So, what does compliance involve? That's the first question we should be asking.

If your local libertarian hot dog stand guy rages at you about maybe being shut down because the health department is on his back, instead of saying "fuck guvment", maybe you should figure out if it's something as simple as them having hygiene standards for how he cooks, and some small fee for a license. I mean, maybe there is something unreasonable or crazy, and there are some industries that corrupt government and do rent-seeking in order to limit competition, but these details matter.

Then we should turn away from GNOME3. Because they're taking compatibility lightly. Because they're wrongheaded. We should make sure that no distros ship GNOME3 or systemd as default. Sure, they're not serfs, they're just people promoting an inferiour solution that damages Unix.

The corruption of GNOME and other opensource projects by tying it specifically to Linux comes with this; it represents giving up on being cross-platform, giving up on the BSDs and other Unices, and giving up on openness. No thanks.

Good start, now go do some formal study and get a degree. There's too great a risk, with self-taught people, for them to only expose themselves to the ideas that are appealing to them. Academic fields recognise this; you're not going to be ready to contribute to the cutting edge unless you put your ideas in the field up for reshaping by people who know more than you do, and that's a good thing.

If we think we might object to provisions we wouldn't like in the final contract, we'd better start objecting now. The end effect of such protests can only be positive for us, particularly because we often lack a direct input into terms and in the end are left with a thumbs-up-or-down; making a fuss early gives us some of the only kind of leverage we really can get.

If they contribute the least to global emissions now, their development should take the form where they remain contributing little to global emissions. Hopefully more advanced nations will be able to reduce their dependency on coal in the meantime.

In the last few years, Ubuntu and GNOME stepped beyond the useful compromise Unix made between suitability for technical people and suitability for average people, and leaned towards the latter with generally no good reason. Sure, Ubuntu was pushing for an alternative to the X Window System, but so were the Wayland folk, supported by GNOME. The GNOME folk have been toying with the idea of making systemd a requirement for GNOME, making GNOME infeasible on other platforms.... because apparently your window manager should have a dependency on your init scripts? GNOME has removed all the options that make it usable in GNOME3, while at the same time embracing unreasonable defaults and suggesting the community write extensions to make it usable again? And so on.

I suppose if we want everyone eventually running KDE on FreeBSD, we're well on our way there.

Imperfect doesn't mean worthless. If someone were to create a treatment that would cure almost all the people suffering from deafness, that'd be pretty great. Doesn't mean we should stop caring about the rest, of course.

Sorry to be the pedant, but that "disallow apps that can't be scripted" line seems kneejerk and fairly stupid. Scriptability is not a yes/no thing, it's a measure for how good an API is. If you just want apps that are minimally scripted, I'm sure you could make a platform where every app accepts a hello() message, and does a popup with that, but that doesn't get you close to being able to do neat things.

I suspect what we'd really like is more choice in programming languages on the phone and a cleaner split between UI and API.

I wonder how many people would write apps for such a device for free. I might, and the opensource community might too, but is that enough?

Ahh, so nothing that's actually important.

Why are composited desktops important?

Exactly right. When I started my current job, I had an iMac sitting on my desk; I was initially skeptical, but as soon as I saw the machine specs (as I was installing Linux onto it), I fell in love; it's a very nice machine, and my workplace had spiced it up further by putting a lot more RAM and disk into it. It's one of the most pleasant desktops I've ever worked with (and the resolution is amazing).

Losing my sight would be a very harsh blow.