Daniel Lange's blog

After last year's blunder with trying to hide the Adobe toolchain and using hilarious stock photos, the Linux Foundation did much better in their 2021 annual report¹ published Dec. 6, 2021.

Still they are using the Adobe toolchain (InDesign, Acrobat PDF) and my fellow DebianKernel² Developer Geert was quick to point that out as the first comment to the LWN note on the publication:

I think it is important to call the Linux Foundation (LF) out again and again. Adobe is a Silver member of the LF and they can motivate them to publish their applications for Linux. And if that is not an option, there are Free alternatives like Scribus that could well use the exposure and funds of LF to help catch up to the market leading product, Adobe InDesign.

Personally, as a photographer, I am very happy they used stock images from Unsplash to illustrate the 2021 edition over the cringeworthy Shutterstock footage from last year's report.

And they gave proper credit:

Now for next year ... find an editor that knows how to spell photographers, please. And consider Scribus. And make Adobe publish their apps for Linux. Thank you.

The Linux Foundation has published its annual report today. LWN calls it glossy and yeah, boy, it is shiny.

So shiny that people that work in the publishing industry immediately see this has been produced with the Adobe toolchain which - unfortunately - is one of the big suites of software not yet available for Linux.

Checking the PDF file metadata reveals the keywords "open source, open standards, open hardware, open data". That is what the Linux Foundation is about. Good stuff.

The PDF producer meta data for the annual report PDF has been set to "Linux kernel 0.12.1 for Workgroups" and the PDF creator meta data element to "Sharp Zaurus XR-5000 (Maemo5) Edition". Somebody thought to better hide the real data and had some tongue-in-cheek ideas. Kudos.

But nicer would have been to use Open Source software to produce the report, not?

Running strings 2020-Linux-Foundation-Annual-Report_113020.pdf | grep Adobe | wc -l gives us 1229 lines and confirms the suspicion of the toolchain.

A stale /Title (Annual Report 2020) /Producer (macOS Version 10.15.7 \(Build 19H15\) Quartz PDFContext) has been forgotten in the document to tell us about the platform.

So, ladies and gentlemen, the Linux Foundation 2020 annual report has been produced on a Mac.

Running Adobe Creative Cloud on MacOS Catalina 10.15.7.

Which is proprietary software. Its kernel (and some userland pieces) are based on BSD. Not Linux.

The image on the front page also struck me as a bit odd ... using a ballpoint pen on the laptop screen?

Unbranded laptop. Unbranded cup in the foreground.

Kid in the background not paying attention to his tablet.

All of that cries stock image so loud it hurts.

Google currently finds ~560 uses of the picture and any editorial use nicely tells us that it is © Dragana Gordic / Shutterstock.

The image is "Smiling mom working at home with her child on the sofa while writing an email. Young woman working from home, while in quarantine isolation during the Covid-19 health crisis".

See the Daily Mail for a wonderful example of the working mum in context. I hope, if her laptop had been powered on, it would have run Linux. I mean, what else would still run on an old white MacBook with an Intel "Core 2 Duo" processor from 2008?