gitlab.com is fully open source and is enjoying good growth, including commercially.

Avoiding being open source because you don't understand how to create a modern business model around it is a problem that largely went away over a decade ago.

Keeping the lights on vs being open source is a false dichotomy.

Ultimately, gitlab (or something like it) will win, because the users will develop the features they need instead of moaning about it.

I'm not certain, but it seems you are also mixing free of charge with open source.

I'm also an open source developer, and I also use and pay for open source software. I'm much more likely to pay for open source than closed source in general.

Would you care to name some of these talented users whose move to FreeBSD is causing Linux to collapse from within?

For me last year (and one or two before that) it's been Go (golang) that's taken over my programming life. I've taken it from a "spare time" thing to getting many services into production using Go last year, as well as getting 3 dev teams at work using it and it's already proving more productive than java, which we've all used until now, in some cases for decades.

Look here https://github.com/trending and you will see that golang features highly now, pretty much every day. When I list the most exciting projects I've started using in the last few years, about 70% of them are in Go. When I look around me at software startups, they mostly use Go. I was also told that about 80% of startups working with Adrian Cockcroft are using Go (and he spends a lot of his time with startups in his current work)

Also, it's really fun. Seriously. Learn Go and use it.

If you own something, you can re-sell it so someone else entirely without the permission or knowledge of whoever sold it do you. If you can't do that, you don't own it.

https://tyk.io/

And to some, "research" means gathering evidence, conducting experiments, interpreting the results, publishing, getting peer-review, incorporating peer review and possible re-publishing.

To others, it means reading a bunch of unattributed stuff from the web.

I'd rather see bugging of rooms and physical observation of actual suspects rather than weakening the security and rights for absolutely everyone.

Besides, it's not like organised criminals will stop using encryption just because it's illegal. (I almost can't believe we're talking about effective encryption being illegal)

Tor provides anonymity. It does not provide authenticity or secrecy, and doesn't pretend to. If you want those things, you should use something else in addition to tor. For example, TLS or SSH might suit your needs.

Indeed. But that's a different class of problem. Or are compilers optimising constant time comparison routines to not run in constant time these days?

Use a language that does bounds checking automatically. Its not the 1970s any more.

(I hope the sarcasm in my comment was obvious.)

Programmers are human. They'll make a ton of mistakes

Humans make certain classes of mistake. Things like array bounds checking are really easy to miss.

If only machines were good at this stuff. How come we don't have any languages that do this for us yet?

golang.org

Briefly:
1) Go is a modern "better c from the people who didn't bring you c++"
2) Go is designed from scratch to make concurrent programming simpler, and believe me they achieved this.
3) Go is fast, portable, lightweight, simple.
4) Go is designed and worked on by the likes of Rob Pike & Ken Thompson.
5) Programming in Go "feels" like c, but with the simple expressiveness of a scripting language. It's both low level and high level, depending how you use it.
6) The standard library is really good, especially given that go 1.0 only came out in 2.12
7) The community is even better.

And they achieved this without DRM as a part of the standards.

Just like it did for music?