On attitude, part 3

Sometimes I ask myself: “What da heck is wrong with all these people?” When you try your best as a community leader, when you try to be the most tolerant and friendly to everyone, when you try spreading the knowledge corporations don’t want anyone to have, when you entrust most passionate and talented people with the right to speak on behalf of the whole society you founded, when you put the common above the private… then sometimes you get backstabbed from the ones you trusted the most. This makes you wonder whether the chosen org structure was correct in the first place. And not so long ago, I realized the full need to rethink my own approach to this when something unexpected happened when I finally managed to return to the game…

I’m not going to go into any detail about what exactly happened because that would be highly unethical, even though I’m usually not much into ethics anyway. In short, we encountered a highly irresponsible action from a highly influential person in our group. And I later learned that this action was purely emotionally driven, and that I also was among the primary subjects for this person to blame behind my back. What was done, was done deliberately to catch me off-guard in the first place. And for me, this is the most vivid showcase of arrogance, weakness and cowardice.

But you know what shocked me the most, beside this guy’s sudden blatant flash of irresponsibility and lack of courage to start a direct dialogue with me afterwards? His initial accusations. Of what? Of… …drum roll… Copyright violation and unsanctioned redistribution.

Really?

No, I mean, really? Are you serious?

First, I double-checked two things: that I didn’t remove his authorship from the utility I upgraded and that there were no specific license terms stated in any code part. So, legally speaking, I didn’t and couldn’t do anything wrong with his codebase that effectively already had gone public domain.

Second, I still don’t get how such a smart guy, who had been co-maintaining a growing mobile hacking community for almost a year, all of a sudden started whining about redisribution rights. As if he had completely forgotten what movement he was involved in. He had been maintaining it side-by-side with me and another guy, and now he’s afraid to even talk to me. What happened? I mean, what really happened? Could it be that he really just got tired? No doubt, but that doesn’t explain such a rude and abrupt behavior. He knew very well who he was targeting. No coincidence.

Could it be that he received threats from his local police forces? Not impossible, but highly unlikely. We’re scattered around the world, so an arrest of one member, even an influential one, wouldn’t have much impact on the movement, moreover, it would cause the resonance in society. Anyway, we don’t constitute such a large threat for corporations. Yet.

Could it be that his idealism had taken over the reason? Most probably, yes. I knew him as a big FLOSSer, and even remember him asking me about rooted ADB redistribution rights a long time ago. On the contrary, in terms of the attitude to the so called “intellectual property”, I am a total nihilist (and even have a corresponding nickname in our group’s Discord chat). Whatever helps me to reach the goal (preferably without any unwanted side effects) works for me. And I’m into Linux and other free software because I’m more convinced about its lack of unwanted side-effects (like remote control and surveillance), not because of its abstract “freedom”. I consider the phrase “free license” an oxymoron. Because that’s an attempt to fit a notion of freedom, that already assumes being outside the reach of any governmental punishment system, into this very system. To put it more simply, your true freedom is based upon your inability to get caught and your ability to defend it by any means necessary. Everything else about this subject is a brainwashing hypocrisy designed to make you more obedient and replace free thinking with pseudo-freedom values where your actions are still under control by someone else.

I repeat: whatever helps me to reach the goal, works for me. Would you really care about ADB redistribution rights if you were just an upload away from the biggest revolution in KaiOS history? Have you ever had such a feeling when you know some information that allows you to single-handedly decide upon further fate of millions of users? Have you ever felt such a huge responsibility with full understanding that “if you fail, then Zion will fall”?

If you haven’t, you most probably won’t understand me.

Ich bin der Shlächter dieser Welt,
In der nur ein Endsieg zählt…
© Centhron — Dystopia

Anyway, what’s that all about and what triggered all this nonsense? Well, the mere fact I returned to the group mailing list and instantly found a way of rooting my Alcatel Cingular Flip 2 (OT-4044O) based upon an obsolete KaiOS version 1.0. Specifically, I was told that instead of kaiosExtension or engmodeExtension, it only has jrdExtension (with a corresponding jrdextension manifest permission). That information, and the fact it uses Gecko 37, was enough for me to adapt a rooting utility (originally created by this guy for Nokia 8110 4G with v16 stock firmware) to work with this device.

This time, I was helped by the community (with aforementioned information) and in the end, met the community needs. He somehow failed to do this. And he accuses me of something? Did he forget who made an original research around these proprietary extensions and the discovery of the startUniversalCommand method? If anything, I have the topmost right in this group to demand contributions from anyone using my researches. But I don’t do this, and never will. I have enough dignity not to do this. Trying to claim any private rights within a community created for open knowledge sharing, especially for things that hardly fit into legal field at all, is the mentality of a slave. And the only thing I actually regret is that I didn’t recognise this issue with him early enough and thought I could safely stay aside for some time while being busy with a whole lot of other things. Despite outskirts of our group actually were sometimes swarming with rats, I thought our core consisted of knights. Apparently, I was wrong.

As I already stated earlier, this blog is not an official announcement channel so, as a head of the group, I won’t state any official decisions about further actions regarding it herein. When I speak in group resources (e.g. our Twitter), I speak on behalf on the group. Here, I speak for myself. And speaking for myself, I think it’s time to switch to masonic model for our Inner Circle. In order to gain order, the order of an order must be applied sometimes.

Anyway, I won’t dig into it much anymore. I have things to do. MTK-META mode research. Batty revamp. GerdaOS refactoring to v16 base. Alcatel unlock. No time for this drama. One admin left, two admins come. The show must go on!