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No Billionares at FOSDEM


Jack Dorsey, former CEO of Twitter, ousted board member of BlueSky, and grifter extraordinaire to the tune of a $5.6B net worth, is giving a keynote at FOSDEM. The FOSDEM keynote stage is one of the biggest platforms in the free software community.

After Dorsey sold Twitter to Elon Musk, selling the platform out to the far right for a crisp billion-with-a-“B” dollar payout, the FOSS community shouldered the burden – both with our labor and our wallets – of a massive exodus onto our volunteer-operated servers, especially from victims fleeing the hate speech and harassment left in the wake of the sale. Even if our community hadn’t been directly harmed by Dorsey’s actions, I don’t think that we owe this honor to someone who took a billion dollars to ruin their project, ostracize their users, and destroy the livelihoods of almost everyone who worked on it. Allow me to give you a preview: in addition to posting $5B in revenue and a 21% increase in YoY profit in 2024, Jack Dorsey laid off 1,000 employees, ordering them not to publicly discuss board member Jay-Z’s contemporary sexual assault allegations on their way out, and announced a new bitcoin mining ASIC in collaboration with Core Scientific, who presumably installed them into their new 100MW Muskogee, OK bitcoin mining installation, proudly served by the Muskogee Generating Station fossil fuel power plant and its 11 million tons of annual CO 2 emissions and in the local area due to pollution associated with the power plant.

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