Gone? How?

Free software does everything I need (there is literally nothing I need to do on a computer that doesn't have at least one, or more often multiple, free software options), doesn't require paying rent, doesn't lock up my data, won't force me to upgrade to an incompatible version or prevent me from reverting back to an older version or switching to an alternative program, and won't suddenly vanish one day.

It also won't spy on me or sabotage my system or my data if it detects that I'm doing something with my hardware or data that the developer doesn't approve of.

It boggles the mind that anyone would actually pay good money to be abused by proprietary software manufacturers - must be some kind of consumer Stockholm syndrome.

Yes, that's why Microsoft put ads and spyware and forced updates into Windows. Because it makes users happy.

It's why Adobe switched from selling software to renting it by the month. Everyone just loves rent-seeking parasites, and is ecstatic about the need to keep on paying or lose the ability to use their own data.

Having your work break because of incompatibilities in a forced update is just wonderful. And having no way to revert to the old version is even better.

Proprietary = This is our stuff, and no outside help is wanted
GPL = This is owned by all contributors, and no outside help will be accepted without also making it fall under GPL
BSD/MIT/PD = This is a product, do whatever with it, no contributions will be accepted, if you want new features, fork it and rename it.

Source code can be developed under any of the three models, but the first two will poach code from the third without contributing anything back.

1. Why call it "poaching" when the entire purpose of BSD style licenses is that you're not required to contribute anything back?

That is touted as the huge "benefit" of non-copyleft open-source licenses, so it seems kind of weird to be condemning people (and corporations too) for doing what the license is explicitly intended to enable.

If you want people to contribute back then use the GPL or some other copyleft license - if someone uses and modifies GPL code but never distributes their modified version they have no obligation to share that with anyone. But if they distribute their version, then they must either give the modified source (under the same terms as the GPL) along with the compiled executables OR make a written offer to give that source code to ANY THIRD PARTY for at least three years.

In other words:

  GPL, other copyleft = sharing required if re-distributed
  BSD, non-copyleft = sharing is not required.

(also: Proprietary = fuck you, and the DMCA says it's a crime to disable our spyware or our product sabotage code)

This is why corporations love BSD type licenses and hate the GPL, it's why they actively undermine it by pushing non-copyleft replacements for copyleft software and engaging in propaganda wars against copyleft (e.g. "GPL isn't as free as BSD" when the only "freedom" that the GPL restricts is the freedom to restrict other users' freedoms - that's not a "freedom" that anyone should support). They want to be able to take the software and free labour without any obligation to give anything back.

2. requiring contributions to GPL projects to also be GPL (or at least compatible with GPL) is almost the entire point of the GPL. The purpose is "Once free, always free. For everyone - users AND developers". Including patches with an incompatible license subverts that purpose. Such contributions are actively toxic to GPL & other copyleft projects.

    BSD concerns itself only with the freedoms of developers, it's perfectly OK to use the code, embed it in your project or product, and restrict the freedoms of downstream users

    GPL is concerned with the freedoms of everyone, if you want to use GPL code, you can not restrict the freedoms of any user whether they're a developer or not.

(BTW, I'm not against non-copyleft licenses like BSD - it's a completely valid licensing choice. Sub-optimal, IMO, but valid. I use lots of BSD software, but I vastly prefer copyleft. I don't think I've ever made any contributions to BSD projects aside from bug reports and some tiny bug-fixes, but have made many contributions to GPL projects over the decades because I don't want any code I contribute to ever be locked up inside a proprietary derivative by some parasitic corporation. I'm happy to voluntarily donate some of my time and effort to the world, to humanity, but not to be exploited as unpaid labour for billionaires. This is a very common motivation for GPL contributors - and is a huge part of the reason why the Linux kernel obliterated every other *nix kernel in terms of number of developers, code, features, hardware support, and "market share". People don't like to be exploited.)

3. your claim that both GPL and BSD projects reject all contributions from outsiders is absurd nonsense. Some projects do that, but the vast majority accept competently written patches that fit the license and the goals and the roadmap of the project.

Found the fascist.

Not at all. I just believe that governments and government agencies should serve the needs of people (all people whether they're citizens or not), i.e. real human beings, not artificial entities like corporations, companies, and other businesses.

BTW, remember that corporations are not people and never can be, can they ever be citizens. Due to not being people, they don't have human rights, either. They're artificial entities that are created by and exist only because governments say they do. They're fictions that only exist because we, i.e. humans, allow them to. That's why they, often successfully, try to control governments - it's against their interest to have their existence subject to people and governments...they haven't succeeded 100% yet but they're close and getting closer all the time.

In this particular context, markets must be regulated to serve the needs and protect the interests of people. It is impossible to have a free market without regulations to prevent from it being taken over by corporations, and actively enforcing those regulations.

The opposite, serving and protecting the needs of corporations against those of humans is part of the definition of fascism.

In other words, I'm a socialist. The exact opposite of a fascist.

I know this sounds like a fantasy-land position to Americans but that's because:

a) corporations took over control of your government long ago - with particular leaps in corporate power by their re-purposing your anti-slavery 14th Amendment, again since WW2 (Eisenhower warned against this), and again with that fucking idiot tool/arsehole Reagan (who, amongst many other crimes, broke your anti-trust regulations)

and

b) corporations have brainwashed you into believing that that's how things just are, always have been, and always will be, that it's the natural order of things. That's why they spend so much money and effort telling you that in advertising, movies, TV, newspapers, magazines, and other forms of propaganda.

If you can't even imagine an alternative, a better world, then it's impossible to begin implementing it. The first step is taking back control of your government - in the hands of the people, it's the only thing strong enough to rein in the power of corporations.

You believe it's impossible because that's what they want you to believe, and they work hard making sure that you do.

Fuck corporations. They're the enemy of all people, everywhere. All corporations, even the ones who pretend to be nice. They're slow, evil AI that happens to run on a substrate of the legal system rather than silicon. Worse, they modify their substrate for their benefit. There's not much point in worrying about science-fictional evil AI like Skynet when we already live in a world that is mostly controlled by real evil AI.

PS: I just know that you're going to think or say something like "but corporations are made of people" but that's only true in the sense that Ophiocordyceps unilateralis and related parasitic fungal species are "made of" ants and other insects.

Without user-replaceable batteries, this is pretty much useless and will probably just be used to harass owners into replacing their devices long before it is necessary.

It should be illegal, world-wide, to manufacture or sell phones, tablets, and similar devices which do not:

1. allow the purchasers to easily replace batteries, and

2. use readily available standardised batteries which can be sourced from the OEM or third-party battery manufacturers - with some allowance made for new battery tech / form-factors / specs as long as those specs are published without patent restrictions at least a year before any new devices use them.

3. allow the purchaser to easily replace the "ROM"/"firmware"/operating system without risk of "bricking" the device. It's not hard to provide a recovery mode to deal with failure during "ROM" installation.

Planned obsolescence is or should be a crime. As is deliberate sabotage by the manufacturer of purchased products for any reason, including to prevent/restrict repair or to force new purchases.

Minimum fines for breaking such laws should be at least 100 times the initial launch retail price of the device multiplied by the number of devices sold. Such fines should be used to fund the design and manufacture of open-source, patent-free alternatives to be sold at near cost.

Otherwise manufacturers will treat fines as a trivial and irrelevant cost of doing business. The only way they're going to stop fucking over customers is if doing so causes them severe financial pain.

PS: for any brainwashed corporate apologists/sympathisers: the only good free market is a well-regulated market that prevents both monopolies and abuse of customers. "caveat emptor" is not a valid business model, it's a crime.

Nothing in GPL2 or 3 requires one to make the source code available to everyone everywhere.

You couldn't be more wrong.

The GPL requires them to either distribute the complete source code WITH the binaries or with a written offer to give that source code to ANY THIRD PARTY for at least three years.

You really need to read and understand the GPL before opining about it in public. The GPL was designed to ensure that Free Software would always remains free to everyone - once free, always free - that is its sole purpose and everything within it needs to be read in that context (as noted in the Preamble to the GPL). And it was written by people way smarter than and far more knowledgeable about copyright than armchair lawyers like you. They took the time to think of loopholes and close them before they could be used to subvert the intent of the license. Funny that - it's almost like they suspected there would always be arseholes who'd try to turn Free Software into their exclusive property.

Go read (and take the time to understand) the whole thing. It's not very long, and it's not all that difficult to understand. But here's a few particularly pertinent extracts to get you started.

GPL v2, clause 3:

3. You may copy and distribute the Program (or a work based on it, under Section 2) in object code or executable form under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above provided that you also do one of the following:

        a) Accompany it with the complete corresponding machine-readable source code, which must be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

        b) Accompany it with a written offer, valid for at least three years, to give any third party, for a charge no more than your cost of physically performing source distribution, a complete machine-readable copy of the corresponding source code, to be distributed under the terms of Sections 1 and 2 above on a medium customarily used for software interchange; or,

        c) Accompany it with the information you received as to the offer to distribute corresponding source code. (This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)

The source code for a work means the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it. For an executable work, complete source code means all the source code for all modules it contains, plus any associated interface definition files, plus the scripts used to control compilation and installation of the executable. However, as a special exception, the source code distributed need not include anything that is normally distributed (in either source or binary form) with the major components (compiler, kernel, and so on) of the operating system on which the executable runs, unless that component itself accompanies the executable.

If distribution of executable or object code is made by offering access to copy from a designated place, then offering equivalent access to copy the source code from the same place counts as distribution of the source code, even though third parties are not compelled to copy the source along with the object code.

RH don't do 3a and (as they're a commercial distributor) 3c is not available to them, so they MUST do 3b. Their only other alternative is to refrain from distributing the GPL licensed code at all.

BTW, the three year term applies for every act of distribution...so every time someone purchases or downloads RHEL or other GPLed software from RH, the three years is effectively reset.

And then there's clause 2:

2. You may modify your copy or copies of the Program or any portion of it, thus forming a work based on the Program, and copy and distribute such modifications or work under the terms of Section 1 above, provided that you also meet all of these conditions:

        a) You must cause the modified files to carry prominent notices stating that you changed the files and the date of any change.

        b) You must cause any work that you distribute or publish, that in whole or in part contains or is derived from the Program or any part thereof, to be licensed as a whole at no charge to all third parties under the terms of this License.

        c) If the modified program normally reads commands interactively when run, you must cause it, when started running for such interactive use in the most ordinary way, to print or display an announcement including an appropriate copyright notice and a notice that there is no warranty (or else, saying that you provide a warranty) and that users may redistribute the program under these conditions, and telling the user how to view a copy of this License. (Exception: if the Program itself is interactive but does not normally print such an announcement, your work based on the Program is not required to print an announcement.)

These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole. If identifiable sections of that work are not derived from the Program, and can be reasonably considered independent and separate works in themselves, then this License, and its terms, do not apply to those sections when you distribute them as separate works. But when you distribute the same sections as part of a whole which is a work based on the Program, the distribution of the whole must be on the terms of this License, whose permissions for other licensees extend to the entire whole, and thus to each and every part regardless of who wrote it.

Thus, it is not the intent of this section to claim rights or contest your rights to work written entirely by you; rather, the intent is to exercise the right to control the distribution of derivative or collective works based on the Program.

In addition, mere aggregation of another work not based on the Program with the Program (or with a work based on the Program) on a volume of a storage or distribution medium does not bring the other work under the scope of this License.

In particular, it is important to understand what the paragraph beginning with "These requirements apply to the modified work as a whole" means and how that interacts with clauses 1 and 3. In short, what it means is "your stuff is your stuff and you can distribute it under any terms you like BUT if you merge it with GPLed code, you can not distribute that merged version unless the entire merged work is licensed under the same terms as the GPL"

BTW, don't forget clause 6:

6. Each time you redistribute the Program (or any work based on the Program), the recipient automatically receives a license from the original licensor to copy, distribute or modify the Program subject to these terms and conditions. You may not impose any further restrictions on the recipients' exercise of the rights granted herein. You are not responsible for enforcing compliance by third parties to this License.

They're not allowed to impose additional restrictions on recipients. No matter how you try to dress it up, even threatening to revoke a customer's subscription to support etc services in retaliation for exercising the rights given them by the GPL is imposing an additional restriction.

That's the psychopath's understanding of benefit vs risk - as long as the right kind of people benefit, it doesn't matter what risks and harms other people suffer.

With vaccines, as with other medications, the benefits go to those who take the risk - and they're generally choosing to take that risk because they want to avoid even worse risk, like getting measles or influenza or covid or whatever (your chances of catching and dying from one of those is FAR greater than the risk of an adverse reaction to a vaccine), or because they want the benefit of being able to socialise with sane people who don't want to mingle with plague-carriers.

With glyphosate and other herbicides and pesticides, the benefits go to the corporations that sell and use them. The risks are borne by everyone else, involuntarily and unknowingly.

These two things are not the same. Not even remotely similar.

BTW, RE: "washed away" - where the fuck do you think toxins are "washed away" to? Do you imagine they just disappear completely? Wrong, they end up in the rivers, lakes, wetlands, seas, and oceans. And while some chemicals can and do eventually degrade to less harmful (or even harmless) chemicals, many of them don't. Many are "forever" chemicals, and many accumulate in the food chain and/or destroy entire eco-systems.

That's been my biggest concern with RISC-V right from the start - not just China, but any company/organisation/government that develops RISC-V chips can build back doors, spyware and other malware into their proprietary forks of the CPU (RISC-V has a "permissive" license like BSD, not a "copyleft" style license like GPL).

And, sure, TPM and similar technologies can (and do) do the same thing with Intel, AMD, and ARM CPUs- the difference is a matter of scale, instead of a small number of such anti-features that can be studied and (hopefully, eventually) worked around, there'll be an enormous and ever-growing number of anti-features. And that's a war of escalation that can never be won.

Every "partner with a chinese company" scheme is a way for China to steal that tech. All these companies that have done so, have found their tech sold back to their home market's, pennies on the dollar, at dubious build quality.

Yeah, well, that's a global capitalism problem. If corporations weren't so keen to fuck over workers at every opportunity, then they wouldn't be outsourcing manufacture to slave labor in China, they wouldn't be putting themselves in a position to be fucked over like that.

The root cause here is American corporations, China's slave-owner companies are doing what is obvious and utterly predictable given the opportunity gifted to them by US corpos. But while that IS obvious and predictable, it's a problem that extends beyond the next quarter so is an externality that nobody needs or wants to care about it.

BTW, "steal that tech" and "might actually get subverted by China" are just plain wrong when it comes to RISC-V. There is no "theft" or "subversion", or even copyright or patent infringement. It's the license working as designed. It's just another example of the massive flaw inherent to "permissive" licenses - and it's an intentional flaw because that's what the original developers and contributors wanted. The whole point of permissive licenses is that the originators want downstream licensees to be able to make and release proprietary / closed / secret versions of the licensed tech.

Now there's no argument about the fact that the licensors have every right to use a permissive license if that's what they want - but it's foolish to refuse to see the flaw inherent to that.

So what is the article trying to tell us?

Just another part of the endless corporate propaganda war against copyleft.

They love BSD and similar licenses because they can take whatever they like without any obligation to give back.

They hate the GPL and other copyleft licenses because using copyleft code incurs that obligation. They'd prefer to use it without paying the price.

> I'm pretty much happy with Gnome 3 [...] Just keep the current Gnome updated and stable.

Remember how, when the gnome devs released Gnome 3 and fucked over all the existing users who were happy enough with Gnome 2 (telling anyone who complained "you're a fucking idiot because you're too stupid to understand our Glorious Vision")?

Well, welcome to the club. With any luck, there'll be a decent fork or clone implementing all the stuff you like within a year or three.

> And without the space program, technology would not be where it is right now.

You mean, without the government pumping billions into research and development?

but that's socialism. and socialism is bad.

(which is why we should all stop using the internet, its development was socialist too)

anyway, everyone knows that innovation requires capitalism, it's why we humans never invented anything before we invented capitalism (which has always existed and is unquestionably the Natural Order of Things). This is why it's obvious that the Apollo project was fake and the internet doesn't really exist - it's all just faked by commie troll farms.

ps: humans didn't originate in caves, so there was no "going beyond them". caves were useful things that some people in some places at some times in pre-history had access to.

Also, colonising the moon kind of requires returning to caves (in lunar craters), not going beyond them.

to build Galt's Gulch.

Hopefully, all the billionaires will migrate thinking it's paradise without all those uppity workers thinking they're not worthless greedy parasites just because they're the ones who do unimportant menial stuff like growing food and and maintaining oxygen equipment.

I'd have a lot more sympathy if they were arguing for everyone involved in the production getting residuals, not just themselves and a handful of the actors.

And I really do mean everyone, including the "extras", the technicians, the stage hands, the props people, the costumers, the camera and audio people, the post-production staff. Everyone, all the way down to the janitors and cafeteria staff. Everyone.

Otherwise, I don't really GAF about one set of bosses whinging about not getting as big a cut as they'd like from bigger bosses. They're complaining about *their* personal alienation from the product of their labor, while being more than willing to benefit from the alienation of those who work under them.

Why would the company who made that hardware & software do that when it would allow their customers to keep running their old scientific instruments for very little money instead of replacing it with a brand new one for $100K+?

(and sure, the new $100K+ instrument is probably better in every way, but the old one still works and is good enough for student labs at least - no university wants to spend hundreds of thousands on kit for a student lab if they can get away with hand-me-down equipment for undergrads to learn on, while the actual researchers with funding and actual budgets get the cool new stuff. The problem is that while the instrument itself still works, the ancient PC it's plugged into via an ISA bus is either dead or dying)

As someone who used to do sysadmin work for a science faculty, I ran into this kind of shit all the time...had to keep several very old instruments running on ancient PCs that either couldn't be replaced at all or could only be replaced after an exhaustive (and exhausting) search for motherboards which still had ISA slots. And then there were additional problems when the motherboards had ISA but only supported CPUs that were too new to be compatible with the ancient software. It was all kinds of fucked up.

Many of the problems could have been solved by the company releasing a new interface card (e.g. PCI or PCI-e) for the instrument and updating their software so that it could run on a new, modern system (or via virtualisation, perhaps with some kind of emulation to provide a translation between the new PCI hardware and the old ISA card that the software expects), but they didn't do that either. They didn't want to support old instruments, they wanted to sell new ones for a huge amount of money.

And that's not even considering the fact that many of the companies that made the ancient instruments were no longer in business, having gone bust (or bought out and trashed) decades ago.

BTW, this is (one of many reasons) why anyone who thinks "market forces" will solve all problems is living in fantasy land. "The market" does not want to solve some problems - the market wants to sell new shit to customers who have no choice. Or better yet, rent that new shit to captive customers who never get to own anything. That's the problem the market want to solve.

Copying is not theft.

Claiming ownership of copied/derived data IS theft.