Hypocrisy and politics in free and open source software projects

Published on 2025-01-31.

At EuroBSDCon 2024, Kim McMahon, who is a so-called expert in product-led growth strategies, developer marketing, open source marketing, and growing healthy and productive communities, does a presentation (YouTube link) about how you can or should advocate FreeBSD and help grow the project.

Kim McMahon has been involved in the tech industry for many years, as she herself explains, not new to open source. She has spend a lot of years at the Cloud Native Computing Foundation, The RISC-V Foundation, The Linux Foundation, as well as working with open source at companies like Oracle, Dell and Cisco.

Kim McMahon is being paid handsomely by the FreeBSD Foundation for the work of so-called advocacy she does for FreeBSD. At about 2:30 in the video she does some “audience interaction” and begins to ask people what operating systems they use. As she asks the audience about Linux, she says, “Anybody still using Linux?“, and then continues to comment, “Yeah, we can’t get away from it“. Then she asks about Microsoft Windows and says, “Yeah, I am really sorry, I feel bad for you, that you have to do that. I think Windows is hard. I am a Mac user.“

Mind you, this is supposed to be a presentation about how we should advocate FreeBSD. A presentation done by the FreeBSD Foundation.

So, is this a “Do as I say, not as I do” thing?

A proponent of open source, of FreeBSD specifically, being paid (partly by our donations), to tell the rest of us how to promote FreeBSD, something many of us has done for years by actually running and using FreeBSD on our laptops, desktops and servers, and by writing tutorials and sharing experience, yet Kim McMahon can’t even be bothered to figure out how to run FreeBSD on a laptop in order to present a simple slideshow?

Hypocrisy is a strong word, but I am sorry, this is pathetic.

I wonder why a woman like Kim McMahon was hired by the FreeBSD Foundation to begin with.

I love FOSS and I have been a proponent for many years, and I have absolutely nothing against tech companies using, promoting and participating in the development of FOSS, but it is really sad to see how so much has been swallowed up by the greedy part of the big tech industry. The fact of the matter is that the majority of these big and greedy tech companies are making billions on the free and open source software communities, giving only tiny amounts back, while at the same time – and this is the important part – violating privacy, taking away freedom, and frantically fighting the right to spread software behind the scenes. One of the worst companies in that regard is Apple.