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Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice. Look how little leverage GNU's got these days. Then again, trying to contribute to GNU wasn't exactly a positive experience. Maybe it's for the best.
That somehow implies or suggest BSD is not free software.
Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice. Look how little leverage GNU's got these days. Then again, trying to contribute to GNU wasn't exactly a positive experience. Maybe it's for the best.
On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?
Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
how so? could you please elaborate?
As an example, I had a headless devuan instance that took an extra ~50s to ssh to today, repeatably. Checked to see if it was DNS -- wasn't DNS. Checked to see if it was misconfigured ssh -- wasn't misconfigured ssh. Eventually it turned out to be that /etc/pam.md/common-session was misconfigured by installation default to have 'pam_elogind.so' set up, which was trying to do some cockamamie dbus bullshit to communica…
Just to be clear, you’re not entirely wrong. Linux is not about being simple and comprehensible anymore because that only serves a small subset of users. As the userbase grew, the needs and demands grew with it and so did the solution. But your problem isn’t a sign of “becoming shit” more than finding some hardware not fully supported by *BSD or middling performance optimizations justify some rant about its developers.
Just for the sake of it I whipped up a Devuan VM, SSH worked as expected.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?
No. As enshittification encroaches onto Linux the user base is moving the other way. To their benefit, I might add. With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer. Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
What enshittification?
> Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together
Linux is a kernel. The user space stuff is a bunch of random software thrown together. That's what Linux distributions are.
Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice. Look how little leverage GNU's got these days. Then again, trying to contribute to GNU wasn't exactly a positive experience. Maybe it's for the best.
I think GPL and copyleft in general is getting less and less relevant as time goes on. Looking at GPL specifically it relies on scarcity. The reason companies would agree to the terms of the GPL in the 1980s, 90s, and even 00s was if you wanted a good compiler, parser, kernel, or library you had only so many choices. There might have been only a few thousand people in the world capable of writing a mature compiler su…
Therein is the great misunderstanding , the GPL was never written for 'companies' , it was and still is for the User. You, Me a $MEGACORP , sentinel islander - it does not matter the rights are granted to all equally to reuse/modify/offer for sale as long as the contributoins come back to the commons.
What is happening now is akin to the 'enclosure system' in early Britain when the commons which had been for the benefit of all were fenced off and the peasants thrown off the land to seek wages in the newly industialising system.
When no one is contributing to the GPL commons the options become more restricted. If one isnt a corp that can write their own library or a 10X coder that can bash it out on their own , leaves the users looking at proprietary solutions or restricted offerings with two tier licences.
So in a way yeah most coder/engineers have developed an antagonistic relation to the GPL commons , which is leading to its decline in some sectors.However if/when the share of GPL drops to a level where the adverse effects can no longer be ignored , there will probably be attempts to rollback the clock.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
On the other hand, isn't the FreeBSD user base shrinking and its former users going to Linux?
No. As enshittification encroaches onto Linux the user base is moving the other way. To their benefit, I might add. With ZFS on root in FreeBSD it's a no-brainer. Linux is feeling more and more like a bunch of random tools thrown together as opposed to a complete OS designed to work as a whole.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think GPL and copyleft in general is getting less and less relevant as time goes on. Looking at GPL specifically it relies on scarcity. The reason companies would agree to the terms of the GPL in the 1980s, 90s, and even 00s was if you wanted a good compiler, parser, kernel, or library you had only so many choices. There might have been only a few thousand people in the world capable of writing a mature compiler su…
Yeah. Free software used to have so much more leverage back then. Now even GCC isn't sacred anymore. Linux is the only project that's still somewhat capable of leveraging corporations into upstreaming GPL drivers. Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore. Even proprietary software isn't safe: now that I've got AI, decompilation has gone from a time consuming grind t…
The GPL doesn't actually solve the community-level problem very well (which is the basis of Linus's complaints about GPLv3--it positions the license much more directly in the direction of the user-level freedom rather than the community-level freedom). But the solution for the community-level problem involves a lot of social pressure, and it turns out that for a large open-source project, commit velocity means that most proprietary companies find the easiest way to deal with the open-source upstream is to contribute their code to the community to make it everybody else's problem to maintain.
You can see this in the development of LLVM, e.g.: almost all of the proprietary compilers are LLVM-based (especially as EDG has finally thrown in the towel, everyone using EDG is going to look to rebasing onto clang instead). And yet the companies with their proprietary forks of LLVM are still major upstream contributors.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yeah. Free software used to have so much more leverage back then. Now even GCC isn't sacred anymore. Linux is the only project that's still somewhat capable of leveraging corporations into upstreaming GPL drivers. Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore. Even proprietary software isn't safe: now that I've got AI, decompilation has gone from a time consuming grind t…
> used to have so much more leverage back then And maybe that was required back then, and/or maybe it ended up being bad strategy in the long term. Leverage only gets you so far, especially in community and relationships. > Just extremely low morale right now. Not sure if there's even a point to any of this anymore. See I feel the exact opposite. As FOSS license choice matters less, now we can just focus on hacking.…
Well, I can't do that. Releasing software under permissive licenses is just wealth transfer from well meaning hackers straight into the pockets of corporations. It just gives it all away, no questions asked.
For me it's either AGPLv3 or all rights reserved. I'm trending towards the latter now. I'm starting to question whether I should even publish my work.
Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice. Look how little leverage GNU's got these days. Then again, trying to contribute to GNU wasn't exactly a positive experience. Maybe it's for the best.
>Pretty sad from the free software movement's perspectice. That somehow implies or suggest BSD is not free software.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Same here, using Linux since the beginning (1993) but slowly migrating machines to FreeBSD (some to OpenBSD) as Linux slowly becomes ever more like windows which is exactly the opposite of what I want.
how so? could you please elaborate?