R.L. Dane 
🍵 
Well, that's depressing. :(
https://codeberg.org/small-hack/open-slopware
List of #FOSS projects using #slop (yes, including the Linux kernel and of COURSE systemd)
jnsLinux is primarily a tool for fortune-500 companies first, and end-users like thee and me, last.
Given the fact that most Linux contributors are on a corporate payroll, no surprise.
Computing as we knew it, is dead. The future has been robbed from us.
OBI-WAN: That boy was our last hope.
YODA: No. There is another.
I mean, there's always the BSDs, Haiku, heck, the Commodore 64 is back, so anything can happen. ;)
@rl_dane Hah :) Haiku gives me some hope. They do actively resist the ai nonsense, so far,...
The c64 might be the better way to go :D
Anything that needs to be general purpose enough to work with modern hardware is always going to be disadvantaged by having to reverse engineer proprietary drivers and hardware.
There used to be enough people to somewhat keep up with that, and some shift in mentality at the manufacturer side to be a bit more reasonable with providing open drivers and/or documentation, but in the past few years or so, none of that is true anymore.
I am seeing projects long considered stable fall apart due to losing maintainers left and right, and projects that are still alive get flooded with new developers pushing bad practices as if it were a personal crusade. The software landscape in general seems to be slowly unraveling into complete dysfunction.
Sticking with an as-simple-as-possible stack where all parts can be maintained by one person seems like the most reasonable way out of the mess. (there's more capable options other than a c64 these days though ;) - reviving something like Wirth's project oberon on a somewhat more modern fpga would be a fun start.. )
mirabilosDoesn't seem so:
collapseos-again $ head COPYING
GNU GENERAL PUBLIC LICENSE
Version 3, 29 June 2007
Copyright (C) 2007 Free Software Foundation, Inc. <http://fsf.org/>
Everyone is permitted to copy and distribute verbatim copies
of this license document, but changing it is not allowed.
Preamble
The GNU General Public License is a free, copyleft license for
I need to spend some time to sit down and read/process the very thoughtful email Michael Dexter wrote me a couple years ago w.r.t. BSD licensing. (I was going to make it into a blog post, but then ran out of time due to family medical stuff).
I don't totally understand the #BSD licensing mindset. In a historical perspective, I totally get it, as it was a University project, but I don't personally understand why a person wouldn't want their license to basically say, "don't use this code to abuse human beings."
Tried to avoid overly rhetorical and drum-beating language in the previous paragraph to limited success. 😅
I understand that FOSS is against restricting use (especially non-commercial restrictions), but I thought the thrust of the #GPL v3 was to fight against the "TiVOization" of Linux (making a closed product from open components).
I know Torvalds was against it, but what was the point of it, then?
I always heard rms talking about it in the context of "TiVOization."
Kinda? I have to ruminate over it some more.
I tend to be so anti-corporate, that the GPL makes more sense to me, but I'm open to thinking about it differently.
@rl_dane @mirabilos I've had similar thoughts wrt licensing in bsd-land. I also always favored copyleft licenses. It just makes sense in the original mindeset we had of: The software we write is a contribution to global human knowledge - thinking it was a cumulative re-usable thing. In such a context, copyleft is definitively more reasonable than permissive licenses, as permissive licenses don't mandate corporations stealing^H^H^Husing the code have to contribute back.
The way things worked out in real life ended up being a bit different, unfortunately.
Software became throw-away. These days, there's very very few devs actually willing to maintain anything older than a few years. Just look at how many people call old codebases 'crusty' and start new rewrites, as opposed to the number of people actually willing to take on maintenance of a larger codebase...
Secondly, the clever hack copyleft used to use the copyright system against itself became defunct. Corporations steal whatever they want now, by having ai harvesting bots slurp up anything regardless of license, and having it regurgitated into codebases with an incompatible license, often closed-source.
We're now living in a world where publishing ANY code online under ANY license is basically a gift to the corporate overlords.
I still think copyleft is superior to permissive licensing, but then, Linux (and Linus) were always about 'Open source' first, not 'Free Software'. They were always pro-corporate, and it should be no surprise that the Linux landscape is now seeing a massive shift towards permissive licensing over copyleft.
That said, over the years I've come to realize that software licensing is secondary to the community aspect.
Currently, the BSD-community is more user-focused than corporate-focused, whether that is a function of being less popular or not is not as relevant than the fact that the signal-to-noise ratio among the BSD's is better. That's ultimately what matters most.
For both the BSD's /AND/ Linux, the software licensing aspect is more historical happenstance than a result of the spirit of the community.
Beautifully well said!
I will say, however, that Torvalds initially used a non-commercial license, but he changed his tune very quickly.
(Can't find a very good source for this, but it's referenced in the first paragraph of the [Wikipedia article].
But that's really a historical technicality. You're 100% right after that initial change, and I'm not sure how long that non-commercial license was around. It might've been weeks. ;)
Oh, here's a slightly better source: https://www.datacenterknowledge.com/business/linus-torvalds-on-early-linux-history-gpl-license-and-money
Basically, the original license was only there for a few months.
@jns @rl_dane I arrive at BSD “copycentre” style licencing instead of GNU “copyleft” style licencing from the same ideas and thought paths, incidentally. (See my other post explaining a bit more of the mindset.)
I do not think copyleft a “clever hack” (nor, actually, really effective; there’s been a legal analysis posted to some Python mailing list (I probably bookmarked somewhere) that shows the GPL is effectively equivalent to the LGPL unless the other part is indeed very derived), and I’ll restate that licences are not the correct venue to fight or even to work on changes to copyright law.
(This not meant as “fighting words”, or even a rebuttal, just as explaining where BSDish people may come from.)
Tim ChaseI find it odd that folks get their knickers in a twist over licensing. It's up to the person writing the code to determine what they feel is an acceptable license for their creation (whether a BSD/Apache/MPL or GPL variant or even proprietary); and then it's up to the individual/user to determine whether they find that license acceptable for the purposes they desire.
If generic-you (not specific Mirabilos-you) don't like the terms of a license don't accept it, or create your own code and license it how you see fit? 🤷
Eh, subjectivity isn't in question, but trying to find the avenue to the most good.
It's obvious that these things are subjective, and will be seen in very differing and subjective ways.
The task is to see if it possible to put our heads together and determine the license that results in the most good, or if that is even a possible End for a license.
Saying "it's subjective" (or something to that effect) isn't really helpful, because it's seemingly an attempt to solve an equation by isolating the constants, rather than the variables.
It's like when I talk to my Christian friends about the evils of this present day, and their response is, "Yeah, humanity is sinful."
The sinfulness of humanity, at least in typical Christian belief, is a constant, not a variable, and therefore cannot be the answer to a question seeking to understand why things are so bad now.
Does that help?
Very honestly not wanting to be offputting or parochial. I'm just trying to explain why thr conversation is worthwhile.
🖖🏼