• 1 Post
  • 39 Comments
Joined 5 years ago
cake
Cake day: July 21st, 2021

help-circle
  • Fair, the patches don’t have to be accepted. 🙂

    Would it be bound by the GPL? Companies love writing shims, and the Linux kernel is pro-business. It is specifically GPLv2 to allow companies to use it in closed source applications. TiVo is the poster child for this.

    Anything running in user space isn’t considered a derivative work. The kernel ABI specifically allows for this. A closed source application could run on top of the Linux kernel and not have to be released.

    Applications linking to a GPL library, glibc excluded, would have to be released since that would constitute a derivative work.

    I’m the PS6 scenario, we would probably get very little usable code. The GPL is old, and companies have had lots of time to work around it.


  • Companies are just taking BSD code and don’t contribute to it.

    There isn’t a lot of evidence of this.

    At the end they’re selecting Linux even if there’s licensing risk and they have contribute to code.

    This is at odds with the first statement. Companies also aren’t contributing as much code as they should.

    Also companies which want to support Linux don’t have to worry that someone would close their code or code they funded with money. It’s not about competition but collaboration.

    Yeah, inertia is a thing. It’s why Windows is so dominant. The BSDs were rather competitive with Linux back in the early ‘90s - ‘00s.

    This might have been a reason in the ‘90s IBM picked Linux as the Unix successor, but now it’s about inertia and a baseless OS is pretty handy.

    It was also never about collaboration. It was always MAD doctrine. Each company had a pack of lawyers ready. The GPL isn’t the most battle tested.

    GPL license allowed us also to sell own open-source solutions.

    This isn’t the flex you think it is.

    Instead of being ready to use solutions…

    The BSDs are full operating systems. Batteries are included in the repo.

    Linux requires adding lots of other software to make the kernel useful. When people say “It’s GNU/Linux”, this is what they mean. The Linux kernel + the GNU tools make an OS.

    …they’re trying to be base for commercial closed-source products and it would be great as contributors could get something from that, but they get nothing.

    They are not. They are existing as their own projects. ☺️

    Most FOSS devs get nothing. 🤣 GPL, BSD, Apache… It doesn’t matter. The capitalists plunder the commons making money off of other’s hard work.

    I understand that BSD see closed source as something cool and way to commercialize software,…

    They really don’t. They just want to work on their projects in peace.

    …but in today times where a lot of devices have 24/7 access to internet, microphones, cameras and at the same time to sensitive data it’s extremely dangerous. Closed source is used to hide backdoors, acts of surveillance and keeping monopoly on market which obviously stop evolution of software.

    Ummm…. That’s not BSD specific. FOSS software gets used for this as well. All those surveillance devices are probably running some sort of Linux.

    There are binary firmware blobs and all sorts of stuff. The Linux kernel is GPLv2 specifically to allow this.

    The DMCA’s anti-encryption circumvention is used to chill software evolution and lock up code more than anything. BSDs only ask that people don’t GPL their stuff.

    Companies play all sorts of games with code, and there isn’t a guarantee that what is in the repo is what people are running. We need reproducible builds to know the software is clean, and without that, software is not trustworthy.

    This is bigger than the license on the code. This is about processes and culture.


  • Please tell me how BSD license can be good solution for operating system.

    The code is still open, and the repos will still exist if a fork is created. Sony forks FreeBSD for PS6, and nothing happens to FreeBSD. It still exists, and it still works. The added bonus is not having to deal with Sony, or other people, trying to upstream stuff that doesn’t make sense outside of the PS environment and would have questionable value to others.

    There are lots of ways companies get around the GPL, and most are GPL sanctioned.

    Starting a company, use the GPL. Starting a project for fun, use whatever because the companies are going to steal it anyway if it’s good.




  • TSMC does have fabs in Arizona now. Next to the Intel fabs. 😆

    It’s more about money and proprietary tech.

    Cutting edge fabs are expensive and risky, which is why most chip companies are fabless, and they should be a state project because of the risk and expense. I’ve seen estimates of $15-$20 billion dollars to setup a new 3nm fab.

    Intel, TSMC, and Samsung are the 3 companies left which run cutting edge fabs. Intel missed on a couple generations, and they are sinking. Samsung is lagging, so it remains to be seen how long they’re in the game.

    TSMC figured out the new tech and Intel didn’t. TSMC picked the correct horse, and Intel didn’t. It’s my understanding Intel couldn’t switch to the TSMC process if they wanted to. The two are different enough to be incompatible.












  • I do encrypt my drives, and it’s not as transparent in Linux as it is in the others. I’m sure I could get a TPM setup for seamless boots, but I haven’t done that yet.

    For mobile drivers, I still encrypt, but that locks them to one OS since LUKS isn’t cross platform. There is VeraCrypt for cross-platform encryption, but that’s one more thing to manage and install.



  • Random peripherals get tested against windows a lot more than Linux, and there are quirks which get worked around.

    I would suggest an external SSD for any drive over 32GB. Flash drives are kind of junk in general, and the external SSDs have better controllers and thermals.

    Out of curiosity, was the drive reformatted between runs, and was a Linux native FS tried on the flash drive?

    The Linux native FS doesn’t help migrate the files between Windows and Linux, but it would be interesting to see exFAT or NTFS vs XFS/ext4/F2FS.