The more the tech world develops and the more I learn, the more I start to like free & open source tech.

I do think there will always be a a large and growing amount of space for paid software work, but the variety and quality of free software seems to go up and to the right over time.

But I think the world is better with him than without him and that he's worked hard to further his mission. Not everyone should be like him, but it's great that he is.

I sincerely wish RMS all the best.

Do you guys know of any ways to reduce your risks of getting cancer? I know not smoking tobacco works.

What foods, bad habits should one avoid. What other habits can reduce cancer risks?

Are there any prophylactic techniques?

because of the poisonous vitriol that responses will undoubtedly have, i wont be reading responses. dont even bother.

The biggest tension at the GNU 40 years event was when an old Mr. was speaking about social economics and his attempts to make a local money in Basel (ch). Two american protagonists interrupted the speach telling it is too political. Later i talked to the one of them, a Chinese girl studiying in Harvard USA, she started telling me things about her big rich buisiness family and personal crypto projects she had in liberal finance field in Switzerland, she proposed me a job as a Solidity develloper. And I UNDERSTOOD why the previous speech was "TOO POLITICAL" for her.

For me, FSF and GNU are not enought political; I was always disappointed of the FSF and GNU political positioning, while their fight is about freeing the world of proprietary licences (property right) they don't consider to support anticapitalists movements who are fighting for that to. Stallman was the only to publicly support the French left social-reformist party "La France Insoumise" with the candidat Jean Luc Mélenchon, and for me it means a lot.

Now, let's say it; OF course I understand why this is strategic for them, but i don't stand for it because it is irresponsible and dangerous.

So sad to hear this :(

Also several studies mention they have higher level of nutrients, vitamin &co

Eating bio veggies won't make you cancer proof, but the again smoking a cigarette a day won't guarantee you a cancer either. It's a game of luck but some things help while other things are detrimental, I personally see no reason to buy pesticides riddled veggies when I have access to cleaner ones

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/20359265/

Or is it because people with higher vitamin D levels probably spend more time outdoors, and are getting more exercise?

I wish it was easier to figure this stuff out.

> Results Global incidence of early-onset cancer increased by 79.1% and the number of early-onset cancer deaths increased by 27.7% between 1990 and 2019

https://bmjoncology.bmj.com/content/2/1/e000049#

Even if you don't care, you have to upgrade to the latest Xcode to build against the latest iOS version with the cascade of consequences you described so well.

My wife is Ukrainian and we do live in Ukraine. And hadn’t left, as our city is relatively safe from missile and drones attacks. But the winter was harsh and we had extreme blackouts last winter. We could have from days (at worst) to hours (at best) without any electricity and internet connection. I bought top of the line MacBook Pro 16 with M2, just to do my work, which involves heavy renders quite often. Also we have a generator and a huge battery pack that can power some critical devices up to a day.

Still, given all that, the iPad saved our winter, as we could download offline most of the various content and almost never its battery was depleted during those blackouts. This tablet ($30 on a used market) and a $4K laptop were two devices that held its battery basically without need to be recharged either from generator or the battery pack.

Now Apple and Google tell me I have to retire the tablet just because. Also, I have an obsolete 10” Intel Atom netbook somewhat 5 years older than this iPad (ca. 2007–2008), and it runs fresh Arch Linux with the latest Firefox. Its battery is dead, but I know I can replace the cells, when needed. It can run many of my tasks, has an HDMI port and 4 GB of RAM. And is perfectly usable in many cases. But the iPad that could run rounds across the netbook, if allowed to remove all the bloat and update what’s needed— well, you know. You better buy a new one to watch YouTube and your precious local content.

And it plays local H264 720p very well, usually. However, for us 480p is plenty most of the time.

So funny and so sad. Nonfree JS? They're in their own cloud of whatever. Yes, there is nonfree stuff. But nonfree stuff also can get things done.

Linux just has a different business model. If you can do all your things like that, cool.

Many other business models are possible too, use that to create better products than the "invest huge sums now and develop the thing, collect small payments down the road".

It's strange to expect that other business models shouldn't exist so yours can work.

If you don't like locked down cars, just make cars the way you see fit.

With Google you can even make an argument that they can violate more user's rights because of Free software.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not against Free software per see, the topic is just more complex than what is presented.

To my knowledge the FSF doesn't consider firmware blobs with no way to flash "part of certification" because it would be inoractical to do so. By definition "software you can't change" isn't "free"(as in speech, not beer), so I don't think it's an ideological line.

So they either have to consider any device with unmodifiable software to be non-free(basically removing entire device classes), or be realistic and draw the line somewhere. "Can you modify the software on the device from the rest of the gnu software" is a line that matches up with their ideals fairly well IMO.

Basically, Richard Stallman is well aware that cars are bundles of non-free software(see: https://jalopnik.com/richard-stallman-weighs-in-on-the-check...). He has voiced opinions that software controlling the brakes in your car should be FSF and not binary blobs that come pre-installed with no visibility.

Can you develop a bit on that ?

The EU is one of the rare large public institution on Mastodon currently.

Also one of the rare institution to sue properly the GAFAMs successfully when they on-purpose try to fuck user around with carefully designed locked-in solution (Hello Internet Explorer, Safari and App store).

Like every large political institution, it is an hydra with many yeads. Nothing in the EU is entirely clean. But I would rank then more in favor of OSS than against.

The FSF/GNU seems a bit too fringe and not too great at explaining the problem to everyday people instead just offering entirely uncompromising solutions that don't work for most people. More isolationist than activist. What would the less radical organization benefiting from the existence of FSF/GNU even be? The EFF?

Give them an inch and they'll take (or more precisely, they took) a mile.

There are many cases where running a self hosted version is not feasible, which are also mentioned in the text. Social media and other services where the information is an important part of the service or software that can not be run on my own machine due to limits in my hardware. But outsourcing simple calculations that can be done locally is a bad thing I agree.

You do? No graphics card? No (good) games? No firmware? And if so, how much of a premium did you pay for the lack of scale from your hardware vendor alone?

But things are changing and linux is getting some traction.

The healthcare industry is very slow moving (as it should be).

That article was written before the finished GPLv3 was published, they had only published a stricter draft.

What is the anti-tivo clause?

Yeah, the greed and individualism of earning a living wage. Not everyone can have a sheltered position at MIT or as head of a foundation.

the complaint that stallman had for the name `linux` instead of his preferred `GNU/Linux` had this consequence because the people who own linux chose not to adopt his preferred branding.

Branding and marketing is really important, no matter what the field is. Especially for consumers who tend to be clueless most of the time about the underlying technologies. It's why Intel's genius is not only in processor design, but the fact that they foresaw the issue, and started marketing the "Intel Inside"(tm) branding, which put them on the table from a consumer perspective.

[0] for example: https://www.gnu.org/fun/jokes/ed-msg.en.html

So I see ads (even videos!) instead of my simple html page, or on top of it. It's terrible!

Sure can, that's the very purpose of their existence. "The Free Software Foundation (FSF) is a nonprofit with a worldwide mission to promote computer user freedom." -- how is that going to happen if nobody hears what they want?

> Also, in suggesting they use Youtube or Twitter, you're simply exemplifying how you reject their principles.

And how else are people on those platforms going to hear anything? The only way I can imagine is either by people who don't agree with the FSF repeating their message (do you trust them to be accurate?), or people who do agree, but more willing to compromise.

> so ask yourself, why have we not been promoting those platforms, and why have everyone seemingly yielded to ever-widening control of our digital lives by these large corporations?

And you think posting in tiny platforms that almost nobody knows even exist is going to fix anything?

Sure, some of this situation is on us, not on the FSF. But I’m discussing what the FSF can do here. And I’m afraid they don’t have much choice.

We as users should demand insight into the software running on hardware we own. Otherwise we only partially own it, and if the device is connected to the internet, we can lose ownership any time.

Yes?

This is sort of the opposite of the "yet you participate in society, interesting" comic.

You can non-hypocritically call for people to move away from something you also use. It's especially important when it comes to communication because how on earth are you supposed to tell people to change behaviour if they never hear you? Running an ad on fox news calling for people to listen to say NPR instead isn't hypocritical.

An absolutist approach diminishes itself, as it's saying "hey don't use twitter, then just like us you'll have no reach".

Stallman almost screwed up gcc, I think multiple times. GRUB at this point can be safely declared obsolete in the age of EFI.

But yes, GCC is very nice.

> You are seriously asking why the Free Software Foundation isn't using a propietary social platform?

If only to direct people to content hosted elsewhere, but yes.

They're terrible at it, Youtube or not.

The purity inherent in insisting on using only free software is laudable, but evangelizing is only effective when there's reach. (It's also much more compelling when it demonstrably makes folks' lives materially better, but reasonable people will disagree on the particulars there.)

I don't know how Microsoft managed to design a boot scheme that is conceptually better than boot sector booting while including a similar painful amount of legacy in it.

And then there are the people who celebrate that 'advance' of modern software while their kernel now has a 16-bit real mode "This program cannot be run in DOS mode" stub.

It actually is painfully obvious now that what Stallman/FSF did was correct for their mission, in the sense that they knew what they actually wanted, and that Open Source definitely was not it. Thus they alienated their closest would-be allies. FSF narrative was hijacked as Corporate Open Source is a much easier sell comparatively, especially when the primary business models of "tech" companies has become less about selling software over time. When people suggest FSF is bad at advocacy, what they really imagine usually is they could have been nicer and said some of the things that everyone else in Corporate Open Source world say. If they had done it, by now they would have had no originality, added a big banner in support of Ukraine to the top of their home page, had a big DEI statement, and five random flags like every other corporate non-profit.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

His ideals is just fine. His social manners not so much, and that highly limits the effectiveness.

This isn't new. Read up on the dark ages, and how Gutenberg ended them with the printing press. As technologists, the best thing we can do is figure out how to build technology that scales down enough to be wielded by individuals. That includes education and media distribution technologies.

Also, climate change models that estimate economic damage project annual damage from extreme weather exceeding global GDP in a few decades. Humanity will probably survive, but its unclear that anything resembling the modern economy will.

The issue isn't just being "called out for being a jerk". It's one thing to call someone a jerk. It's another thing to be entirely unwilling to look at facts objectively, to reason about them, to listen to those defending the person and yet throw wild allegations, as well as vilifying anything an anyone that is in any way close to that person.

Nobody is actually concerned about "cancelling" just because people call each other "jerks". You can call me a jerk if you want. I won't feel cancelled.

Er... what?

He's known for forcing the name Gnu to be appended to Linux because of some wildly exaggerated claims of ownership.

We're talking about rms, not Linus.

I did hug him later and he was very sweaty - but we did just traipse across London in a bit of a rush and he was absolutely exhausted.

Interestingly, even after years of professional hardware engineering, I still feel some hesitation when interfacing with 230V AC.

I think it's deeper than that; I think the problem is app ecosystem. More and more apps that you need to use (e.g. the only way to perform 2FA with your bank) are dependent on Google/Apple services, use anti-root, anti-tampering and remote attestation techniques, making them impossible to run on free (libre) mobile OS alternatives.

Chemo subsumes a large number of different medications. What they have in common is that they are basically poison, and you hope that the cancer cells die faster than you. The effects differ wildly between different treatments and patients.

It's also true that chemo treatment has gotten better over the years. Chemo 20 years ago was much harsher and it's not the same anymore. Advancements in pharmacology.

The MIT License is a permissive free software license that isn't copyleft, as it allows proprietary modifications.

https://www.gnu.org/graphics/copyleft-sticker.en.html

>This is a scan of the “Copyleft (L)” sticker on the back of the envelope mailed from Don Hopkins to Richard Stallman on 1984. The envelope contained a 68000 manual that Don borrowed from Richard, that he was returning. The sticker inspired Richard to use the word “Copyleft” for licensing free software.

>attention:

>READ NOTE BEFORE OPENING!

>Copyleft (L)

>The material contained in this envelope is Copyleft (L) 1984 by an amoeba named “Tom”. Any violation of this stringent pact with person or persons who are to remain un-named will void the warrantee of every small appliance in your kitchen, and furthermore, you will grow a pimple underneath your fingernail. Breaking the seal shows that you agree to abide by Judith Martin's guidelines concerning the choosing of fresh flowers to be put on the dining room table. Failure to break the seal on a weekday is […]

Unless I misunderstand them, what about using the actual definitions?

- Proprietary software can be closed-source or source-available

- Open-source software can be under a permissive or copyleft license

- Free software is a philosophy around open-source software, but in practice FOSS and OSS are mostly the same thing.

the less people can do it the more valuable the skill is, or maybe they're really smart people and I just ain't got what it takes.

I wouldn't be able to use Word attachments (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/no-word-attachments.html)

I wouldn't be able to use Windows (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/upgrade-windows.html)

I wouldn't be able to package useful non-free software for my Linux distro (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/compromise.html)

I would have to call the Linux distro a "GNU/Linux distro" (https://www.gnu.org/gnu/why-gnu-linux.html)

I would have to ideally stop, but at least reduce, my usage of WhatsApp, Facebook, Slack, etc. (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/saying-no-even-once.html)

These are just all-in-all minor examples I could find in a couple of minutes on gnu.org. I remember reading much more radical takes by Stallman and his companions, but would have to spend more time searching for them.

Prognostic factors

- Median overall survival of > 15 years

For one thing, it would mean that I'd have to pull my kids out of school, pull my money out of the bank and cancel all of my utilities.

Heck, I'd need the equivalent of a degree in tax accounting just to avoid being jailed by the IRS, since I wouldn't be able to use tax software. (Not that this would matter, since I have to use *aaS stuff to pay my mortgage and insurance and collect my paychecks, so my taxes would be simpler next year.)

Even if I somehow managed to connect to the Internet without indirectly paying for a SaaS, I wouldn't be able to browse it in practice without agreeing to ToS contracts from companies I haven't even heard of.

Don't agree with the cloudflare, google and aws ToS agreements? Try blocking all their servers (since continuing to use the services implies agreeing to continuously-updated ToS terms). If you succeed, you'll find that the internet doesn't work at all. You can't even use email normally, since it's unclear what addresses get routed through which service providers, and what terms you have to agree with to "use" their SMTP services.

He founded the idea of Free software. Him being "gross" is completely orthogonal. "I would have agreed with the guy who fought against slavery if he didn't pick his nose in public."

These "gross" people are the ones who made overpaid dev positions possible.

Every time I have to use my Windows 10 corporate laptop, I become even more bewildered that people actually tolerate such a farce as their daily computing environment.

Obv he doesn't seem to mind the question. Just my approach.

Some things are worse as you note, but there have been som important improvements.

- professional domain-specific software now available, both free (such as KiCad) and commercial (such as DaVinci Resolve) and supported by vendors on Linux.

That's their decision, but it's a career limiting one, akin to saying the VAX has everything I need and it won't be changing so I refuse to learn any other system.

I'd bet less than 10% of professional developers could say who he is, and that a tiny portion of the population has any clue.

There are probably thousands of similarly important/influential people in various subfields that we have never heard of, because they're not our Subfield, and I highly doubt any of those would get a biopic.

Plenty of people with physical disabilities make people "uneasy" -- who's wrong here? The burn victim or the person taking offence to it? Stallman didn't do anything towards women that warrants the criticism he received. The claims have been debunked and it just comes down to him coming across as a 'creep' -- aka considered unattractive. Yeah, okay.

I agree its incredibly dangerous to accept bs just because someone is famous, but i also worry that if we throw out all the sinners we'll have no heroes left.

Its a hard question how to square all that and i don't have the answer.

Stallman weeps.

Edit: link to old.reddit.com https://old.reddit.com/r/linuxmemes/comments/16ts15z/stallma...

Mostly the "superior" ethical stance. You do things this (my) way, then it is ethical and you love freedom or you are not ethical and don't want freedom.

Sorry, but I just have some different opinions about some things, but I rather feel not like working together with people who consider me lower. So the result is not cooperation but lot's of fragmentation in the free software/open source world. I do not think that helped the common cause. Otherwise we would not be where we are. Lots of open source and free software for tech people - everything closed down for ordinary people.

Examples:

* Norman Finkelstein (blacklisted from Academia for his work relating to the Israel/Palestine conflict)

* Richard Stallman (made to resign from his positions at MIT and FSF due to comments relating to Marvin Minsky and Jeffrey Epstein)

* James Watson (ostracized from the scientific community due to his comments about race)

* Justin Roiland (forced out of Rick and Morty due to alleged crimes)

etc.

That was a few decades ago, so perhaps things have changed, but he was well within normal odor back in the early 90s.

I hope it's far in the future, but we'll see how the media spins it when Stallman dies. They can easily sell him up as some Godfather of computers. Or it can just be a small whimper in the corner of HN. I'd still bet on something closer to the former, but it's not a sure bet.

Let's be fair here: stall man's last technical contributions were when he was Linus's current age. Some people will code to their deathbed but I don't think that is a requirement to properly champion tech. He's more than paid his dues there.

Tech is relatively young and Stallman is one of the oldest living people left. Older than Gates, older than Jobs if he was still alive today. I see Linus less as a comparison so much as a torch Stallman's generation passed on.

https://www.photopea.com/

> But his reputation has been harmed like almost anyone who's been in the public spotlight for long enough.

These kinds of affirmation are really easily the result of the bias. You see a lot of public figure in the spotlight having their reputation harmed, but you don't notice the ton of people who are just "normal" or "not unlucky" that are not and will never be harmed.

For example, it is true that when Trudeau dressed in black-face, it was not such a big deal. But then, the probability of dressing in black-face was still very small. How many innocent people just dressed in black-face just for an innocent joke at the time? So, people who are "unlucky" are statistically a minority.

As another example, behavior like Stallman or Roiland are not "normal". "normal" people are just not that abusive or inconsiderate. So, people who are "not normal" are also a minority and to some extend even deserve it a little bit (they should have known better than being jerks, having their reputation harmed for being a jerk is not a bad thing, it is a normal consequence).

My personal view is ... did this person move society ahead? I will give someone who fought against slavery 200 years ago, a pass for being what would be considered misogynistic now or a racist who fought for suffrage at the turn of last century. If the person was just all around "a product of their times" or specifically evil, cancel away!

> Even people who are obviously anti-racist like Justin Trudeau used to believe black face was acceptable until very recently, for example.

This is an interesting case. When I first saw the picture, I was immediately struck by the fact that Trudeau was dressed up as a Djinn which were historically often (mostly?) displayed as black skinned in Islamic art. I totally understand why he didn't try to explain that and just took the hit (when I dressed as a Djinn, I went with green rather than black for the obvious reason that Trudeau also should have gone with red, green or blue).

To the extent to which "black face" just means for a white person to play a black character, they were entirely right in thinking so. All actors play things they are not.

This is the 2nd time this word has been used to describe the Linux desktop in this thread, and it's disingenuous. FOSS doesn't do any of the things described with enshitification article: it doesn't sit between buyers and sellers and screw each of them in turn. That's not what's been happening. Maybe the software goes shit, but it is not "enshitification". At every turn there's been alternatives (GNOME3 -> Unity/Xfce, KDE4 -> Trinity, Pulseaudio -> Pulsewire, systemd -> upstart, Debian -> Devuian, etc)

Stop misusing the word, you're discrediting the good work of FOSS.

I'd prefer we reserved this word for when stuff gets worse because of money / investors, with incentives at odds with the user needs.

I don't believe Gnome suffers from decisions that are bad because of financial incentives.

My first successful experiment with Linux was in 2003 (having flopped in the late 1990s, when Linux could be found on the shelf in stores everywhere). The desktop I used then was Gnome 2. My current desktop is Gnome 2, with more or less the exact same look and functionality, though it's called Mate. It's only enshittification if you have a way to force it on people against their will.

And the great thing about e.g. a window manager is that there is no lock-in effect. I must use GitHub because everyone is using GitHub (even thought I like the git e-mail workflow better), I must use WhatsApp because everyone is using WhatsApp, and I must use the Slack and their damn Electron app because my company chose Slack and I don't have a choice.

Gnome does nothing like that: I don't use it, and I don't even know how many people use it. I don't see why there would be a reason to complain about it; if you don't like it, don't use it.

To be honest, the only thing that bothers me about Linux desktop environments is that there isn't a simple way of getting a 4G dongle and using my laptop as a phone (calls, SMS, etc).

And it may even be true this time around (I love me some KDE).

But for me, it doesn't matter. Once I discovered i3 I just never went back, there is just no desktop that can compare to it.

Obviously I'm not your typical user, so this is an aside from a "nerd", but it's sometimes interesting not having a horse in that race anymore (I've been using i3 for 10-15 years I think at this point?)

Besides, I recommend servicing the device every so often. People create weird failure modes (putting too many files onto the device, clicking at random in menus). I also recommend setting up a backup.

As a figure of speech: Nobody is expected to service a car on his own. You'll get professional help every so often.

If I were in either of your shoes (sandals?) in that situation, I’m sure I would be super frustrated all the time. Impressive on both your parts.

I see. Well then, carry on.

But maybe then do not wonder when the rest of the world does not care about software freedom and also don't donate or support it in any way.

Oh and Plato is well known as a philosopher, but yes, most people do not know that he proposed a very totalitarian state and is rather known for platonic love.

His message is pretty much user-centered.

(and programmers deserve good message delivery too)

There are even strong theories connecting early Christianity directly to Plato.

Then there comes the persecution complex. The horror.

This is a good point, and shows why we need people like Stallman to press us on important but unglamorous issues.

I don't really see the point of the term "cancelled" if it is what you describe: what you describe is just the normal usual consequences of living in society, and it existed since millenia without the need of using a specific term like "cancel".

It is also not really good because it muddies the water. We have people who are saying that the cancel-culture is a big danger. What they have in mind as "cancellation" is mainly a fantasy, and it is true that what they have in mind practically never happens in real life. But then, if you come and say "yeah, there is the list of people cancelled", these people will just start to believe these people went under the way more extreme definition of "cancellation" they have in mind.

> P.S. I never said Finkelstein as cancelled for being woke (you likely misread the word "work"), in fact he is very much against woke culture - see his latest book, "I'll Burn That Bridge When I Get To It!"

Oh. When I saw that, I was thinking "Good, this list contains some people that would have been cancelled for not conforming to right-wing ideal. Then I guess it is already more believable". But if it is not the case, I find it problematic. There is absolutely no intrinsic reason that only people would be cancelled for "not conforming with a left-wing ideal". If "cancellation" is a real thing, it should happen to right-wing or left-wing.

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/1005005081587056.html

That's strictly about businesses not willing to give back in the way the GPL forces you to. It's nothing to do with how RMS behaves.

"The Democratic People's Republic of Murderistan is a human rights violating hellhole, so that's what you want whenever you say you support Democracy. There is no selection bias from people from there because they should know what Democracy is if anyone does".

This. They have this kind of Apple syndrome of belittling use feedback, minus the part of being a billion dollar megacorporation

Also, things would have gone differently if they forked gnome 2 into a new project and left the original sources intact, instead of dragging all the userbase and distros with them.

To me, this was the shittiest move. Instead of saying "hey, we want to remake gnome into a very opinionated DE so we will make a new project for it", they said "we will use the same gnome2 sources so we will not listen to you but you are forced to listen to us!"

Anyway, you're being illogical. A flawed argument will remain just as flawed when it is used to reach a true conclusion as when it is used to reach a false conclusion.

If you want to prove me wrong, show that it is sensible to infer from the fact that an extremely selected-for sample has some property that the entire population has that same property - and do so without appealing to a bigger picture. Because if you were to claim that appealing to a bigger picture is necessary, you would be making the selfsame claim that I am making.

I wish I can be one of those young people who can be a worthy successor to Richard Stallman. I already am to a great extent, preferring FLOSS whenever possible (with an unfortunate exemption for video games, especially many PC and all console games).

My primary issue is now trying to find like people who are also into FLOSS as much as I am, and they're not as common as tech illiterate people are. Maybe someone can advise me on how I can get started (online or local around the Houston, TX area).

I feel like this is a bit of a misperception. Does this historically happen?

yes there are; but also not really.

due to my age cohort I'm see my self as this "next generation" software scientist/engineer who is aware and believes in FOSS and "liberty minded software";

I suppose most of use are millennials but the whole generation-label stuff is not accurate so maybe in the USA this next gen of people are a bit older but in other poorer countries they're younger???

in any case I think a lot of younger engineers got swayed away from the FSF/GNU ideological stuff by means of 'being pragmatic' which is just a consequence of when the open source movement distinguished itself as different from the free software.

I think the impact of this may have something to do with leidenfrost's appraisal that there's no next-gen to pass the torch to.

it seems like us millennials do not rally, we don't come together into any kind of social movement or dunno.

TBH I would put Drew DeVault in this category.

I feel like back in the day there would have been so many easy wins for modifications. Like how people used to root Android to add screenshot capability.

These days modern software is so extremely sophisticated and refined that I can’t think of anything I could improve for say iOS.

Still love foss, but the idea of “it’s open source, you can improve it yourself any time” has worn off for me.

I think that people leaving a country are more likely to dislike that country than those staying.

I suppose we're fortunate that options like Xfce and MATE are around, but I can relate re: compatibility. Truthfully I'd be just as happy with MATE as with GNOME 3.x, but last time I tried I ran into issues with high DPI and mixed DPI and didn't want to invest time trying to get it all working to my satisfaction.

Perhaps FSF has solved all the problems the community at large deems as worth solving.

It makes me wonder if a new org isn't what we need. I love the FSF and feel they did a tremendous service to the world, but the religious extremism limits their appeal only to true die-hard believers.

As a result, he was denied tenure and was never able to get a job as a professor, other than occasionally working as an adjunct. Really, I'm not sure how much more severe it could be without being something other than cancellation.

He was cancelled long before his work on wokism - that topic was only brought up because someone misread one of my previous comments.

Another example of someone on the left-wing being cancelled by those on the right is Paul Robeson, who was perhaps the most famous American alive at one point, but lost everything due to his left-wing beliefs.

I do think you're confused about the popular conception of cancellation. Stallman lost his position at the FSF and MIT. His speaking engagements were cancelled. Article after article came out about how terrible he supposedly was. Almost all of it was unfair, almost all the claims against him were inaccurate. If these things don't constitute cancellation, nothing does.

When picking a phone I like to see if it's on the LineageOS devices page (you bring up a good point that different variations of the same model aren't equal, definitely watch out for that), as that means both that the bootloader is unlockable and that someone else is already maintaining a ROM for it, and hopefully will for years to come. If I just go after the shiny new hardware, chances are the bootloader is locked and it will never be unlocked, generating e-waste.

I mean, how many articles and blogs are there about how to make money with foss and how many desperation and frustration is around that topic? How many games exist, that are donation funded?

I mean, please tell me, I want to publish a game, how could I make money with it with the GPL?

Selling it to only one person, who then can publish the code?

Having the code open, but serve ads or ingame purchases, rewarding addictive behavior? Sounds not so ethical either.

That leaves only donations and traditionally people do not value things they get for free. Some do and I hope their number will grow. But as of status quo the majority does not. Some GPL games I know make money, because they sell at steam and the users do not know they could also download it. Is that really ethical? What other GPL buisness modells exists?

A game is not a professional software, people would be willing to buy support contracts for.

Yes, it would be very hard. But today it is impossible, so very hard is hardly a complaint you can make in comparison.

Did my other two examples seem more reasonable?

No you don't. It's not all starvation deaths. Mao deliberately - through the insane power Communism bestows on the state - told farmers what to farm and how to farm, and punshed harshly those who disobeyed. And because they obeyed, and only a child who still thinks their parents know everything would think the state (parent-surrogate to many Communists) knows more about farming than farmers, millions starved. Even worse in some ways (while it's stupid to trust the state with farming techniques, it was at least trying to make farming better) - the Soviet Union imposed harsh quotas on Ukraine, causing the death of 3.5-5m people in the Holodomor.

This is what you should expect when you give your "bureaucrats that supposedly represent the workers" all the power, trusting that they can do all the hard and expert work in allocating resources both extremely well, and without any human failings such as corruption or violence.

Markets aren't perfect at resource allocation, but they are very very good at it. Replacing the experts at it whose livelihoods depend on doing it very well, with bureaucrats who know nothing about it, and whose livelihoods are guaranteed either way, and who might get disappeared if they displease their superiors' whims, seems impossibly naive on the face of it.

Still, around 20 years ago when I was a teen, some edgy kids did wear Che and Marx t-shirts and it was considered cool in some circles. I'd say it is an imitation of the West. As paradoxical as it sounds, since communism is seen as edgy and cool in Western Europe, the kids in Eastern Europe who want to seem in-the-know and up-to-date had to copy it. But it was indirect in this way, it didn't grow out of the Eastern European experience.

You're just making it worse and worse. I'm also European. I'm guessing you're Western European though? I'm also guessing your country wasn't under soviet occupation for 50 years? Eastern Europeans very much do have a bad allergic reaction to communism, just like Americans, and just like everyone else who came in contact with it. Che was at best a useful idiot.

Nah, by that point I may as pitch to some billionaire studio and make a hefty salary that way. Or you know, sell your IP for actual millions if it's that valuable. If "exposure" is the alternate currency I'll happily sell out. I'm not my game IP.

Not saying it was good or anything, it was a terribly autocratic regime without self-determination and liberty, and i'm sure 99% are better without it, whatever their feelings are. I'm just saying that the sentiments about it are more complex than you seem to say. Anecdata is only worth that much, and in topics so close to personal feelings, it's worth even less. And you seems to essentialize your opponents too much.

Huh? Finder is the macos equivalent of explorer.exe and it's the GUI for the file system. I assume you're taking about Spotlight which searches the entire file system and the internet much like the Windows start menu.

Anyway people have been making claims like this for as long as computers have been around. Smart people use Spotlight and the start menu because it requires fewer keystrokes than typing full paths or clicking 10 times to navigate a directory tree with Finder. It would be stupid to avoid using the fastest tools available

I don't believe that's true, no. China does have a lot of natural resources, and a large population, and also it's true that any very authoritarian regime, fascist Italy under Mussolini being another good example, can do things like create good infrastructure, because it can have long-term bets. That is an accelerator for long-term economic growth. But the actual economic growth has come from China allowing capitalist economic systems to develop, where the people doing the work or risking the cash make decisions. Of course, Communism dies hard, and so if you say the wrong thing you can be "reminded" that the Party is all-powerful[0], but China has done well to allow individual people create value, evidenced by its economic growth.

[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-56448688

To be fair, China always had great famines, at least twice each century. This changed only recently, which in fact is a good argument pro-revolution: after one last famine, it never happened again. The same cannot be said for other countries that were colonized or invaded by capitalist powers; and the famine and problems caused by them during XIX century in China were much worst than the famine after the revolution.

Ultimately, some people are just not interested in technology or using it efficiently.

I don't agree with it, but you've coined a first rate phrase there.

It's a reasonable hypothesis, just not the only one.

This week I only saw white people in the streets. I could conclude all people walking in my city are white. But that's false.