Caretaker of DS8.ZONE. Free (Libre) Software enthusiast and promoter. Pronouns: any
Also /u/CaptainBeyondDS8 on reddit and CaptainBeyond on libera.chat.
ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment
Always has been. One does not "use Linux" they use an operating system built on top of Linux.
Chrome is not Linux, but Xfce also is not Linux. Gnome is not Linux. KDE is not Linux. Linux is Linux.
I don't think the ffmpeg maintainer is complaining that Microsoft is using ffmpeg, rather that they are opening "high priority" bug reports based on customer complaints. This might be a high priority problem for Microsoft but that does not make it so for ffmpeg.
The license allows Microsoft to use ffmpeg but they aren't entitled to demand free labor from the project. Really, no one is entitled to do so, but Microsoft being a large company who can definitely afford to put money or talent on the problem makes it only that much more egregious.
edit: I would note that asking for help or reporting a bug is usually welcome, the problematic part is demanding help because it's a high priority issue for YOUR customers.
Notice they avoid using the exact term "open source" in this press release. I'm ~90% sure it'll turn out to be under some proprietary source-available license.
Discord is a proprietary centralized service that is hostile to privacy and third-party clients.
Reddit karma is a self-perpetuating problem. Karma being used as an indicator of an account's quality and trustworthiness incentivizes karma farming, effectively turning fake internet points into real money. This spurs the development of bots whose sole purpose is to farm karma by reposting old content from humans (and more recently using ChatGPT to generate comments) which then spurs the rise of human "bot hunter" accounts whose sole purpose is to detect and report bots "stealing" content. At some point reddit turns into bots acting like humans vs humans acting like bots.
Google is also one of the most prolific contributors to Linux, and was the #3 corporate contributor in 2022. If you're avoiding everything Google had a hand in you literally can't use any GNU/Linux.
I'd just like to interject for moment. What you're refering to as Linux, is in fact, Steam/Linux, or as I've recently taken to calling it, Steam plus Linux. Linux is not an operating system unto itself, but rather another component of a fully functioning Steam system made useful by Steam Proton, DXVK, and vital Wine components comprising a full OS as defined by Valve.
On the one hand, anything that acknowledges Android as being a Linux system is welcome.
On the other hand... ugh, user-agent strings.
Unfortunately a lot of this seems in reponse to Midori, a seemingly hostile fork with a pretty suspcious website.
To some people all forks are hostile. This appears to be such a case. He just seems to be sour over people exercising the same freedoms he got from Mozilla upstream. Rules for thee but not for me. The free software community doesn't need his obscure fork.
Translation: "no"
It started 40 years ago, when a man was not allowed to fix his printer. We didn't have the word enshittification at the time but even then it was understood what happens when technology abuses its users in order to enrich its creators.
The notion of there being underrated or overrated distros is, itself, overrated. No, there should not (and cannot) be "one distro to rule them all" because different people have different needs.
Remember that in the free software community we have the freedom to modify and share everything. Those "overrated" distros exist because someone saw a need for them, and they are widely used because other people agree. If Debian was good enough for every use case why do these other distros exist? Why doesn't everyone just use Debian?
Linux doesn't have any GNU in it. Linux is a kernel that GNU runs on top of. That's what Stallman means by "GNU/Linux."
Maybe he is a little bitter about his life's work and philosophy being erased by Linux fans, but that is understandable. Maybe he is a little too bitter.
Translation: It's proprietary "source available" software until January 2027, at which point it becomes free software and open source under the Apache 2.0 license.
There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It's not a forum; there's no such thing as "your posts." It's more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren't "yours" any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don't have the right to take it back.
Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don't think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like "destroying it to save it."
GitHub has been recognized as harmful to the free software community at least as early as 2015, years before the Microsoft acquisition. See RMS email on GitHub.
Microsoft is about as bad as any other proprietary software company. They do some good things for the open source economy, but they also mistreat their users.
I think it's a mistake to look at the free software movement as being a reaction against Microsoft or Google. It's against the proprietary software world in general.
We don't do planned obsolescence in the software freedom world. We keep old software and hardware usable way past its intended expiration date. If something is usable and does the job there's no reason to throw it away - and, remember, since it's free software anyone interested can fork it and bring new life to it.
Of course, with old software and hardware there are security considerations to keep in mind - I wouldn't use an abandoned web browser, for instance. But for any app that has no network access and no or very little attack surface there's no harm in using it as long as it suits your needs.
Traditional GNU/Linux distributions (as well as F-Droid) are not "app stores" even though they are superficially similar. Traditional distributions are maintained and curated by the community, and serve the interests of users first and software developers second, whereas an "app store" has minimal curation and serves the needs of software developers first and users second.
I point this out because there's an annoying meme that traditional distributions are obsoleted by the "app store" model. I don't think that's the case. "Verification" is essential for an app store but pointless for a distribution.
That's debatable, since what people generally call "Linux" is more GNU than Linux anyway. "Linux" as the Linux fandom considers is it big and professional like GNU, because it is GNU (among other things).
Grayjay is proprietary. https://hiphish.github.io/blog/2023/10/18/grayjay-is-not-open-source/
Fauxpen source licenses such as this are the answer to the wrong question.
"Other people making money with my stuff" was never a problem in the software-freedom community. Whether this means "selling my stuff" or "using my stuff in a commercial setting" ("commercial use" restrictions are confusing in this way). In the free-software world we just accept that our work belongs to the community and the community can use it in ways we don't approve of.
(Edit: Likewise, it has never been an issue to sell copies of free software, although I should point out the very nature of software freedom makes it more difficult to guarantee a revenue stream in this way)
Rather, this is a symptom of the proprietary software world's reaction to free software and co-option of it (in the form of the open source movement). Tom Preston-Werner, founder of GitHub, opined that proprietary software companies should open source almost everything - "almost everything" being anything that does not "represent business value." In other words, open source cost centers but keep profit centers proprietary. Ideally, these companies would cooperate on widely used components (and some do!), but practically they spend as little as possible because capitalism. This is also why we see so many projects turning fauxpen source lately; these companies imagined they were developing cost centers and then realized they could be profit centers instead.
What was (and still is) a problem is people making proprietary derivatives of free software, and copyleft is the solution to that. If you want to extract license fees from proprietary software developers you can dual-license under a strong copyleft like (A)GPL for the free software community and sell proprietary licenses. Believe it or not, Stallman explicitly does not object to this - mainly because, if selling GPL exceptions to enable proprietary development is wrong, then releasing under a permissive license must also be wrong because that also enables proprietary development.
I don't understand why we spend so much time praising proprietary software in these communities.
As to your question, I have a separate Windows machine for gaming, but that's it. I keep one foot in the free world and one in the proprietary. As for productivity tools I can't think of a proprietary tool I "can't quit" or that I would pick in favor of a free tool.
Fans of proprietary software have this weird belief that free software users choose inferior tools for purist or idealist reasons. This is offensively ignorant. No one chooses bad tools on purpose; we just consider freedom to be part of the criteria of a good tool.
Free refers to freedom, not price. It is perfectly acceptable to sell free software.
Unfortunately, this is not actually free software, it is distributed under an EULA: https://github.com/harmonoid/harmonoid/blob/master/EULA.txt
Everyone who has an Android phone "uses Linux without the command line." Your question, however, seems to be "is it possible to play Windows games on Debian without the command line" (edit: or, more broadly, "how suitable is Debian as a Windows replacement") which is not the same question.
No one in this community cares about open source. It's been overrun by privacy redditors, some of whom seem to have a personal mission to campaign against the free software movement. There's a constant deluge of "it's not foss but it's private/not google" apologia in almost every thread here.
I suspect the community being unmoderated is part of the problem.
If this is "completely open source" and "doesn't rely on the original Discord client in any way" (from their front page) how can mods for the official client be compatible?
Oh wait, their faq clarifies things: it's an electron wrapper for the official web client, not a completely open source client that doesn't rely on the official one as they claim.
Common DeVault W
Yes, if the JavaScript is running on a computer he owns. JavaScript programs running in a browser are just as much software as any other type of program.
Nah it's proprietary garbage. If it weren't proprietary it would be an option (although in that case a "deMicrosofted" version would be better). there are free Chromium browsers and free browsers that aren't chromium, this one offers nothing of interest.
There is no cloud, it's just someone else's computer.
The code merely being "available" isn't the same thing as the user having the legal freedom to modify and share it. Besides, that's not always the case; sometimes JavaScript is minified, obfuscated, and packed in ways that make it effectively no different than any other compiled program.
Note that source code is "the preferred form for making modifications" so obfuscated code is by definition not "source."
Very concerning misinformation in this thread. Open source does in fact mean more than "can look at the source code." The open source definition closely parallels the free software definition, in fact.
I don't like the terms open source, FOSS, or FLOSS precisely because of this misconception.
xkcd 743 moment
I don't care about Linux. I care about freedom. It just so happens that the best free software operating systems are built on Linux, so that's what I use.
I use GNU Guix System on my desktop, laptop, and server machines. I use LineageOS on my mobile devices, although sometimes I wish I could use Mobian or even Guix System instead. I do have a Pinephone with Mobian but it's collecting dust and the battery is swollen so I can't use it anyway. I also have a router running OpenWRT.
I used to use Debian until 2019, Trisquel until 2014, and Ubuntu until 2010. When I was something of a kid I played around with a Knoppix live CD, which was my first taste of GNU/Linux.
Because even some FOSS developers value convenience over freedom and privacy, unfortunately. Those of us who've spent decades warning about this get shouted down and told we're being too puritan or ideological and that the proprietary thing just works and everyone uses it already so we're wasting our time.
For mobile only,
Damn this community is getting really toxic.
You're upset that a community called "open source" is pushing back against an attempt to co-opt the open source label? In my view this attempt is highly insidious and far worse than one corporate actor "stealing" (i.e. using) an open source project. These projects were all true free software before pulling the rug on the community and switching to a fauxpen source license, which makes it even worse - if these were proprietary from the beginning no one would have cared, but also fewer people would have contributed, because it doesn't feel as good doing volunteer work for a proprietary product.
I agree there needs to be a mechanism in place for free software developers to be financially compensated but if you're changing the license so that it's no longer free software then it's just proprietary software under some faux "open" label, at which point you might just drop the pretense of being "open" at all - just admit you're a proprietary software company that puts your financial interest ahead of the community's.
Software freedom applies only to hardware you personally own. It wouldn't even apply to machines you interact with but do not own (such as ATMs or kiosks) since you aren't the one who agrees to the proprietary software license.
Stallman himself explains it in his computing FAQ.