@rl_dane

Linux 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.

@jns

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.. )

@jns

It's also worth looking into #CollapseOS and #DuskOS

https://collapseos.org/

https://duskos.org/

@mirabilos @jns

Doesn't seem so:

@mirabilos @jns

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. 😅

@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.

@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.)