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Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95

Only 3 Easy Payments of $19.95

@feld@friedcheese.us remote
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The Linus / Linux drama can be summed up as: "all these people thought that because the Kernel was GPL, the Kernel actually supported the political aspirations of the GNU project."

It was never true, but some people really thought if they believed in it hard enough they could will it to be true.

And now they're mad it didn't turn out the way they dreamed.

You did this to yourselves.

Let's rewind to 2011 where Linus was interviewed about the GPL:

LinuxFR: Why did you switch the kernel’s license to GPL? Moral or practical?

Linus: Primarily practical. The original license was too strict and obscure; GPL solved those problems and attracted more contributors.

LinuxFR: Do you agree with the moral clauses in the GPL?

Linus: I disdain mixing morality with the GPL, calling it nonsense; morality is private, and imposing it in a license is hypocritical.
Q.U.I.N.N.

Q.U.I.N.N.

@icedquinn@blob.cat remote
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@feld they were co-dependent. he inherited a lot of relevance from gnu coreutils et all being around to finish the userspace and gnu never finished their kernel.

there's some work (partly by corpos) to get a de-gpl'd operating system around, though i suspect nothing good will come of those efforts (google has consistently shown they deserve no goodwill and consistently expresses a desire to lock everything down harder, which gpl kernels and userspaces put explicit limits on)
Replying to @mischievoustomato@tsundere.love
Q.U.I.N.N.

Q.U.I.N.N.

@icedquinn@blob.cat remote
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@mischievoustomato @feld i don't think i'd consider that a utopia. originally was not a GPL fan but then time happened.

GPL hate was always sponsored by corps until they found a way to cheat it (the network hole) and then the AGPL closed the cheat and they went back to sponsoring hate for it. (google code banned putting AGPL products on it, for example)

at this point AGPL is heavily used by venture capital specifically to cripple the "community edition" and the ambiguity/FUD about what exactly triggers the infection with that license is strategic.

so i don't think the FSFs original goals were wrong at all. i think their PR just sucks, and companies really would like the public to go back to not resisting colonization. if it was not an effective resistance the propagandizing would not be necessary (nobody would care if RMS is a dofus unless he did something else that did matter.)

there's a book called the plenitude by rich gold. it has nothing at all to do with foss, but one chapter talks about the history of companies doing this exact play. showing up to vacuum up community assets (grandma's soup recipe) and resell it as a proprietary product (now its campbell's soup), in a move called "colonizing the commons."

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Replying to @icedquinn@blob.cat
find you on :butterfedy1: fediverse

find you on :butterfedy1: fediverse

@frogzone@wizard.casa remote
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@icedquinn @feld
Interesting! yea. Richard Stallman talked about this phenomenon of (my words) "epstine-connected g(ewww)gle" giving lots of money to developers to not license their software under a copyleft license. It was in a talk he gave last year in italy, https://techrights.org/n/2025/02/28/Video_Full_Video_of_Richard_Stallman_s_Talk_Earlier_This_Month_.shtml

also here but internet Archive appears to be offline (!) now. https://archive.org/details/180th-nexa-wednesday

he also mentioned Distrowatch's reporting on 'false'book deplatforming/unpersoning people who talked about "linux". he attributed this phenomenon to a bigtech "combine" surrounding the "dishonest (fascist) president" I believe he used the less politically loaded word, "corporatist", to describe the sociopathic, epstained, genocidal, warcriminal, fascist. It would be interesting to ask stallman whether he would use more direct phrasing now (18 months later). Especially given changes to re like this... https://futurism.com/science-energy/trump-nuclear-regulation-radiation-energy re 'Trump Administration Scrapping Nuclear Energy Rules Requiring Plants to Keep Radiation Levels “As Low as Reasonably Achievable”'.

I'm not asking this for any reason at all, but how many nukes does russia need to deal with US datacenters?

Replying to @frogzone@wizard.casa