It sucks. More consolidation is bad. I have no fondness for Activision Blizzard, but then I'm not a big fan of Microsoft either and neither of those is the main point. Corporate behemoths are too big; in general they should be getting chopped into smaller pieces, not allowed to stitch together into even gianter Frankenstein leviathans.

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Wish someone would do this kind of thing with Alpha Centauri.

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I note ChromeOS is at 4%. If only it ran, you know, programs.

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I was going to comment, but I'm lost for swords.

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Quoting: m2mg2My understanding of the BSD license and I'm no expert either is that is even freer than GPL. GPL has restrictions on how you can use the code. BSD is basically do whatever you want with it. These are license issues and have nothing to do with operating system functionality, how free it is or how respectful of it's users it is.

Well, you might not call me an expert, but I have been following licensing controversies for a long time, so indulge me a moment.

In an odd technical sense, the BSD license is indeed "even freer" than the GPL. An analogy is, a state of law in which absolutely everything is permissible, is freer than a state of law in which everything is permissible except enslaving people. However, it does not feel freer to the slaves, only to those exercising their freedom by doing the enslaving.

So, leaving analogy, the distinction between the BSD license and the GPL is that the GPL insists that all derivative works stay GPL. The BSD license allows derivative works to be anything, including closed; people can basically relicense BSD works at will, including relicensing them as ordinary commercial software.

It is important to note that this has no impact on pre-existing versions. It's not like someone who holds the copyright on software they released as BSD can suddenly close all the copies everyone else already has--it's just the version they are continuing to develop that might now be closed. So, BSD software that someone starts developing closed versions of, can be forked and the fork could still be open--it could be BSD, or heck, you could fork a piece of BSD software and release that derivative version as GPL. Nobody ever does because it would be really rude, but you could.

So OK, what was someone saying about Red Hat and some stuff they do that apparently is BSD licensed? Yeah, if they're doing stuff and they have it BSD licensed they could totally close it, and if they're the main or only ones using and developing it, there probably wouldn't be a fork, and anyway if the main use case was in software they were distributing, then yeah, suddenly people would be getting some closed stuff in their Linux, and there would be nothing legal to stop that.

But it's not going to happen. I myself am very much pro-GPL and pro-Copyleft. But in practice, the BSD license has mostly been pretty stable, just because taking BSD licensed stuff proprietary is seen as, well, really rude. It's bad publicity and there isn't usually much benefit. There have been a few fairly high profile exceptions, but the spectre many (including me) feared in the early days, of BSD code turning out to be useless as Free Software because corporations would grab the nice open code and develop their own proprietary versions and get everyone to use that and effectively kill the open source version, just hasn't materialized. There are a number of reasons for this: Fork something and you have to maintain it, fork something and try to monetize it and you're competing with a free product that has a better reputation than you. And also, I think the BSD license benefits somewhat from the mere existence of the GPL--it's clear that if you go around messing with the Free Software that has permissive licenses, the open source aficionados will increasingly use stricter, more copyleft licenses and get more political, and the corps would rather just let the sleeping dogs lie and use the gravy train of good software they produce.

There is no way Red Hat is about to take any of their open source software closed; anyone saying so is either naive or deliberately alarmist. Slippery slope arguments are rarely sound.

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Quoting: poiuz

Quoting: m2mg2Can you name anything that improved leaps and bounds after starting to collect telemetry? Gnome does telemetry but they continuously ignore the obvious will of users to do what they want instead.

No, they're not. Stop spreading FUD.

Ah, pet peeve pedantry: FUD is not, or at least was not originally, a catch-all expression meaning "anything negative said in the computing field". It means Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt, and it is a strategy of making it look as if a thing is not viable, has poor future prospects, in an attempt at making people hesitate to adopt that thing, thus creating a self-fulfilling prophecy and making the thing fail.

So, the comment you're quoting is not FUD, it's just trash talking.
(I couldn't comment on the accuracy of that trash talk; I don't pay much attention to Gnome since Gnome 3, which wasn't to my taste--not saying it was bad, just not my thing, and I've found desktop environments that are, so I just don't follow it any more)

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Quoting: RenardDesMersI must say I was quite baffled by the proponent's opinion that's basically "We want quality data, opt-in is useless data so if it's not opt-out, I don't want it".

Wellll, I can see it. If you're trying for statistics across a whole population, and what you instead get is a self-selected subgroup which almost certainly has differences in tendencies from the whole but you don't know how, that's gonna be poor data. And then if you make decisions about how to do UI based on the usage patterns of the subgroup, you're fairly likely to screw it up.

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Well, I dunno if it really fills a lot of needs, but the license is fine so I'm not gonna grumble.

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Quoting: elmapul

Quoting: MetallinatusReplacing something with something else ≠ censorship.

And even if they kept the lyrics the exact same, the singer would still be different, because it's not a matter of lyrics, but a matter of having a song in the country's language.

again, im not against translation.
but changing the musis as well?

as for "not censorship" back in the days many businessmen didnt believed that japanese shows could make an sucess in the US without changing a lot of things, that is why they made power rangers for example, instead of showing the original shows as they were.
if you cant broadcast your show as is without any modification that dont count as censorship?

Here's the thing: "Censorship" does have a meaning in English. And it's a meaning that carries a powerful political charge. It's about authorities eliminating people's freedom of expression, or forcing people not to tell the truth.
And, certain segments of the right wing use the word "censorship" for other things, to imply that there is some kind of shadowy liberal "authority" forcing people to, um, behave decently I guess? This allows them to basically claim that certain forms of decent behaviour are in fact tyranny.

So for those of us familiar with the usage of the word "censorship" in both its normal form (like, the Soviet Union practised censorship etc) and its frequent current use by the alt-right, when we see someone use the word "censorship" to describe the acts of executives making decisions about what will sell, it doesn't match the actual definition or usage of the word, and when it comes to the Skull Girls thing really seems to match up with the alt-right usage. So whatever you think you're communicating, by incorrectly using the word "censorship" you are delivering a political message implying outside control by nefarious "liberals". So I think you might want to find a different word.

(There's a big irony in this alt-right position, in that they're describing community enforcement of moral standards as tyranny in some contexts, but are TOTALLY INTO IT in others. So, community enforcement of codes against racism == tyranny, but community enforcement of codes against premarital sex, among other things == good and necessary, and for that matter community enforcement of codes against pedophilia == good when they do it, bad when liberals do it)

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Quoting: sddt

Quoting: Bogomipsit took me a week to rebuild my library downloading more than 200 GB of data with my poor bandwidth…

That's rough, no fibre available where you are?

What does diet have to do with it? :grin:

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