewrote the whole thing in a better language, not controlled by Microsoft. Yes, his whole program was re-written as a hobby in C++ — a process which didn’t take long — and then it run much faster (details in the above links).

The original implementation (Tomboy) was technically weak. Among the quotes we heard about Graveley: “He is so insecure”; “Full of doubts and strong opinions”; “Fun to be around, but also very self destructive” (attributed to Miguel de Icaza, speaking on experiences with Alex Graveley).

“Based on his code,” our source added, “Alex is the kind of engineer that doesn’t understand easy to read doesn’t mean it’s simple…”

“I write easy to read code that is well organized and get underestimated for it…”

Tomboy was apparently so bad that someone simply rewrote the whole program in another language, C++, and did so very quickly; the technical improvements were vast.

So is Graveley even good at software development? He didn’t finish school.

He is insecure but (now) well connected, so he’ll try to use the current status to compensate for a weak background. “I suspect that Alex and Nat share darker secrets,” our source added. “I don’t even understand why Alex is working. [...] In regards to Github, the Github hate community has already been in touch on Twitter, mostly in regard to the ICE stuff…”

GitHub does worse than ICE, but the media seldom talks about that. The media suppressed that and more, whereas it actively helped ‘pacify’ the ICE protesters by shoveling up “Arctic Vault” puff pieces. We wrote about it back then. █

Permalink Leave Your Comment      Send this to a friend