Awesome.

Not installing Plasma from the default repos on Debian Stable though obviously.

When I say “Debian”, I mean “Debian Stable” which is what I think most people mean when they Debian without qualification.

The GPL does nothing for MY freedom.

Freedom to have sex with somebody against their will is not a “freedom” for me. It is subjugation for them. Something does not become a “freedom” simply because it benefits me.

The right to eat crops grown by others is not a “freedom”. It is an entitlement.

That said, there is nothing immoral, unethical, or wrong about me growing crops and providing seeds to others on the condition that they share the resulting crops with me or even with everyone. This is a contract and hopefully a mutually beneficial one. All good as long as the terms are known up-front and all parties consent.

In my view, that last paragraph is the GPL. There is nothing wrong with it at all. However, it does not make either party to the contact “more free”. In fact, you a bit less free in the future when you agree to a contact, because you have to abide by its terms. But at least you got there freely.

Permissive licenses are not a contract. They are a gift. They make no demands. They take away no freedom at all.

Both are valid choices. I have no quarrel with somebody choosing the GPL.

I do not agree that permissive licenses are less free or that the GPL is moreso.

If it was truly about MY freedom, choosing a permissive license would not upset you.

Are you willing to provide unpaid labor for corporations?

When I release code as Open Source, I am providing unpaid labour to everyone. My work is a public good. Like science.

I welcome collaboration from everyone (including corporations). That is the spirit of Open Source.

I do not demand it. That is the nature of freedom.

they are not obligated to release the modified code under the same license

Agreed

the community receives nothing back for their labor.

The community has the source code that has been released as Open Source. That is what results from their labour. They can continue to collaborate and improve it. What they have “for their labor” is totally unmodified. Nothing has been lost. Possibly, nothing has been gained. This is not unique to corporations. The vast majority of the users of the code will contribute back nothing.

As it turns out, corporations are a major (majority) source of Open Source software and so it is their labor that we all benefit from. This is true for both permissive and copyleft licenses. And, true to form, few of us give anything back.

[the GPL] obligates that the modified code must be released as GPL

Agreed.

So GPL guarantees that the community benefits.

We disagree big picture.

First, I see a world with greater freedom as a benefit on its own.

Second, I think the GPL discourages corporate contribution. Corporations write most Open Source software. The GPL does not prevent natural monopolies in Open Source. Red Hat has enormous influence over Linux as a platform and all of free software as a whole. The GPL does not stop this and may in fact contribute. There is a reason it is their preferred license for the considerable amount if software that they write. In my view, better communities develop around permissive licenses. Just like, my opinion man.

Third, the GPL shrinks ecosystems and restricts my ability to build on and share code. I cannot combine ZFS and Linux. I could if either one (or both) was permissively licensed. That is a loss of freedom for ME.

The act of choosing a license political one

Totally agree.

I also think that the number one way that corporations profit from code without giving back is to sell it as a service. And the GPL does not help with this at all.

Adding to this, Google created Android, wrote all the source code, and released it as Open Source.

By definition, Google cannot take anything here. It is only a question of what they give way in the future.

What Google wants is for people to use Google services. So they are making that less and less optional. There is no way for them to mandate this in Open Source and so they are shrinking the size of AOSP.

Online “services” are the greatest threat to software freedom. What kind of license is used has little to do with it.

Since this is a “GPL saves the world” thread, how would the GPL change anything? Android is mostly permissively licensed. But let’s assume that it is all GPL. Since we are talking about code Google wrote, nothing changes at all.

And the Linux kernel is already GPL licensed. Does that mean I can run whatever I want on my phone?

No. The threats to freedom in the Android space have literally nothing to do with permissive vs copyleft.

Do you think IBM wouldn’t make Red Hat completely proprietary if they had the chance?

No. I don’t. For quite a few reasons.

1 - Red Hat has released new software (quite a lot actually) that they wrote, as GPL since the IBM purchase (rather directly refuting your thought experiment)

2 - A huge amount of Red Hat Enterprise Linux is permissively licensed. They have the chance every day to make this proprietary. They don’t. Again, answering your question.

3 - Red Hat is one of the most profitable parts of IBM.

4 - IBM has left the Product and Engineering teams independent. Because of #3 obviously.

5 - I use facts when forming my opinions

Red Hat is the most commercially successful Open Source company and perhaps the biggest proponent and prolific author of GPL software. They founded (created on purpose) one of the most successful community Linux distributions (Fedora)—a distribution with annoying dedication to free software (eg. codecs). Many of the “leaders” and “contributors” to Fedora are Red Hat employees. Red Hat of course does not make Fedora proprietary since having it be “community” led is a core part of their strategy.

Finally, you do not have to fear a Red Hat take over. Because it already happened.

Half the software (source code) you think of as GNU sits on servers Red Hat manages and controls. This is where that software is developed (not in Savannah—which is just a mirror). I am talking about GCC, Glibc, core utils. Etc.

Do you use systemd, pipewire, Wayland, Mesa, Podman, Cockpit, or Flatpak? Where did all this software come from? From the Free Software Foundation? University students? No, these are all part of the “Linux platform” as defined by Red Hat and they have swept us all along with them as they create it. You can probably add GNOME and GTK to the list at this point.

Has Debian moved to all these technologies? Why? Because of the FSF? No. Because of Red Hat.

Personally, I am ok with it. My core distro uses A LOT of software brought to me by Red Hat and I am thankful for it. But I avoid a lot of Red Hat software like GCC, Glibc, and systemd. But the replacements I use are also mostly corporately funded (Clang, MUSL, and dinit).

Your opponents. You do not get to decide who my allies and opponents are.

I agree with everything you are saying “for you”. It sounds like the GPL is the perfect choice for code that you wrote (assuming you wrote any).

But stop telling me what to think and do. Or, at least stop using the word “freedom” while you peddle your authoritarianism.

My philosophy is single. Those that wrote the code should get to choose the license. Many people prefer the collaboration that permissive licences allow. I do not oppose that.

Permissive license offer greater freedom to users of the code that already exists. The only benefit of copyleft is that it lets you demand future code that you did not write and that the authors do not want to Open Source. It is about restricting their freedom, not enhancing yours.

Permissive licenses provide all of the “4 freedoms” that the Free Software Foundation talks about. You cannot really talk about the differences between cooyleft and permissive as a “freedom” because they are not.

The name “permissive” kind of gives it away that permissive licenses offer more freedoms about what you can do with the code you were given.

Most Open Source software is written by corporations. The Open Source licenses are an advantage to them.

The biggest source of GPL software is probably Red Hat (IBM). They maintain most of what people think of when they think of GNU software and they wrote many of the newer GPL projects that everybody uses (like systemd).

The trend has been towards permissive licenses for a long time. The have led to more Open Source software, not less.

Look at Clang vs GCC. Clang attracts a greater diversity of corporate contribution and generates greater Open Source diversity. Zig and Rust appeared on LLVM for a reason.

What we should be worried about is the cloud. It allows big companies to outsell the little companies writing Open Source software. Neither permissive nor copyleft licenses prevent this.

Had to upgrade my wife as she could not use Zoom and I think Teams. Plus Office could not get final updates and even Numbers and Keynote wanted a newer version of macOS. I cannot remember what else.

Without OCLP, the latest release of macOS that a 2015 MacBook Pro will run is Monterey (5 releases ago).

The final release of Monterey was July 2024. So no, it is not getting updates anymore. Worse, many programs require a newer release of macOS to run at all.

This is a perfect system to migrate to Linux. It will run faster, be more secure, and will have totally up-to-date software.

I got a laugh at the end as I have also experienced that the hardest part about converting parents to Linux is them not knowing their passwords.

The laws are entirely stupid (as in written by people that have no clue).

The ones I see do not make using a VPN illegal, they make it illegal for certain websites to receive traffic from VPNs.

As a website, how am I supposed to know if I am receiving traffic from a VPN?

I have to maintain a database of restricted IP addresses? How do I keep that up-to-date? How do I catch small players? Self-hosted stuff?

And even if I do all that, how do I tell where the actual user is? Because that is exactly what VPNs were designed to hide from me. So, I cannot apply it to residents of a state—I have to refuse VPN connections from the entire world.

It is impossible and pointless. Anybody actually doing anything wrong will get around it easily. So all it accomplishes is reducing the security and increasing the hassle for everybody else.

Dumb. Dumb. Dumb.

I agree with you on the “stability” of frequent small changes vs infrequent huge ones (release upgrades on distros like Debian, Ubuntu, or Fedora).

However, I have had multiple Arch installs where I have not used the system for multiple years (eg. old laptops, dormant VMs). Other than having to know how to update the keyring to get current GPG keys, Arch has always upgraded flawlessly for me. I have had upgrades that downloaded close to 3 GB all at once with a single pacman command (or maybe yay) that “just worked”.

Wayland is a great example.

Debian user? You may have spent the last two years complaining that Wayland is not ready, that NVIDIA does not work, and that Wayland is too focussed on GNOME. You may move to XFCE if GNOME removes X11 support.

Arch user? Wayland is great and Plasma 6 works flawlessly. There have not been any real NVIDIA problems in a year or two. Maybe you have been enjoying COSMIC, Hyprland, or Niri.

This is me talking out of my ass a but since I do not do it, but you can create your own AUR packages pretty easily. If you have the Deb, you could be rocking it in Arch too.

On Chimera Linux, I do make my own packages. Just so easy.

In the AUR maybe. I certainly have had to trim lots of old electron and other bloat.

My favourite package manager is APK 3. No clean-up required there almost by definition.

Because it is less trouble.

I read comments here all the time. People say Linux does not work with the Wifi on their Macs. Works with mine I say. Wayland does not work and lacks this feature or this and this. What software versions are you using I wonder, it has been fixed for me for ages.

Or how about missing software. Am I downloading tarballs to compile myself? No. Am I finding some random PPA? No. Is that PPA conflicting with a PPA I installed last year? No. Am I fighting the sandboxing on Flatpak? No. M I install everything on my system through the package manager.

Am I trying to do development and discovering that I need newer libraries than my distro ships? No. Am I installing newer software and breaking my package manager? No.

Is my system an unstable house of cards because of all the ways I have had to work around the limitations of my distro? No.

When I read about new software with new features, am I trying it out on my system in a couple days. Yes.

After using Arch, everything else just seems so complicated, limited, and frankly unstable.

I have no idea why people think it is harder. To install maybe. If that is your issue, use EndeavourOS.

I agree that the opportunity for Frame is to be “big screen” portable gaming.

Desktop stuff will just come along for the ride.

And yes, the ecosystem is in place. Steam is already the de facto distribution channel for games, proton makes most of them work great on Linux, and FEX should make most of those work on Frame.

I am not sure how well FEX works today but it is obviously going to get a lot more love. And the CPU is not the bottleneck for games anyway as the GPU is doing all the heavy lifting.

Debian has stopped 32 but in Debian 13. He is talking about Debian 12 which is still supported.

The Debian 12 based version of Q4OS has committed to supporting 32 bit through 2028.

I made the same recommendation. Sadly the “latest” version in 64 bit only. Unsurprising as it is Debian based.

The older release is still available and still supported though. It would be a great option though the clock is ticking on it of course.

The most “batteries included” distro that is I can think of that is not Debian based is Adelie.