I think that entire comment is actually incorrect. My understanding is that they did not “remove” any maintainers, but actually rejected patches from Russian citizens (because of their employer), and also removed some Russian names from the maintainers list who already have code in the kernel.

yikes.

That doesn’t invalidate my statement though.

freedom TO vs freedom FROM

I was more referring to mainline specifically, otherwise your chances of having many people actually benefit from your changes without a lot of effort is small IMO.

And here I am looking to move away from Linux after they started rejecting submissions for political reasons.

I still don’t think something so important should be beholden to the whims of one company (Linux Foundation) or their country’s laws (USA).

I would strongly prefer to use an operating system that didn’t have this problem. Do any even exist?

go against their spirit

I think this is more of a failure of the license itself. It’s not a good look to allow something explicitly and then go “no not like that!”

For professionals used to Photoshop, yes it is that bad. People want what’s familiar because they’re used to it and they’re busy or lazy. They don’t want to learn something new.

If GIMP wanted to increase their userbase by a million overnight, they would make it look more like Photoshop.

The problem is they and many current users are huge FOSS zealots and see this kind of thing akin to selling your soul to the devil.

I think if Rust people want C and C++ devs to switch over, there needs to be a lot more documentation that’s easy to follow on how exactly to do that. For example with Swift there’s an amazing tutorial called Swift for C++ Practitioners that step-by-step goes over all the equivalent functionality and how to translate existing concepts over from one language to the other. I think Swift at least has the edge there with familiarity because the syntax physically looks closer to C-like languages, so when that’s not the case, even more hand-holding is going to be necessary IMO.

Yes, they actually CAN know those things.

I think eventually if a federated system (or particular server) gets too popular they will just defederate from everyone else and perpetuate the same problem all over again

that is the only current accepted alternative to paying for website access, yes

if you have better ideas though, we’d all love to hear them

You might be right, but I don’t think that’s a problem they’re going to solve all on their own, meanwhile the rest of users will suffer.

That doesn’t mean we need to cater to their business model at the technical level.

From what I have seen, it does… if you want to have a popular site that stays running well, and don’t charge your users for access.

69% of the world population doesn’t use ad blockers. Google made their billions from people clicking on ads.

Not only are we technical folks (only 5% of the population not their target audience, it seems most people don’t care enough about ads to ever try to stop them… at all.

Yes, I wasn’t trying to refute that. But Nintendo can still ruin your life fighting a losing battle if they wanted to. To me it’s just not worth the risk of putting your name on it.

You’re not wrong. I just think that if you believe there is a good chance of having legal problems for your project (I don’t see why they wouldn’t have thought that), then it makes the most sense to do it anonymously from the beginning to avoid getting sued. Yes they can still possibly offer you money, but it might not be worth revealing your identity at that point either, as any continued development could be assumed to be you, and then you must defend yourself in court if they sue, even if it was never you.

I would consider that cartoony as well. You might disagree but that’s ok. I’m not trying to pretend like my opinion is popular, it’s just how I personally feel.

I should have articulated my point better. I meant that this has been the “final straw” for some people for most of those steps along the way in the picture. If you look at the comments from then it’s often the same kind of thing you’re seeing right now. That’s why I mentioned selection bias, because there are actually lots of final straws happening over time, people just aren’t seeing those or weren’t around then.