Among those affected, the rate rises to 100%!

I hear Trump wants a Booker Prize. He thinks it should be gold and heavy enough to squeeze his collection of Time magazines on the shelf so they don't fall over.

Seems like they're trying to become Airbnb For Cars....

Next I predict Airbnb will compete by offering cheap overnight stays in the backseats of parked cars.

True. But then again he also died in his bathroom while taking a shit. If he had lived today, I guess they would have found a half finished tweet on his phone too.

Huh? You're in a trolling mood today? I guess I'll kick the ball back.

Linus is often full of shit on stuff he doesn't know much about, but he has had an outsized influence over the years. Media darling and bullying, mostly for 30 years. Defending him instead of talking about the GPL like I did is your way to move the goal posts, I guess?

I'm not going to address how wrong you are about driver contributions in detail. Maybe another time. It's enough to remind everyone here about binary NVIDIA drivers and how their open source "contributions" were just wrapper functions that loaded binary blobs. Lovely way to give back indeed. Yet another GPLv2 loophole.

As to your rebuttal about renting Free software, you clearly don't understand the legal limitations of the GPLv2. When you rent access to software that runs on a company server, the copyleft provisions do not apply in this case: You send input and receive output, and the software is never distributed to you. So no contributing back to the community. That loophole is addressed in GPLv3,

Encrypted signing keys was just one of the loopholes GPLv3 addressed. Another was running modified GPL code on a server and never giving back to the community.

You're right of course that companies were never going to give access to their changes, instead they just exploited the commons when given the chance, and here we are, a generation of people who rent software instead of owning and controlling it locally.

IMHO that was a strategic mistake.

Invoice breakdown:

Execution of Kill -9 command: $1

Knowing the root password: $9999999

Total: $10000000

Night of the Mini-Dead. (No actual human actors were inconvenienced during the filming and set production.)

I would add to this: use GPLv3 or later if you can.

The FSF (and Lawrence Lessig) designed the GPLv3 to protect open source creators from new exploitation tricks that companies came up with in the mid 2000s to bypass the GPLv2.

Sadly Linus Torvalds was one of the vocal opponents of GPLv3 because he fancied himself a startup millionaire (remember Transmeta? Me neither.)

As a result, he refused to support bumping the version from 2 to 3 in the Linux kernel at the time, and many projects followed suit.

Oh I'm a lost cause. Any day now I will stay home and scour the internets for my very own mint condition Bripe.

Why does Linux need this? It's not trying to tie you to a single hardware configuration like Windows(*).

With Linux you are completely free to take your old HD and just stick it into your new shiny PC, and everything will just work. Personally though, I use a NAS. My data is accessible from any one of my many PCs over the home network. It's super convenient, and if I need a bigger disk I just buy that one component and add it to the NAS. No need to copy anything.

(*) so they can gouge your for an extra license if you ever decide to replace or upgrade some components.

The silliness in those fictional comics is actually the existence of superheroes...

In the Matrix, humans are being taken care of by the machines and programs. But if you ever hope to have sex in your life, you'll first need to take the red pill...

Wait until next year, when the AI startups' VC money runs out.

I think you're focusing too much on the number 900. How are these things counted? How *should* they be counted? Are they 900 variations on a single idea? Are they 450 variations on two distinct ideas? There's plenty of redundant software patterns and anti-patterns in a code base as large as the Linux kernel, so double counting is expected to be rampant.

Similarly, with Linux distros: Attack viability will depend on the mix of installed software packages. Some things are more important than others, and should be counted differently.

AI companies like to claim "number go up" so as time goes by they will make "bigger number" announcements. Ignore the number. It's the distinct ideas that matter.