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GAFAM Bait-and-Switch and Openwashing (Free Labour to Promote Proprietary Spyware and Slop)
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Tech Times ☛ Linux Foundation Tool Spotlighted: Furious Developers Accuse ‘Sickening’ Google Gemini CLI Bait-and-Switch
On May 19, 2026, at the same hour a developer named Andrea Alberti watched a 27-commit pull request get merged into Gemini CLI, Google announced that the open-source AI coding tool would stop serving free users on June 18 — and that its replacement would not be open source at all. Alberti's question, posted minutes later in the project's GitHub discussion thread, put into plain language what hundreds of developers were suddenly asking: were they "essentially working for free on a code base that will only be used in enterprises?"
Google had accepted more than 6,000 merged pull requests from external contributors over nearly a year, cited those contributions as evidence of the project's success, and then announced that the community which supplied that labor would lose access while paying enterprise customers kept everything. The reaction was immediate. The announcement received 31 thumbs-down reactions on GitHub — the top reaction on the post. Developer @anthuanvasquez summarized the mood in two words: "As always, Google being Google."
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Make Use Of ☛ Microsoft’s open-source era still comes with an asterisk [Ed: Openwashing is a lie]