181–190 of 248 posts
> I am no easy mark for those who want me to change my views. This is an absolute lie. I know for a fact he has cancelled talks he's agreed to after being contacted by various factions of activists.
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I don't know why anyone would think it is impossible, but it would take significant money and time to do it and it is unclear what benefit there would be except some small good will gained from developers that care about the FSF mission.
I think the benefit is unclear but it's almost certainly not limited to good will. There's lots of developers who are working on products targeting Windows today (for momentum, their customer's requirements, etc). Those devs encounter Windows bugs and generally workaround them. But if instead they could patch them and/or provide patches upstream, it would be a huge benefit to them and likely some benefit to Microsoft…
The second would be to bring classic theme back :-P
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It's probably too vague a claim to prove or disprove. They could amend this sentence. Different companies have different impacts on software freedom that I'd be hard-pressed to compare. However, consider Microsoft Office, which is widely used, and has some network effects. If a friend uses an iPhone, that does not really impact me (where I live). In contrast, Microsoft even has impact on people who would consider not…
Two things that come to my mind from reading your response: Why are we releasing this document in PDF format? Shouldn’t it be in docx or XPS? https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20110104-00/?p=11... Why we don’t want you and your Android green bubbles in our iMessage chat https://www.fastcompany.com/90391587/why-we-dont-want-you-an...
The second link is saddening and I know iMessage is a problem in some areas of the world. Here, people expect that most people don't have an iPhone… and the problematic messengers are of course Facebook and WhatsApp. At least, here, it seems that most people understand that you don't want to use them. But you are still locked out of group discussions. You rely on people who like you to keep you posted because they want you to be at whatever event is being discussed there, and you are that one person who is not in the group chat.
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Earlier he had said that we shouldn’t keep old grudges, so I was surprised he then turned around and asked for them to renounce statements from 20+ years ago, made by people that aren’t even there anymore. In my mind, .net core and vs code and countless smaller projects are a complete renunciation of their previous public statements. Maybe Stallman can’t see that because they MIT license those things, but why ask for…
Ballmer is an opportunist, pure and simple. When it suited him Linux was a cancer, and when it no longer suited him he 'loved Linux'. If the wind should ever change Linux will for sure be a cancer again.
"It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Ballmer is not a Devil. Open source was costing him billions in lost Windows revenue from Google, Amazon and many other companies. Right now, with hindsight bias, we feel that the path to capitalizing on open source was OBVIOUS - it wasn't. Cloud computing wasn't a thing when Ballmer was in power - an existential crisis for the Microsoft.
The new guy Nadella is no Saint or Altruist. Right now, it's obvious business sense to embrace open source - particularly because of Azure unlike 20 years ago.
People talk about Saint Nadella and forget that Nadella's just taking the glory for Money makers that were started & financed by Ballmer - Xbox, Azure, Office 365, Hololens, Surface Pro, Windows 10...
Google which built its business on open source, embraced open source much early with Chrome & Android. However, they are doing a tactical retreat - butchering those two money makers and making key parts of them proprietary.
If Jobs were still running the show at Apple when he built NextStep, he wouldn't have embraced Unix. At that time, only broke people did open source but now big companies can go broke trying to build everything by themselves.
Just follow the money and most people are easy to understand. Google won't stop spying on people because of money. And Apple will join the fray once the financial guys can prove that they'll make more money selling customer's data.
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> Ballmer is an opportunist, pure and simple. You say that as if it were a condemnation. Everybody who runs a business is an opportunist, pure and simple.
That would be fine if he didn't pretend to be a man of "principles" built on a foundation that can not be shaken.
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Ballmer is an opportunist, pure and simple. When it suited him Linux was a cancer, and when it no longer suited him he 'loved Linux'. If the wind should ever change Linux will for sure be a cancer again.
> Ballmer is an opportunist, pure and simple. You say that as if it were a condemnation. Everybody who runs a business is an opportunist, pure and simple.
We've gone through periods in our culture where we glorify greed and self-interest. (Commentary like yours makes me think of Reaganites or Ayn Rand.) We've gone through other periods where we acknowledge the need to band together. (Think 1960s hippies.) A functioning person probably needs both types of influence at various times of their lives. I get really tired of how many people glorify or worship the former and neglect the latter.
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I've always been a bit confused by this take, because the most likely alternative to having proprietary code in the front-end is to have proprietary code in the back-end. It's not clear to me why I shouldn't tolerate closed-source Javascript that I can nonetheless inspect, archive, and edit on my own machine, but I should tolerate a closed-source SaaS backend that I can't inspect, archive, or edit. Of course propriet…
Javascript in the browser is practically compiled binary software at this point. You can't realistically inspect or edit 99% of what you're running since it's fully minified and obfuscated. And that's even more the case with WASM.
Maybe I'm atypical because I work with Javascript a lot, but I don't think it's that hard to read minified JS. Modern browsers have a lot of tools to help with that -- you can set breakpoints on DOM manipulations, you can autoformat the code so it's not just a jumble of text -- you can even pause execution and add custom code to functions that can do additional logging or subvert existing behavior.
And because the industry is at least somewhat focused on minimizing bundle size, it's pretty uncommon outside of captchas for me to see obfuscated code -- most of the time, you'll only be dealing with minification.
I don't know how WASM is going to affect this -- I suspect it'll be more problematic. But I manipulate minified JS all the time. It's a very 'inspectable' language, for lack of a better term.
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> Edit: Just a reminder that, only a week ago, this man was fired for using a technology forum to defend a 74 year old man having sex with a 17 year old prostitute on pedophile island. You're spreading lies, whether or not you're aware of it. The man has resigned (most likely being forced out) for being pedantic about an accusation about a 74 year old man, that allegedly - and in fact not at all, if the actual witnes…
If the witnesses are not to be believed, then he is not spreading lies. Why are we blindly trusting witnesses who were on a billionaire's private island known (now and then) to be used as a sex club? It's just as likely that the witnesses are lying as telling the truth.
This one puzzles me. I thought patents were the big threat for UIs? Or is he talking about copyrighted APIs?
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I would've preferred he phrase it something like "using something like GNU Taler," so that it doesn't look like he's shilling for his own product.
GNU Taler is not a product. It is a GNU project. You can use it full-features for free.
This tweet[1] struck a chord with me when I saw it the other day, I almost couldn't find it when this thread reminded me:
>> I just don't buy the "many eyes make all bugs shallow" thing. It takes so much time to build the context to understand wtf some code is doing that the "many eyes" get whittled down to "very few" very quickly
> This is not just a technical problem, it's a social one too. In practice, 99.999% of users of open source software engage with and expect to be treated as customers of open source, not as collaborators in a communal endeavor to build and maintain it.
To these people, it is a product. For a healthy community, we may need to find a way to get them to see it as a project. And perhaps not just one (eg. how many open source projects are in your team's product stack, and how often do you all think about that?)