And rightfully so, IMHO. The IA has legitimate goals for fair-use, but I don't think that fair use extends to bulk copying of an archive and for profit.

It's also my belief that the Internet makes it really convenient for outright theft of other intellectual property.

You can't have it both ways; kleptocracy is evil.

I know who the maintainers are and what their responsibilities and trajectories are. While no one was looking (Linus), lots of diverse platforms became supported. Provisions were made for both very progressive (if often never ever ever used) modularity.

On the app side, an enormous number of apps found their way inside, often stuff that users (remember users?) didn't ask for but they got The Big Gulp anyway.

I indeed wrote operating systems before Linus Torvalds was born. Wrote in Byte about Linux long ago. Watched a ton of operating systems grow and fail for want of a practical purpose or momentum.

I've surfed the wave of FOSS and Linux (and various BSD) developments for a long time. I have an engineers sense of less is better, and that attack surface involves anchoring unmaintained yet still distributed JUNK into fun attacks. Or watching users (remember users?) become dogged by sheer inode displacement.

Distros don't use Darwin as their set of choices, or even public demand for their content choices. They simply shovel in stuff. More is better. This policy is provably a poor choice.

The relationship between enabling interesting stuff in the kernel and the bloat of distribution apps is highly intertwined. The kernel and app payload enable each other.

Philosophically and relating this to the OP, bloat is bad. It eventually serves too many at the price of integrity and TCO.

Bullshit.

The kernel is built around features, resources, and libs that will touch it within the kernel. This 100% disciplines the "features" that distros shove in, often with seeming hydraulic pressure, into distributions.

Yes, it's a "Swiss Army Knife" with incredible flexibility. And it is a blimp. Then there are untold lib bloats to feed edge case use of distributions. It's my contention that you could slice the entire beast in half and still have great functionality for the bell-curve use cases.

I watch kernel development. There is so much goo inside the kernel that it no longer floats, it sinks under its own weight, and drowns the OS with barnacles and lead.

Like other seemingly simple solutions, this one is wrong.

The major distros have become unbelievably bloated, with Ubuntu leading the pack. LinuxMint needs ozempic in the worst possible way.

The kitchen-sink approach is just wrong and increases attack surface, while those having no choice but older hardware with fewer resources have to cringe.

Although lightweight versions are possible, the sheer sprawl of inodes has become ridiculous. No OS should need a half-million files installed from core executables and libs and sheer goo.

If you have to use W11, it's one more thing to add to your scrape script. This is a sorry last-ditch attempt to make Xbox relevant again. Easy scrape and joins the piles of crapware that doesn't belong in an operating system.

And Linux distros could go on a diet, too. Hey Linus, it's getting FAT.

Zhao forgets what quality, supply chain, consistency, scalability, reliability and lifecycle worth mean. His remarks are self-serving, and facile at best-- and a symptom of a deeper disease that permeates capitalism: Cheap Tricks That Don't Work.

This is Darwinism at work.

Structure, revenue, stature in the rise of developer networks.

You forget that Microsoft built itself on its addictive developer network. They harnessed hundreds of thousands of coders into an army that developed much code, some good, some bad, some hobbled by Microsoft mistakes and bad business partnering.

Now Microsoft wants to bypass coders and admins and go direct. Direct to those that would become dependent on AI related contexts, each a silo, each a house of cards with unknown dependencies and life cycle.

The idea of traditional data processing safeguards gets tossed out the door with it. Even the madness of Microsoft run-times evaporates, because each bit of code is unique, and by definition, not homogeneous and lacking interoperability with other code. A million little bits of non-related code creates a wasteland of stuff that can no longer work. Who's going to fix THAT?

That's silly.

The largest objection is the panopticon, and people's nose in others business with out the warrant or need. Remember probable cause?

What about liberty and freedom? Freedom of association? Oh, wait, that must be another constitution.

Speed cameras, red light cameras, cameras in general need to go. Raise taxes, employ competent LEOs to give fat tickets for witnessed offenses. Soon, you're going to be convicted based on AI, which as a non-human, is unable to be challenged in a court because it can't be cross-examined. What of that constitution?

This'll happen while the kleptoclass are flying over you in their drones or private jets, as you battle the streets, waiting for you to spit, so you can be fined because you're the new profit center. Yes, you.

It's not about your politics, it's about basic privacy and functionality issues. A commonality among those that don't want to be the product, is finding ways that prohibit being involuntarily monetized.

The AI rubric serves only the tech bro fortunes, and not those of the individual. It appears on the surface to be of value, but AI inconsistency, and the addictive quality of short cuts then strangles users and their needs.

This isn't about anybody's lockstep. It's about values and liberty, and human worth as opposed to shipping one's value to somebody for their kleptocracy purposes.

Lincoln freed the slaves.

Don't become one. A well-lived life doesn't work like that.

The influencer-fed Become A BIllionaire rubric is for suckers.

Face the fact that you only enrich the predatory class, and the barriers to entry for the entrepreneurial class are higher than most can jump. Realistically, this means most people reading this.

Wanna use my new AI-generated Face Generator?

Tired of the same old face, and need a new one? We can help.

We can overlay it on your favorite license motif, all ready to go! The barcode will match!

None of that tawdry barrier stuff for you! Discord needs you NOW!

Although NASA engineers are criticized for "What could go wrong?" there are many use cases when you're going 23Kmph in a finite structure built for weeks of living that can and do go wrong.

No, it's not pure oxygen, but fire control, unexpected EMI/RFI, outgassing plastics, all are major and life-threatening events to deal with.

Woe the day when an unapproved/untested device becomes a death weapon, or distorts a signal in such a way as to render bad navigation, etc.

Nothing is foolproof because fools are so ingenious.

The IP gateway used will have to deal with latency outside of edge cases. And although there is FCC testing of Apple devices, these devices compete with other resources for transient earthlinks.

Yeah, what could go wrong? This is what happens when you put your buddies in charge of important research agencies.

There's a truth problem, as in truth in advertising and avoiding fraudulent bait-and-switch problems. Such alterations make people doubt everything, and while suspicion and skepticism is a good thing, it shouldn't come as the result of constant misleading marketing.

Gone is the era of consumer protection from public policy; this might add it back.

If you read my post, you'll see that we agree. The attempt at labor cost reduction makes agentic AI into some sort of being, which it is not. Using the context of being is an attempt to incorporate AGI, which is plainly evil.

Make them pay taxes, and you further the incorporation, and the damage that act does.

The taxation has to be of people. There is plenty of imbalance that needs correction in the tech sector. The wealth at the top needs a healthy slice to run the nexus of what government should do towards humanity, not the Libertarian version of this.