It's not a matter of the existence of the BSD license. The key is the license of the most competitive project. Keep looking at Android as an example: Google dislike the GPL, so if some BSD kernel was on par with Linux for embedded devices, they would certainly have chosen that kernel instead. And we wouldn't even get device vendors to release the kernels.

Look at the Darwin kernel as another real-world example. Its source as released by Apple doesn't even boot nowadays, so the open source community around the Darwin kernel is very small if any.

As a user of the proprietary bit of silicon, because of the BSD license, I don't get a compiler for my machine at all, unless I pay for the company's proprietary one (if that is an option).

This is something that bites me continuously with Android phones: manufacturers will only release the GPL licensed bits, so if I want to run my own software on the phone, I can only get crippled functionality because of all the bits I'm missing (Android has a no-GPL-in-userspace policy).

Please update your FUD. GCC has supported a plugin architecture since 2010. You can use any GPL-compatible license for your plugin. This includes BSD, and in fact, there's a LLVM plugin for gcc.

What features are they missing in FreeType, and where do they get them instead?

I'm asking because on Linux I get subpixel rendering, subpixel hinting, support for TrueType, OpenType, Type-1, WOFF and bitmap fonts, including color emoji (!). HarfBuzz supports quite a lot of exotic scripts, and that supports follows the standardization of those scripts into Unicode, whereas users of proprietary OSes have to buy a new operating system in order to enjoy the same improvement. What's "fucking atrocious" in that?

Straw man.

The perfect is the enemy of the good.

The Linux desktop 2.0 that has been brewing for the last 15 years will be marvelous once it's finished. Until then, we can rely on the ugly X to get our work done.

You're saying it yourself, there's little reason to fix what is working. There's no reason for you to use, say, X core fonts if you don't want to (and you shouldn't want to of course). Freetype and Xrender will give you state-of-the-art typography support. You wouldn't consider ext4 a "workaround" for minixfs or amiga ffs because Linux, for backward compatibility, continues to support the latter.

And developers don't care anyway, because they'll use a ready-made toolkit, just like Windows developers no longer dirty their hands with RegisterClassEx and WndProcs.

X powers every single Linux-based desktop in use today. It was fast and lean enough to run on Nokia's smartphones. How exactly isn't X working?

It's younger than UNIX, C, Windows and other venerable stuff which keeps the world going nevertheless. Who cares if it's old? It's not like it hasn't been constantly updated, as per TFA, and by very skilled people, so it has this useful feature: it works here and now. I don't feel the "brokenness" asking to be fixed.

I said that they could, not that they would.

There are no such games made in the USA, would you really compare BF4 to a homegrown game made in Iran by some Iranian kid who changed some texture of Quake?

What they would do if such a game was successful and mass-marketed as Battlefield 4 is, remains to be seen.

What conspiracy?

You mean the premise where I said that censorship is unacceptable?

They're not justified. I pointed out that they banned the game because the game content was offensive for them, which I can understand, but being my culture different from China's, I can not justify.

But I didn't say this. My point is, that if nobody in the USA has ever done a game like that, it's because it would be considered highly offensive, by itself. There's no need for the government to declare it outlaw. Attacking the government is obviously considered more offensive than hitting people with a car (as in Carmageddon) or committing assorted crimes, killing the forces of order, and crushing people with a tank (as in the GTA series). The post I was responding to was saying that a realistic simulation game about attacking the government is not a big deal. But if nobody has ever made such a game about the USA, there must be some reason; and that reason is that most people would find such a game offensive.

About the legal means making such a ban impossible: while there's no doubt that the USA are the most free country in the world, history has also shown that they have a habit to overridde even their most sacred laws when the government feels that the country is under threat. Just to make one example, but there are others, http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/12/27/1727207/us-federal-judge-rules-nsa-data-collection-legal : isn't the right to privacy constitutionally guaranteed?

Is there any US game where I can (gasp) bomb NY, invade Washington DC, help set up Communism or Sharia in the country? I'm not saying that censorship is acceptable, but I can understand why they're upset.

I do understand the difference. My example was meant to propose the concept that that the only difference between buying cigarettes from abroad and buying advertising from abroad is, in fact, that there is a long accepted rule against doing the former, while until now there was no rule against doing the latter. Now the rule is there, so the avoidance becomes evasion. Until the EU suppresses that rule, that is.

When the law wasn't there, by unjustly taxing the local advertising providers, the local government itself was skewing the market in favour of the foreign operators, creating a preference for local taxpayer money to be transfered to foreign governments (Ireland? Bermuda? USA?), where it could be spent, for example, financing the NSA or paying the fuel for Brin and Page's private jets. The government was acting against the interests of its own citizens.

Now the playing field is level, and the companies you were talking about are perfectly free to become even richer, which contrary to what you say isn't stigmatized by anyone, as long as they do it by providing better products at better prices instead of relying on legislative advantages.

Yes. What's exactly wrong with that? If I bring three packs of cigarettes inside the EU, I will get fined at the border for evading something like 20 € of taxes, and my name will even end up into the list of smugglers. Even though the money was mine, and the cigarettes were made outside my country. Nobody has ever objected against that, because paying taxes is seen as normal. So if eluding 20 € of taxes is a crime, why should eluding 10 billion € be considered fair?

They're two different services, two different persons earning money, two different tax returns.

It depends. If they buy them on Amazon, they won't pay a penny of taxes to Italy, thanks to the same Ireland-Bermuda trick, even though Amazon competes with italian sellers who do pay taxes and present comparable prices to the customers. It's a matter of fair competition, which certainly is very complicated to handle, but can't be dismissed altogether.

The EU needs no army to enforce its decisions. In fact, Italy has a long history of ignoring EU directives when they harm the powerful (while they're inexorable in applying them when they harm normal people). What happens in this case is that the EU opens an infringement procedure, which means that Italy has to pay a fine for each year of non-compliance with the EU laws. In the end, the fine gets paid by Italian taxpayers, so basically the powerful can continue ignoring the law, and normal people pay for it.