231–240 of 371 posts
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The only freedom you give up by using the GPL is the freedom to screw your users over by denying them access to the source code. All you are demanded is to let others enjoy the freedom you enjoy. That, surely, isn't too much to ask.
Meh, hardware vendors routinely ignore GPL, and for the money it takes to sue them in court you could in most cases reverse engineer their drivers and write them for scratch.
> I like FreeBSD, and I use it as a server OS and on a NAS box but you only need look at https://wiki.freebsd.org/Graphics to understand that if the "Linux Desktop" is a joke compared to MacOS and Windows then the "FreeBSD Desktop" is even more so. I've never heard anything good about the "MacOS desktop" and I'm pretty sure that the "windows desktop" is far behind the "linux desktop"(plugins, performance, menus etc.)…
I've never heard the opposite. I've switched to OsX 4 years ago after being completely unhappy and irritated with Windows for over 12 years. Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. Although I would be much more happy with something Open Source.
I recently set up Ubuntu and Mint computers for some folks, and can report that Mint is not bad, but Ubuntu is dreck (seriously, the change-user-password dialogue hangs: do Ubuntu users never change their passwords‽).
I've been running Debian with stumpwm for years now, and am convinced that this is the way of the future: a tiling window manager, extensible in a real language, capable of performing literally any task I ask of it. Most of the time, my main window is full-screen — that's odd to someone used to a classic desktop interface (as I used to be), but it's actually very much like a modern tablet or phone.
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Enlighten me - what's the problem with the linux desktops?
Back in 2011, security researcher, Joanna Rutkowska wrote a very enlightening article on the inherent security deficiencies of the X server architecture which allows allows any windowed application to control any other one: http://blog.invisiblethings.org/2011/04/23/linux-security-ci...
https://www.acsac.org/2006/papers/epstein-paper.pdf
One from 2005 that I sent Joanna in gripe about Qubes not having a trusted path:
https://www.acsac.org/2005/papers/54.pdf
Good to see she added a better graphics system at some point. I suggest looking at prior work, though, as it's by security engineers with knowledge of adding it to every aspect of lifecycle and intent to minimize TCB. For example, GenodeOS is using Nitpicker + a microkernel. The abandoned EROS OS, whose site is still up, combined a different windowing system with a capability kernel and new networking stack. All to minimize risk in system in fine-grained way.
I find that FreeBSD is generally a lot simpler and more discoverable than Gnu + Linux. If you want a bare-bones UNIX experience free from SystemD and Pulse Audio, I'd recommend giving FreeBSD a try. The FreeBSD handbook is very nicely written, and at the very least using FreeBSD is an educational experience.
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I've never heard the opposite. I've switched to OsX 4 years ago after being completely unhappy and irritated with Windows for over 12 years. Now after months of using Ubuntu (unity, xfce) and Mint (Cinnamon) I'm convinced that OsX is best for average (and power) desktop user by a huge margin. Although I would be much more happy with something Open Source.
I used Linux on the desktop from 2001-2007 or so. Switched to OS X until then. It's no contest: OS X is smoother, more consistent, and lower maintenance. Linux desktops seem to have peaked with GNOME 2.x. I'm not even sure what's going on with Unity.
Meanwhile everything went down the path of compositing and otherwise burning way too much CPU to do not a whole lot extra.
I switched over to a tiling WM years ago, and have been extremely happy since. It does exactly what I want; I can connect to a running instance with my editor and reconfigure it, as well rewrite it while it's running. It's pretty great.
I know Linux (Debian) quite well and would like an excuse to try learning FreeBSD, but I just can't find any serious use-cases where FreeBSD would be of any advantage. I run a small site on a VPS, so: 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS 2. I don't have GB of RAM, CPU and HD space to build everything from ports, and most importantly, no need. Except for an Application Firewall for nginx, what does ports have ov…
> 1. I don't have GBs of free memory for ZFS Others have already addressed the memory hog myth, so I'll just say that you aren't required to run ZFS - UFS still works just fine. I just sshed into my freebsd AWS instance (UFS) to see 116d uptime with 130MB ram in use and the remaining 110MB being free. I've made no effort to optimize resource usage on the instance, but if I wanted to I could pretty easily cut that by…
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> That's the GPL doing its job. It also makes it really hard to earn a living with actual software (not services) that depends on GPL.
All of the software I have written for money is free software. In some fields it is hard to not do that: Wordpress plugins, for example, are GPL licensed by default. Can you elaborate what problems you have run into?
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All of the software I have written for money is free software. In some fields it is hard to not do that: Wordpress plugins, for example, are GPL licensed by default. Can you elaborate what problems you have run into?
How would you solve the following use-case: You want users to be able to try your software for non commercial use, but you want them to pay for commercial. I don't see how GPL licenses can do that for you. In fact, I don't know any common OSS license that has non-commercial limitations with the option of purchasing a commercial license.
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> That's the GPL doing its job. It also makes it really hard to earn a living with actual software (not services) that depends on GPL.
Buy commercial licenses from authors of GPL code, so they will earn something too.
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All of the software I have written for money is free software. In some fields it is hard to not do that: Wordpress plugins, for example, are GPL licensed by default. Can you elaborate what problems you have run into?
How would you solve the following use-case: You want users to be able to try your software for non commercial use, but you want them to pay for commercial. I don't see how GPL licenses can do that for you. In fact, I don't know any common OSS license that has non-commercial limitations with the option of purchasing a commercial license.