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This is the year 2122, my name is R.R. and I am leaving this witness for next generations. I am in the Richmond Area, Washington, and we are leaving soon for the mountains. This is the last time I would touch a computer! The destination where my family and myself, with others families, are moving to is out of the reach of any signals and connections, a strong electromagnetic field protect the area, keeping any military action a remote risk. Even though that area resembles more a Dante's round, for us represent a truly, rare, still internet-free, paradise.
Other people, from different places of the world, are reaching others electromagnetic hells. We call it the "techno-diaspora". It is important you understand why we are living our homes; I am going to tell you what motivated our exile if you ever find this message!
Everything started many decades ago when the Big Tech Corps were working together, surfing the opensource revolution, but that was only a facade; as a matter of fact, they were silently trying to slay off one to each others!
Nobody was able to determine what would come next, but in those days a lot of yells were raised around "GitRepo Factotum", mostly because was the MinuzSopht brand new AI and because — silly them — there were a lot of legitimate licenses concerning around this project.
In its defense MinuzSopht rapidly assured that not only a single license will be ever infringed! Rumor said that, before to release Factotum, a tremendous effort was infused to resolve any potential legal issue might be ever raised up (maybe they developed an AI for that scope as well).
Useless to say the propaganda machine was already deployed and ready to spread the novelty, as it was a gospel. All the influencing voices were well aligned and tuned in chorus mode to celebrate the peak of the MinuzSopht ultra-advanced knowledge.
Licenses issues were important back to that time, but such concerning had never been the scariest part in the whole picture. The worst was simply waiting to knock the door.
MinuzSopht built a very bad reputation in the opensource community and a bunch of years making cheap public relations had not been enough to wash out all the mischievous actions it did and it was planning to do again. Some of the smartest folks were vigilant but still unprepared for what was coming next!
I would not sound particularly obsessed or biased against MinuzSopht, it wasn't the bad as much as the others weren't the good either. It was good and bad exactly like any other Giant Tech Corps of those years. Furthermore end-users and professionals were divided since they had different expectations against the Big Techs. Conflicts and frictions were pretty commons into any opensource community, as far I can tell you.
I used to have a career into a bunch of various big a mid corporations and I learned enough to recognize how such big entities laid out their development plans. The big Tech Corps were following a similar and recognizable pattern as well.
Big Corps (Tech) had generally several strategies that were played concurrently, the shorter ones were useful to make revenue, the longer ones were focused to guarantee the stream of revenue on a long run.
Despite all the money (wasted) to employ the most brilliant executives to lead these giant corporations, the pattern was always the same; when a big corp became dominant, the cheapest long-term strategy to deploy has always been overtaking and enforcing control over any potential target: their own customers; their own workers; their own markets; the other competitors; up to the own country politics. In other words the final goal had always been to create a market regime close to a monopoly.
The latter had been generally fought by law-makers, therefore giant corps learned how to deploy several counter-tactics to build a mechanism that allowed them to enforce control while avoided to hit directly the laws, so hard, to eventually raise up to many concerned eyebrows (read as the public opinion).
In MinuzSopht long-term strategy vision, Factotum was designed and introduced as spearhead to breach what, for the majority, was considered an unbreakable wall.
The history told us that MinuzSopht empire was built upon three "E": Embrace, Extend, Extinguish. We have seen using this tactic multiple times along the IT industry, however this approach failed when it was time to conquer the opensource industry.
During the opensource era a piece of software was particularly central; started as personal project made by a University student, it became suddenly a pivot to build around an entire industry. That software was known as the Linux Kernel.
Linux was released under a "GNU Public License", a peculiar family of licenses that allowed software to be shared and reused under defined and strict rules. Introduced to defend what a — in the past persons like him were called: hippie — visionary called the four freedoms.
With such licenses you could manipulate code, you could fork it, you could abuse it but you couldn't extinguish it. Especially because GPL-kind licenses were viral, therefore prone to reproduce and reiterate any derivatives copy (it was called fork) made off them.
You could create a replacement for Linux and many came after it, but if you would replicate the same success of the Linux industry — when it was shining — you had to reproduce the same conditions, therefore you had to use a license that would allow all the stakeholders to cooperate together under clear and enforceable rules.
The (infamous) day of "MinuzSopht loves Linux", not only was a shock for many but also a declaration of intents. Nobody was able to read along the lines of such statement. It was only when was, disgracefully, too late that eventually became clear for all that Linux and opensource were just tools to use exploit but never targets!
MinuzSopht acted like a weird copilot looking to take control of the ship without explain the new route: « Where are you leading us copilot? ». This should had been the real question that nobody was able to answer. Nobody knows why that rhetorical question was left unreplied but, mostly believe for fear or good faith, a lot people were simply trust MinuzSopht (blindly). They were exclusively watching the whole situation by a technological standpoint and by merely legals concerning. Perhaps the majority didn't have the necessary tools to draft a clear path toward the incoming, and dark, future.
Factotum was — but not anymore — an harmless word, the perfect word to name after a product that would had changed the world irremediably. We referred at this day as the "Great Deception Day", when to the world was presented, a futuristic, powerful and ready-made product aimed to help programmers on the wake of the opensource. However words can be used to change the perception of what we use or what we do; often words can be even used to change the destiny of world! Mankind learned this lesson when, a couple of years later, MinuzSopht changed Factotum into "MinuzSopht Secure Code Program".
If back to those day a clever man or woman would had been able to connect the points and draft the incommoding future I would never need wrote this chronicles.
How foolish and pathetic is the destiny of who, watching all these signs, lacks the cleverness to connect them together.
One step back may help to understand better. Among 20XX & 20XX, for the sake of security, MinuzSopht introduced several technologies: UEFI; Secure Boot; TPM.
Since it was still dominant on the desktop market, MinuzSopht forcibly imposed these technology, making them a "de-facto" standard. Auto-entitled as Operative System Authority, all the computer manufacturers and vendors simply accepted it. As a matter of fact MinuzSopht OS won't start without these security features, and people still buy computers because its operative system.
MinuzSopht was always good at polarizing the public opinion and getting the support from the bigger chunk: the majority of the people agreed to consider said such technologies good improved security, someone else argued that, for instance, devices such laptops didn't need such security level.
Not all these computers BIOS (hope you still know what it means) allowed to disable such features, and for a while this prevented to install, extremely unfortunate coincidence, many Linux distributions on newer hardware. The issue eventually was solved when all the major distribution received or were able to get a signed key from MinuzSopht. In our day any electronic devices require a key signed by MinuzSopht sadly.
MinuzSopht would not be MinuzSopht without any mischievous act. Concerning against Factotum were raised up exclusively for the potential licenses issues, but this was a no-match game for MinuzSopht, debates were raised up everywhere and quickly made fading out into the oblivion.
Factotum was a machine learning assistant, it was created upon that huge data that GitRepo was able to farm. Thousand of projects and thousands of thousands of line codes were used to fed the AI Factotum database. Line after line, commit after commit. Any imaginable programming language ingested and reorganized into a quasi-quantum neuronal multi-levels data-center, designed exclusively to materialize factotum AI.
Do not let MinuzSopht making free-software illegal [29-58]
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