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How Sirius Open Source Turned From a Company Into Just an Account

Video download link | md5sum 7fe1fe13ceb4d6a779380ededbafb8b4
Security Impermissible in Sirius
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Some years ago my employer was abandoning (piece-wise) its own infrastructure along with Free software, security, and privacy, in effect rendering the company a set of accounts in various third-party servers overseas (security breaches were routine but conveniently ignored)

THE company I left this month, Sirius ‘Open Source’, gave me a lot of abuse (like unjust threats) for merely doing what’s right and what’s legal. No person should be in such a position, but choices were limited during a pandemic and working from home is generally preferable, even if the working hours are quite insane.

A company that used to have its own telephony system and do conference calls over Asterisk (or similar) later became some Zoom or Skype or Google tenant, subjecting the company’s operations to total surveillance. A company that used to manage accounts with self-hosted OpenLDAP gradually started creating accounts in third parties like Slack and LastPass. No wonder system administrators left; their job was made obsolete and the roles had increasingly become almost clerical, not technical. Bad technology was chosen or outsourced to. It was all proprietary. No control, no room for learning, no customisation, and nothing to actually offer.

There Are Now at Least Three ‘Shell Companies’ for Sirius ‘Open Source’

Video download link | md5sum 2559ad3e58655ae8f53c6926a800bc30
The Sirius Open Source Shell Game
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ is trying to dodge liabilities; in the process it misleads staff and bullies staff, leading some colleagues to abrupt departures and others into mental and physical health problems

THE company that my wife and I left earlier this month no longer has an office and no longer pretends to have an office, either. About 7 weeks ago the address was changed for the second time in a month. The current address isn’t even the company’s own.

The legal status of the company is unclear or barely verifiable. People who ask about it receive evasive if not aggressive replies. The video above goes through the latest 3 posts about the company. This hopefully serves as a bit of a cautionary tale. Do not work for companies like these. Spot the signs.

Sirius Open Source Probably Insolvent

Video download link | md5sum ab839950e7cf004eeab966e8edca96e4
Sinking in Debt
Creative Commons Attribution-No Derivative Works 4.0

Summary: In order to better understand what’s happening at Sirius ‘Open Source’ one must properly examine publicly-available financial disclosures, which are obligatory; annual reports show a company that despite shrinking every year is rapidly falling into debt that it can never repay

THE clientele of Sirius and the ethics of the company have been getting worse. I could no longer keep my mouth shut and at the start of this year I decided that I would leave. In its usual fashion (as of late), the company resorted to bullying and intimidation (including efforts this past Monday to censor this series). If anything, this reinforces the need for transparency.

Sirius ‘Open Source’ still uses the term “Open Source” in its name, but it’s rather misleading. The company rejects Open Source for its very own use, never mind clients’. Sort of like the Linux Foundation, which actively abandons Open Source and moves to proprietary. This foundation will be the subject of our next post.

Sirius Open Source Has Long Been Blind to Criticism

Sirius shown to the public as women-friendly a decade ago

Sirius 'Open Source' in 2012

Summary: Sirius ‘Open Source’ was taken to court after it had wrongly fired a couple of employees, one of whom was blind; this was accompanied by lies about why the staff’s communication server was shut down

THE year was 2011 or thereabouts. Sirius hired a kind German lady, was also completely blind. Colleagues were happy to help, but clients were not being informed that she was blind and management feared that clients might find out that she was blind. A year or two later she was fired and simply ‘vanished’; nobody was allowed to talk about that.

This, among other incidents, is an example of a ruthless company that does not tolerate staff dialogue and relies on secrecy (or clients being blind to what really goes on). The relevant part of the report is below.


Blindness to Criticism

The foundations of the company need to be protected, not the personal agenda of pertinent, individual workers and/or cliques/factions of workers. Lack of communication blinds us to our weaknesses. Over a decade ago when the company-wide Jabber server was disabled (probably to prevent unity and sympathy among staff) workers’ ability to interact with colleagues was curtailed, leaving everyone in a position where supporting clients was a lot harder. The widespread belief at the time was that the server was intentionally offline (nobody wanted to talk about it, let alone lie) because the company faced a lawsuit from a couple wrongly accused/dismissed (at least one of them). Roy and Rianne have supported blind people’s charities for nearly a decade already, so recalling how the company treated a blind colleague, likely an innocent colleague, is a bit of deja vu in light of later sections of this document. Roy and Rianne poured in a portion of their income (received monthly from Sirius) into blind people’s charities after the company, Sirius, had unfairly dismissed a legally blind — and much-liked among her colleagues — vulnerable lady.

Sirius was not always criticised or fearful of criticism, certainly not as a whole (criticising one particular aspect of Sirius is not the same as just rejecting Sirius as a whole). In fact the company used to boast true transparency (also full access to the wiki, which Roy helped manage/install), like telling workers not only which clients were paying but also how much they were paying (so it was possible to understand the commercial side of things). In some sense, workers felt connected to the company, not left out to hang. Internal presentations in the company, or even the habitual workshop, gave all workers a lot of information. The accountant and other people met staff in person, offering good advice on a number of things. Not much was outsourced or left behind walled gardens.

Things have changed a lot since then.

The Old Sirius ‘Open Source’ Was a Patron (Sponsor) of KDE and FSF

Summary: The company my wife and I joined was (at the time) still Free software-centric and reasonably friendly towards staff; today we examine Sirius of a decade ago

IN THE previous part we showed some preliminary statements about this report regarding Sirius ‘Open Source’, a company known very well from the inside for nearly 12 years. Today we can introduce the softer side of Sirius or what Sirius used to be.


The Open Source Era

At the Beginning

Sirius is early Patron (sponsor but a more modern term for sponsorship) of KDE, a prominent European project for GNU/Linux- and BSD-centric desktops and laptops. Sirius is also an early Patron of the FSF, which stands for the Free Software Foundation (listed and thanked by the FSF for several consecutive years, as The Internet Archive’s Wayback Machine confirms). The FSF was established in the mid 1980s, i.e. almost 1.5 decades before Sirius was even founded. Many early employees of the company were GNU/Linux users, KDE users, even Debian Developers. They were highly technical people who shared the philosophy reflected upon by these (aforementioned) generous donation.

The Wayback Machine shows the Sirius site (old snapshots). Wayback Machine screenshot of the front page:

Wayback Machine screenshot: Sirius and GNU

Wayback Machine screenshot from the FSF:

Wayback Machine screenshot: Sirius and FSF

The company was able to attract high-calibre staff based on these credentials and hard-earned track record. Roy too was attracted to the company based on these publicly- and readily-visible credentials.

People worked overtime to please Sirius clients, some of which were very high-profile. Sadly, as we shall show later in this document, that’s no longer the case and hasn’t been so for several years. The company is living off or leeching off its (distant) past reputation and is extremely paranoid about people finding out about a rapid pivot across numerous dimension, e.g. in-house technology, levels of relevant skill mastered by staff, overt nepotism, and promotion of technologies not compatible with the company’s original mission statement. A lot of the work produced by the company — and it is no longer so much in-house work — leverages Open Source/Free software (libre, or free as in freedom) but does not share back the contributions (or mere code changes), even when initially there’s intention to do so, even if not for licence compliance purposes but status (companies that share back code and don’t just use or exploit code have better karma, averting the image of becoming parasitic to the community).

An Exercise in Optics

The company’s Web site is intentionally outdated. It projects outwards an image of a company that may or may not existed about half a decade ago. Some of the clients being bragged about are well over a decade old. The intention there is to use past clients, no matter how old, to present a credible, potent, highly-experienced firm with high competency. A lot of the actual work gets done by associates (external contractors), not dedicated staff, and those associates have their own firms, which aren’t connected to Sirius at all, except maybe loosely. We’re left to assume that Sirius quietly transforms into a sort of middleman or reseller across a number of domains. For instance, there are a number of things Sirius claims to be supporting, but managers inside the company have no actual staff familiar with ways to maintain such things, so Sirius would typically contract outwards or outsource. This is a crucial point. This isn’t how the company presents itself to the public.

The company, at least in the past, not only had legitimate credibility in the Free/Open Source software world; it goes beyond that. This is well documented and it’s not too hard to find the company’s founder cited extensively in the technology-centric media, especially over a decade ago (Roy used to cite him a lot, including in his site, Techrights). The founder is very visible in national and international press.

The company made a name for itself by attending international events and even hosted an event promoting the use of OpenDocument Format (ODF) in the UK. That’s vital advocacy of Open Standards at a very crucial point in time (format wars and struggles against vendor lock-in). As we shall see later on, these laudable outreach efforts have played a considerable role in attracting Roy’s interest in the company. As an aside, the company first sought to recruit Roy, way back around 2006. The founder of Sirius phoned Roy when Roy was completing his Ph.D. degree in Victoria University of Manchester.

10+ Years in the Same Company, Focusing on Free Software

Roy Schestowitz

DECADES ago somebody told me that changing employers very often is a sign of weakness. Several times later I’d hear the same thing, which follows common sense. Loyalty to an employer or devotion to some particular path shows both a careful choice (of employer) and persistence rather than adventurism. The same goes for housing or residency. Some people move from place to place very often, having to relearn locations of things, spending a lot of time on paperwork, having to meet new people (and losing touch with old friends and colleagues).

When it comes to my current employer, this past week marked 10 years of me working there. There were better times and worse time, both for myself and for the employer.

For the first time in my life I can say that I’ve worked in the same company for over a decade. For just over a year (or about 2 years) I’ve been able to say that I’m the most “senior” (in terms of duration) regular employee there, sans the founder/CEO, who established the company way back in 1998. In a sense, this also means that when I joined the company (with about 20 people in it back then) I was the “latest recruit” and all those people whom I joined are now gone, except the CEO. It’s an interesting situation to be in.

Will I work another 10 years in the same company? It’s hard to tell. The thing I do like about it is that it respects my freedom of expression (it tells off Microsoft when they try to cause issues by phoning the CEO!) and software freedom in general. I realise that many people are forced to use Windows, at least sometimes, and not everyone is permitted to work from home all the time. I’ve worked from home for 14 years now.

Letter From Anonymous on Windows Going ‘Open Source’

The other day I was sent an anonymised E-mail from someone who entertained the possibility of an “open” Windows/Microsoft — a notion that I reject for realistic reasons. Here is the full discussion.


Defining the Cause

Friday October 25, 2013

Hi Roy,

A like to share with you a thought and hear what you think.

By some twist of faith, how many Linux users are pushing for Linux over Microsoft? That would be a lot, right? But, as long as Linux users are pushing for Linux, you know they forget that Linux was “proprietary” too. So doesn’t it make a whole lot more sense, to do the SAME to Windows and make it “open source” too, just like GNU did for Linux?

This is not an accurate account of history. Linux Torvalds chose the GPL for his kernel, which was only briefly licensed as proprietary (it was obscure at the time). This is similar to MySQL. Windows cannot be compared in an apple-to-apple fashion by warping suppositions.

Here are some reasons for it, although not in much order or cohesion. I’m just rushing this to get it out. Please don’t be offended, just consider the possibilities of where this leads for the cause, okay?

If Windows become “open source”, shouldn’t that be a good thing? Don’t we want to see more corporations becoming “open source” free providers?

We want to maximise freedom, for freedom’s sake. If Windows was able to use deceiving labels to perpetuate control over users, that would not be a good thing.

Is the battle of Linux overshadowing GNU? Which isn’t about a kernel, as so much for being “open source code” to be a lot more important, right?

Maybe that SCARES Linux developers? Why would anyone want to use Linux if Windows was made “honest” by releasing ALL of the “open source” code?

It’s not just a problem of honesty and the “battle of Linux” can be viewed as a battle for GNU/Linux, however “battle” may be defined. Advocacy perhaps, given the context.

Haven’t Linux enthusiasts pointed out that Gnu/Linux is trusted more for being “open source”? But the same could be true if Windows did the same!

It’s not just about trust. There is more to it than that.

Are we fighting for “open source” code or against proprietary code? Or is that we just loath and hate anything about Microsoft? Hopefully, we will realize, the main real reason why Microsoft become hated, for using “proprietary code”.

Microsoft is not hated for this. Based on my experience talking to people, ethics are the problem, business ethics in particular. The framing of advocacy as a “fight”, or the choise of pro- or con- (for or against) is quite arbitrary; if you are for something, one can always portray you as being against something, or vice versa. Bias guides language.

Proprietary code is locking in vendors, people and society.

And it is not just about lock-in.

Of course, Linux is designed a bit differently than say Windows. Windows has made it easy for novice, no need to learn “terminal”. But, it always had a clumsy dependency to backup plenty of DLLS versions for instance. Which is just ridiculous! It takes a Chinese hackers to offer the only unofficial tool to actually trim and reduce the WinSxS bloatware.

Windows had and still has competition which makes it easier for novice users to embrace computing. There are suppositions above that I cannot accept, so I cannot reply to them.

You know, “open source code” would be the BEST thing for Windows and Microsoft. That’s not as scary as it seems, because the real reason Linux despises Windows and Microsoft, is for the lack of interoperability, vendor lock-ins, and shoddy development, that has comes to be known as mostly vaporware branding in the world!

Microsoft has already tried openwashing. It also created some proxies that try to make Microsoft look “open”. I don’t think these have been effective as people very much distrust those proxies and many detest Microsoft even more for trying to infiltrate the philosophical rivals. sometimes derailing it from the inside.

But, all of this could be eliminated, if Microsoft adapted “honesty” as their policy by supporting and releasing “open source” code under GPL3 or GPL4 (coming soon).

Honesty, tenets, etc. have been tried by Microsoft marketing already (microsoft.com still has some Web pages to that effect). The same goes for “transparency” (for example reports on surveillance requests compliance). If everything Microsoft ever released was re-licensed GPLv3+ (unlikely as they incorporate bits of code from other parties), that would not mean honesty. Malicious features like DRM (for Hollywood) and perhaps back doors would still be in there.

I am beginning to think, it was NOT Linux that matters at all for whom without having “open source” code, Linux would had remain proprietary. The only reason Microsoft is proprietary, is related to it’s CEO, “Bill Gates”, who pushed the business into a market monopolizer for profiteering, right?

Gates is no longer the CEO and Linux would not have become popular if it remained proprietary (BSD was already ahead). There were other forces in industry pushing for proprietary, even predating Gates.

Didn’t he advocated and pushed that software freedom by taken away for the sake of profits? This works against an open free society, it is evil, it is immoral and that’s the pain, misery and suffering we are having to cope and deal with here from the very beginning.

The same practice is embraced by the medicine ‘industry’ (oligopoly), where generics are being kept away for the sake of profit (more people die, but large corporations make more money). India seems to be the only country that is eager to fight against this, at least sometimes.

What is to prevent the same thing from happening with Linux now? Won’t some rich corporation take it over, once it matures into a rich profitable market? We (creators and developers) do all the work and they (proprietary owners) take over, right?

The GPL does not quite allow this. Linux can be forked if this happens and all the developers then work on the fork.

So what is important here, is the push for “open source code” more than anything else. But tell that to Linux users who bash Windows a lot, instead of realizing there will always be another proprietary around the corner to replace Microsoft. Maybe that would be Apple OSX. Maybe, it might even come from China or Taiwan!

Windows is being replaced by Android to a large degree. Android is a free/libre system for the most part. Taiwanese companies and Chinese companies (RPC) use Android a lot. The notion of ownership is different when licensing is copyleft-leaning.

How much longer will it be before Ubuntu or Linux gets bought by proprietary rich corporation like Microsoft? But, if we got Microsoft to use GPL3, maybe a GPL4 is required, to become “open source” this would INSURE GNU life of living!

These are unlikely — if not impossible — scenarios. There are other risks — urgent issues like software patents. Using these, for example, Microsoft is believed to be already making billions of dollars from Android sales.

The open source community is no less human like the rest of us. There will be temptation to swing back to proprietary. So it is just better to get all public businesses to ditch proprietary code all together, once and for all.

Swinging back to proprietary or “semi” proprietary (like “half” pregnant) is a real issue these days.

The same can be said for freedom, as a democracy cannot be both ignorant and free at the same time! When you fail to demonstrate adequate concern for the freedom of others, you embolden and empower those who want to take yours away.

The same applies to “open source” code. If we don’t insure it for everyone, there will be others who will want to push “proprietary” code.

Now, imagine how the world would had been improved differently had Microsoft not been proprietarized. All the best ideas and software code could had been shared freely with everyone and a more open free society.

Microsoft was proprietary from the start, not proprietarized, except when Bill Gates fished other people’s code from the dumpster, as he himself admitted.

Which is greater to have, your freedom or wealth? What good is wealth if you have no freedom? In comparison, if you have freedom, you can do anything.

Which is greater to have, your health or wealth? If you have wealth, you need it to afford healthcare, but you still may not obtain health. However, if you have your health, you can always earn wealth.

Now you diverge.

Which is greater to adapt in society, proprietary code or open source code? If you use proprietary code, nobody else can build upon it. If you use open source code, and it’s kept free for all, then everyone can contribute and build upon it.

The same can be said for society, as an open free society who strives with self-determination will thrive as a people. As compared to a tyrannical totalitarian society that is reduced down to a few possibilities.

That’s why Linux isn’t or shouldn’t be the focus. GNU must be the spotlight by insuring Windows is made “honest” to release the source code. It may even help fund GNU to discover all the infringing code used in Windows. What is it, 70 million lines of code there?

GNU/Linux is not the sole area to focus on. Ethics and justice are important, Free software is the means to reach the higher goals.

The only people who have something to hide, are those using proprietary code! What is Windows hiding? We should have the legal right to know, if there are backdoors built in. We should have the right to correct the source code, for mistakes, design flaws, to let everyone improve it.

Someday sooner, we will realize by releasing our freedoms, so that profits can be given away to a few will be viewed as both illegal and immoral. It puts the rich and wealthy first, and makes the society hindered, handicapped, crippled and censored.

Secrecy in code — as in anything in life — harbours misbehaviour. Richard Stallman foresaw the applicability to computer programs.

Feedback? Feel free to interject. I especially enjoy a rebuttal.

When is the new TechRights site going to be up and running?

Did you like any of the ideas for the documentary video?

Waiting to hear!

The scope of Techrights expands because GNU/Linux has outgrown the “advocacy” stage and our enemies are no longer just tech companies. A documentary video needs to be short in order to be viewed by many, or split into chunks because people have become too lazy (of overburdened by information overload) to sit through a full-length film.

If you want to write a guest post for Techrights (highlighting some of the above points), please go ahead.


For those who are not aware, I have been redesigning Techrights with Drupal.

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Original styles created by Ian Main (all acknowledgements) • PHP scripts and styles later modified by Roy Schestowitz • Help yourself to a GPL'd copy
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