• 11 Posts
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Joined 3 年前
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Cake day: 2023年6月5日

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  • No. They are not ready. If all your computers and phones “phone home” with “home” being your adversary’s country (that’s how USA deals with Europe in the last year), then you cannot call yourself a world power. Most PCs in Europe use Windows and MacOS. Almost all phones are either Android or iOS. And even if they managed to replace all the software with locally developed Linux, all recent (last 20 years) x86 PCs have either Intel Management Engine or AMD Security Technology. If they chose to make intensive efforts to replace their systems, computers and phones, it would take at least a decade to achieve this. And even then, the US would likely be able to penetrate their systems. It’s so much easier to yield to the Emperor of the Western World for the perennially submissive European serfs.



  • A lot of things can go wrong. A company can take the free code, change it slightly to work only with a proprietary file type and then use their resources to promote their version and make their proprietary filetype and proprietary program the industry standard. Unfortunately this sounds too familiar. There are even cases that the filetype is an open standard but obfuscated to make it impossible for anyone (including the original FOSS) to open/save it.






  • Can someone explain to me why Rust has been so controversial for the GNU/Linux kernel? One thing that I personally don’t like is that the equivalent Rust-made (equivalent) GNU tools are licensed under MIT (or Apache? - something permissive like that) instead of GPL. If they were under GPL, I’d be more than happy. But since the kernel is under GPL regardless of C or Rust, what is the reason for the backlash? Sounds like a very promising language indeed.





  • There was a time that Ubuntu was more polished than other distros but these times are gone. Canonical tried to capitalize their success by making their users “the product” at first and now have attempted to release a closed ecosystem of snaps based on proprietary backend software. They have signed their own death sentence more than once. Their way to redemption is to release the source code of the snap store under GPL and stop trying to replace GPLed tools with MIT or Apache licenses. Either you are committed to free software or not.







  • While all areas could benefit in terms of stability and ease of development from standadization, the whole system and each area would suffer in terms of creativity. There needs to be a balance. However, if I had to choose one thing, I’d say the package management. At the moment we have deb, rpm, pacman, flatpak, snap (the latter probably should not be considered as the server side is proprietary) and more from some niche distros. This makes is very difficult for small developers to offer their work to all/most users. Otherwise, I think it is a blessing having so many DEs, APIs, etc.