No billionares at FOSDEM January 16, 2025 on Drew DeVault's blog
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. Janson is the biggest venue in the event – its huge auditorium can accommodate over 1,500 of FOSDEM’s 8,000 odd attendees, and it is live streamed to a worldwide audience as the face of one of the free and open source software community’s biggest events of the year. We’ve platformed Red Hat, the NLNet Foundation, NASA, numerous illustrious community leaders, and many smaller projects that embody our values and spirit at this location to talk about their work or important challenges our community faces.
Some of these challenges, as a matter of fact, are Jack Dorsey’s fault. In 2023 this stage hosted Hachyderm’s Kris Nóva to discuss an exodus of Twitter refugees to the fediverse. 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. Two years later one of the principal architects of, and beneficiaries of, that disaster will step onto the same stage. 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.
