LeFantome

Totally agree with this.

That happens to me constantly

That and every Stargate planet is Vancouver

Capitalism is fine with it actually.

The issue is that there will be too many old people and not enough young people to support them.

But old people have most of the money. So, lots of money will still be spent. Capitalism will be fine. Sure, some old people will have no money and bankrupt their children. But capitalism does not care about that.

It would have been a bigger problem before AI and robotics. But capitalism will shrink the workforce faster than birth rates.

Watch a bear do it and repeat what they do

MIT license predates the GPL. Tiny projects like X chose it many decades ago.

Most Open Source software is written by corporations.

Probably the largest developer of GPL software is Red Hat. I will avoid responding to the “closing down” of RHEL except to ask how Alma and Rocky are doing. Pretty well I believe.

Permissive licenses like MIT and Apache require the software to “remain free-and-open-source (FOSS)”. That is “the software” released under those licenses (not some future software that has not been written yet).

WSL is Open Source.

But don’t let the facts get in the way.

Permissive licenses are trending in popularity vs copyleft. As a “newer” ecosystem, the Rest-dev culture skews towards permissive.

Why are permissive licenses popular?

Most Open Source software is written by companies.

“Permissive” licenses offer more flexibility and compatibility while minimizing future legal complications. You can replace the word flexibility with the word freedom if you wish. By compatibility, I mean it can be combined with code using other licenses. So no “we cannot combine ZFS and Linux” type problems.

MIT offers the absolute minimum of legal footprint and maximum compatibility.

The above are attributes companies value.

On the other side of the “freedom” front, licenses like MIT guarantee all of the “4 freedoms” that groups like the Free Software Foundation talks about with adding an restrictions on the freedoms of others.

So, why doesn’t everybody use MIT? The patent guarantees in Apache 2.0 are useful if you are ok with the added complexity (still permissive but more legalese).

Not according to the Free Software Foundation.

Also, Red Hat contributes more GPL code than Debian does.

There are closed source apps in Flathub today. Spotify comes to mind.

I use closed source apps. BurpSuite, Microsoft Teams, and some of the JetBrains tools for example.

I would like to see FlatHub become an App Store suitable for distributing paid software as well. That is, I can pay for the software in the App Store. If FlatHub was making money, they could fund the development of Flatpak.

I do not want FlatHub or GNOME to be writing commercial software. They can distribute it though and then use those profits to support the ecosystem.

I use LibreOffice but more people would use Linux if they could use Microsoft Office. I use GIMP but many professional users cite Photoshop as the reason that they cannot migrate to Linux.

Let’s get the Adobe Creative Suite into a Linux Apo Store so Linux users can get their software and Adobe can make money. Then let’s try to make better Open Source alternatives to put them out of business. I would rather compete with them head-to-head on Linux than to keep people trapped on commercial desktops like we do today.

We already have a successful paid software App Store on Linux. It is called Steam. And it is bringing many new users to Linux. We need to do the same for paid applications that are not games.

I do not really want either FlatHub or GNOME to fall into the Mozilla trap though where they become focussed on creating revenue. FlatHub already has a natural way to make money. They should use it to first fund development of their platform. If they have excess cash (guaranteed if an App Store takes off), they can give it away to other projects. Something like a FlatHub Summer of Code would be amazing.

I do not want Flatpak to replace distro packages.

I use both pacman and apk and they are both far better package managers than Flatpak is. Apk 3 is awesome. And I do not want sandboxes for native packages.

The role of Flatpak is as a distribution method for app developers to target Linux as a platform with a single build. It is a place to get things that may not be in my distro repos. It can be a method for commercial distribution. It is the cure for the “fragmentation” problem that makes it difficult to develop software for Linux.

I hate snaps but snaps could actually be used to replace packages. You could distribute GCC as a snap. In its current form, Flatpak is only targeting GUI applications

It is not personal.

Alma creates a distro that is ABI compatible with RHEL. They start with what is publicly available in CentOS Stream. They can contribute and innovate. They do the work (however much that is).

Rocky finds a way to get a copy of the RHEL source packages and recompiles them into a distro. They can then claim “bug for bug” compatibility with RHEL. They cannot change anything (cannot contribute) because that would weaken their compatibility promise.

I respect Alma.

Rocky is a free rider for money that wears the shield of “community” when it suits them.

Too personal?

Can Open Source defend against copyright claims for AI contributions?

If I submit code to ReactOS that was trained on leaked Microsoft Windows code, what are the legal implications?