FTFY.

I totally agree. Piss off with your Windows10 stories.

Yeah, well, you are certainly among the people who get the GPL wrong ...

It doesn't even remotely mean that.

The real problem is that in order to monetize software under GPL, a company will benefit from making it hard to compile, hard to install and hard to use, because most of the money will come from the service you offer and not from the software itself. Even worse, the GPL encourages dual licensing for commercial purposes, using the GPL as a corset from which a customers can free themselves only by paying a hefty fee. Companies then use tricks in the legal grey zone to discourage the use of the GPLed version, for example delaying publication so it always lags behind the version with commercial licence.

AdaCore is a good example. They offer a GPL version of GNAT, but in contrast to the FSF version it is under the full GPL and not under the mGPL. Since Ada more or less requires a runtime engine, this means that all your executables from the GPL version will be licensed under GPL. Or, you can pay a hefty fee for the commercial license. At the meantime, they make sure to bundle their GPL version with a lot of essential, but GPLed code that is not in the FSF mGPL version and ensure (with delayed contributions) that the FSF version lags behind. With that strategy they have managed to boost sales for their commercial license, but it is probably also one of the main reasons why Ada has not gained and will never gain any widespread popularity.

Your suggestion is not good, though, because it would just institutionalize the bad behaviour that companies are already demonstrating currently in a legal grey zone - delaying the release of source code, making it hard to understand, branch, compile on your own, etc. The only one who would win from this change would be proprietary software makers, and they are constantly being unfair already by taking away essential freedoms from their users.

Too bad that's not correct either. The GPL has nothing to do with the question whether you sell software or not. It's all about distribution.

Don't be so patronizing, you're not that more smart or special in comparison to the "people" you refer to. Contrary to your claim, people have no problem with installing software, they do it all the time on their PC, Mac, smart phone or tablet. They want easy installation without problems and instant up-and-running software (a lesson learned from shareware). That's easy to achieve and whether the software is free or proprietary makes no difference in that respect. It only takes a bit of care from the developer.

I recommend getting a Ph.D. in philosophy. It's the best thing for getting a job in any kind of science or technology related field, because philosophy is the mother of all sciences and technology is just applied science.

Oh, damn, please delete the above... too late. :-/ Obviously I've meant upgrade to a new version.

Anyway update... well, whenever it tells me to -- except for Windows, of course, where I check the KBs first and usually there is a problem.

As the title says....

Finally some Russian billionaire who puts his money to good use. (No, I'm not joking.)

That's possibly the worst moral justification I've read in my life. Apparently to some people the adjective 'moral' is a synonym of 'can be used as a business model'.

Some of my essential audio tools have already been reported not to work properly on Windows 10, so I'll be damned sure not to upgrade anytime soon. I have already removed the upgrade notification.

Emotions are an important part of becoming more human.

Google gives less good results than it used to but with a strong adblocker like Adblock Edge or uBlock it's still okay. The important point is too check subsequent pages, and always check out and read any "EU censored" pages by using a proxy.

There is no Artificial Intelligence yet, so how would anyone know?