If you except Google co-opting Linux to create the most terrible dystopian mobile surveillance platform ever to come this close to 1984, Microsoft co-opting it to pretend they like open-source and broaden the reach of their closed-source crap, and sonsabitches like Redhat, amazingly it mostly still is.
Think Different™ (Because we deprecated the service you liked and depended on because an internal team was jockeying for a higher position and rewrote what you loved but worse, so actually you are thinking different every year!)
Azure don’t give a shit what it runs. Windows is on its own these days; if they succeed, good for them, but honestly I think the days of Microsoft just pretending to give a shit about Linux are long gone; it’s an important OS to them too.
I’ve worked for Microsoft for 12 years, still have lots of friends there so I get some of the vibe from that.
While Microsoft and Google merely pretend to like open source but transparently hate it, it is (was) not quite as obvious that red hat wanted to capture the enterprise Linux market wholesale. What red hat has done is terrible for the ecosystem, much more so than Microsoft just throwing out worthless tokens of appreciation.
If you don't like what they are doing with Linux, because it is free and open source, participate in people that are using it in ways that you do like that they do it, or do it yourself.
I have been stopping myself from using those and instead restructure my sentence. But if people like it, guess I can start keeping it.
I do find it more useful, however, to have a kind of a reference to the thing written at the end instead [1], but markdown doesn’t seem to have anything for that, and using the syntax for Markdown references, is only useful for hyperlinks, or if the reader is willing to read the hover text [2](nolink "Like This. But even though I write "nolink", that is still some text that gets converted to a link, making it upto the reader to read the address bar and realise the problem").
[1]: Like This. I would love it if the markdown viewer would link the above [1] to this line. Maybe with a scrolldown effect.
Though for me, instead of a scrolldown effect, it reloads the page on clicking the link. Trying a second time, it does the scrolldown properly. Weird
But that’s just an implementation detail and as long as this is standard, I’ll just start using it.
Well ain’t that some shit. It would make my comments more readable to a degree^[not that I’d ever use it]. I also like how they have return links for when you have some monster text wall that nobody would ever read in the first place on this platform.
Some of those parens could’ve been replaced with commas and retain their meaning (that’s what I do to avoid nesting, so that it doesn’t get confusing).
There’s no guessing what will catch the world by storm. At a party once, Bram Cohen tried to get me interested in his ideas for a a peer-to-peer protocol, and I thought nothing of it.
My cousin’s buddies asked him to build the website for their new ride hailing app but he didn’t feel like doing some rinky dink thing, apparently Travis and them took it in stride though.
I’m pretty sure Apple and Google already rewritten all important GNU parts into something with Apache or BSD license, to throw everything GPL licensed out of their embedded systems. The biggest and most important part was obviously GCC, replaced by Clang.
How many GPL-licensed system libraries and tools are in Android right now, except for the kernel? I’m pretty sure the answer is zero.
Yeah. And I like how even from the message it shows that it’s been already well recognized by then.
If I recall correctly from some RMS’ talks I’ve seen many years ago, they’ve been working on it for years before, it’s just the kernel that was missing. As I see it, GNU and Linux was the breakthrough for FLOSS, since at that time you would still have to use a proprietary kernel. (Well, there’s GNU Hurd, but I’m not sure if it existed at that time, and even if it did, it was not ready.)
MINIX originally was developed in 1987 by Andrew S. Tanenbaum as a teaching tool for his textbook Operating Systems Design and Implementation. Today, it is a text-oriented operating system with a kernel of less than 6,000 lines of code. MINIX’s largest claim to fame is as an example of a microkernel, in which each device driver runs as an isolated user-mode process—a structure that not only increases security but also reliability, because it means a bug in a driver cannot bring down the entire system.
In its heyday during the early 1990s, MINIX was popular among hobbyists and developers because of its inexpensive proprietary license. However, by the time it was licensed under a BSD-style license in 2000, MINIX had been overshadowed by other free-licensed operating systems.
Today, MINIX is best known as a footnote in GNU/Linux history. It inspired Linus Torvalds to develop Linux, and some of his early work was written on MINIX. Probably too, Torvalds’ early decision to support the MINIX filesystem is responsible for the Linux kernel’s support of almost every filesystem imaginable.
Later, Torvalds and Tanenbaum had a frank e-mail debate about the relative merits of macrokernels (sic) and microkernels. This early history resurfaced in 2004 when Kenneth Brown of the Alexis de Tocqueville Institution prepared a book alleging that Torvalds borrowed code from MINIX—a charge that Tanenbaum, among others, so comprehensively debunked, and the book was never actually published (see Resources).
That kind of depends on how you define FOSS. The way we think of that today was in very early stages back in the 1991 and the orignal source was distributed as free, both as in speech and as in beer, but commercial use was prohibited, so it doesn’t strictly speaking qualify as FOSS (like we understand it today). About a year later Linux was released under GPL and the rest is history.
Public domain code, academic world with any source code and things like that predate both Linux and GNU by a few decades and even the Free Software Foundation came 5-6 years before Linux, but the Linux itself has been pretty much as free as it is today from the start. GPL, GNU, FSF and all the things Stallman created or was a part of (regardless of his conflicting personality) just created a set of rules on how to play this game, pretty much before any game or rules for it existed.
Minix was a commercial thing from the start, Linux wasn’t, and things just refined on the way. You are of course correct that the first release of Linux wasn’t strictly speaking FOSS, but the whole ‘FOSS’ mentality and rules for it wasn’t really a thing either back then.
There’s of course adacemic debate to have for days on which came first and what rules whoever did obey and what release counts as FOSS or not, but for all intents and purposes, Linux was free software from the start and the competition was not.
Where he mentioned that the desktop is unique in that it has to support thousands of different devices for all kinds of people, and that most people don’t really care what their computer is running as long as it works.