This is Australia. We don't have constitutional rights - our constitution merely codifies the relationship between the states, territories, federal government and the commonwealth.

The wording of the GPL is quite clear - it only requires the Makefiles to be included, and even adds an exception for the compiler when included with the OS as a runtime dependency. It doesn't say anything about the requirement to include the compiler.

Keep in mind that when the GPL was first written, GCC was only 2 years old, and proprietary compilers were unavoidable in many areas. Even today, proprietary compilers are still unavoidable for certain applications. e.g. FPGAs. To require the publishers of open source programs to cover the cost of licensing the compiler for all their users would have been insane, and significantly limited the spread of open source software.

The intention of the GPLv2, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, is that in exchange for the ability to modify the software to suit yourself, the changes you make can be merged back into the upstream. The GPLv3 places a greater focus on the ability of the user to generate a useful executable, but the v2 was chosen (possibly intentionally) for this instead. Whatever your opinion on v3, their choice of v2 speaks for itself.

The solution is the same as for the razor blade model - stick with products which accept generic consumables. e.g. coffee grinders that take beans, or double edged razors (all the blades have the same shape and are intercompatible). The difference in cost is usually about an order of magnitude. e.g. DE razor blades are ~30c each.

Like this

Do that and they'll disappear into a singularity (mathematical, not physical). What you really need is to use quaternions, like -ijk.

This feels like a troll, but I'll respond anyway.

Wrong on both accounts. Both ALSA and Pulseaudio are available on pretty much every Linux distro. Pulseaudio is generally regarded as the standard these days, but you can target ALSA if you really care about supporting the minority of Arch and Gentoo users without Pulseaudio.

Both of these are free (both libre and gratis), with the GPL family of licenses being the FSF's gold standard.

As for your claim about the LGPL, I am not aware of any evidence that supports your interpretation. In fact, the existence of Linux ports for numerous AAA games indicates that many large companies do not consider the risk significant. Furthermore, courts are generally quite conservative, and prefer to avoid disrupting existing arrangements where possible. The idea that the LGPL was explicitly designed to enable the use of libraries by non-GPL'd programs, combined with the number of companies relying on it, means that regardless of ambiguities in the actual wording, the chances of the LGPL being turned into a regular GPL are slim to none.

Take a look at appdb to see how many of the games you play under Windows (which don't have explicit Linux support) will actually work via WINE. You might be surprised - it's not all of them, but these days they work more often than not.

Slashdot is US-centric, which means it's right-wing from an international perspective. Right and Left aren't absolute terms.

Keep in mind that Google Inbox is really just a fancy email client, albeit one implemented in the browser. I don't really care if they experiment with it, because I've always used a regular IMAP client instead, and I don't see them removing that option any time soon.

Open source hardware isn't viable, though, at least not in its own right. You need to make profit somewhere, and it's usually one of software, hardware, or support. The SoC manufacturers sell hardware - if they just gave it away by open sourcing it, they'd lose their biggest source of revenue. Pretty much all the open source hardware in existence is either bought by a small segment of zealots (e.g. any of the attempts at a completely FOSS tablet), or is sold as a loss leader (e.g. Sparkfun open sources the designs for their breakout boards, because they also sells the parts for them).

$ sudo lshw > hardware_info

The premise of the article is just weird - an article about programming languages with single letter names makes about as much sense as an article about operating systems with blue logos. That D is compared to C instead of C++ further demonstrates the author's cluelessness. (Many D programmers regard D as an improved, non-backward compatible version of C++.)

While I agree with your point, it is worth noting that there have been several studies over the last half-century disproving the diet-heart hypothesis.

You're conflating aspect ratio and resolution. If the 16:9 monitor is 1600x900, then a 4:3 with equivalent vertical resolution would be 1600x1200.

I use 2x 1280x1024 on my desktop, and 1x 1920x1080 on my laptop. I agree that 16:9 is almost like having dual screens, but it's just not as good. If you're going to use dual screens anyway, then it makes more sense to go with 4:3 and have one window per screen.

A semi-related issue is that Linux HiDPI support isn't quite there yet (KDE5 and Wayland aren't mainstream yet), so there's little reason to upgrade until then.

The only reason, AFAIK, is because it's of strategic advantage to the systemd project, and by extension, Red Hat. (If someone has evidence to the contrary, I'd love to hear it.)

I've used systemd since mid-2013, and since then I've acquired a fair few reasons to dislike it, but it's the management of the project that bothers me more than any technical aspect. The systemd modules all seem to depend on the process manager and journal. The process manager requires that systemd also acts as init,* and user instances require a root instance. None of these dependencies need to exist - even the journalling library could be replaced by a shim that just forwards everything to stderr. Traditionally they would have been separate projects and such dependencies wouldn't exist.

* Systemd is a much better process manager than SysVinit, but there was never any reason to prevent the user from choosing another init.