As opposed to IBM, a company whose IBM System/360 OS was totally open-source and didn't create a huge API moat that continues to this day. Same for VMS, a rather expansive API moat that was the sole reason anyone was buying VAXens after RISC workstations became commonplace and is the reason some corporations are still buying VAX clones or VAX virtualizations solutions. Or even the various RISC workstations, whose Unix-based OSes were proprietary and just different enough among each other for every OS to have its own app ecosystem essentially, which is the reason anyone still tolerates Itanium (hint: HP-UX compatibility) Or was the Apple Lisa and the first Macintosh running FOSS operating systems?.

This "lost paradise" narrative was always dumb. OSes were usually proprietary going back to the vaccum-tube era. API standardization is a recent phenomenon, false-starting with Java and sill trying to go mainstream with HTML5+JS.

For consumer-facing products, I disagree. Discontinued consumer products aren't deprecated, they become retro and their value on eBay skyrockets (for example, before Nvidia killed Nvidia 3D Vision, you could get Nvidia's 3D glasses brand new for MSRP, now people are asking for above-MSRP even for used).

But for enterprise/corporate products, I agree. The sad thing is that AWS, Azure, and Google Cloud are the new VMWares, since what runs under your open-source Kubernetes cluster is a proprietary stack. Yes, you can move your Kubernetes clusters to Rancher by rewriting all your Terraform files, just like you can move all your Ubuntu VMs from VMWare to Proxmox, but both cases are cases of vendor lock-in.

And yet, everybody, from startups to big corpos, is ok with this new severe form of vendor-lock-in. Please someone make it make sense!

I hope this succeeds, but I highly doubt it. What will realistically happen is that publishers will stop implying ownership and will start selling "10-year subscriptions" for the same price it costs to "buy a license" to a game now. Which can be reduced to "5 year subscriptions" in the middle of a game's life (for half the price, games become cheaper as time goes on anyway) and so on... After your "subscription" ends, you cease to have any rights to access the game.

Meanwhile, every EU member-state has a bunch of governmental apps that are available only through the (American) Play Store and the (American) App Store app distribution platforms. For example, for my country: https://play.google.com/store/... and https://apps.apple.com/at/deve...

And then there is all the banking apps that also promote the Play Store - App Store duopoly, despite banks being heavily regulated by both the EU and the member-states.

So, the EU can start its "tech independence" journey from this little dependency on US technology. You'd expect the eurocrats to mandate support for the European Jolla OS for governmental apps and banking apps at minimum, but nope.

Exactly. Since when 16GB is the minimum for adequate performance? I am running Windows 10 on an 8GB laptop from 2015 and it runs fine. Just say no to Windows 11 and hack ESU into your Windows 10.

It won't seem pricey after the RAMpocalypse raises the prices of cheap PCs and Chromebooks. In fact, it has already started happening.

The reason repair monopolies exist is governments enforcing patents and "anti-circumvention" provisions, it has nothing to do with capitalism.

If you think Trump and his ICE goons are complete arse-holes, wait until you see the kind of arse-holes that voters will elect as President if "undesirable" people start illegally mass migrating from unlivable areas. You see, people are generally like that: they can become complete arse-holes (and vote for complete arse-holes) if their self-interest and way of life are threatened.

I mean, what will the UNHCR do if the POTUS orders ICE to shoot anyone who tries to illegally cross the border? Send a strongly-worded letter?

I'm just letting you know how humans work, don't shoot the messenger.

Buy an 1TB SSD and store less stuff. The 2020s are Moore's Law going in reverse.

Just when I thought exFAT would finally end the filesystem wars (a filesystem that's implemented by all major OSes, supports files larger than 4GB, and will be royalty-free by May 2028), we may get SSDs larger than 512TB by then.

... if I come across a leaked version of the Windows 7 source code, I can use this tool to "rewrite" the source code and claim its a "clean room" re-implementation like ReactOS is?

Remember, I don't have to disclose the tool was exposed to the original leaked source code or that I even have it in my possession.

At this point, I have come to the conclusion that relying on any sort of proprietary software for your service is a bad idea and that all open-source options should be thoroughly examined first. Eventually, once a proprietary piece of software becomes essential to production environments (via lock-in and/or inertia), the squeeze is guaranteed to happen.

And yes, this also includes cloud darlings such as AWS, Google Cloud, and Azure (whose value proposition, contrary to popular belief, is in the software, not in the remote servers, AWS even offers an on-premises version of their AWS software called Outpost). I mean, if I told you to migrate your production away from AWS EC2 or AWS EKS (including downloading any data, rewriting any Terraform files, and migrating any Ansible scripts or Helm charts respectively so they aren't AWS-specific), can you even give me an estimate when you'll be done?

And this comes from a person who uses mostly proprietary software at home. At least when it comes to the home, you can pirate stuff/bypass broken DRM, and even use discontinued stuff such as Nvidia 3D Vision (or even entire discontinued OSes such as Windows XP) for as long as you want.

Does it come with a bundled H.264 decoder? Currently, only Chrome for Linux has that.

Not a chance, in standard dimensions at least.

Any merger happening now (while both companies are private) will affect the perceived value of the acquiring company when the merger happens, not when they go public. Aka, any gains or losses from the merger will be priced in when the merger happens, not when or after the go public.