Freedom comes with uncomfortable ramifications. This is inescapable. Freedom includes doing things that a given individual isn’t comfortable with. If you’re not happy with this trade-off, don’t use a license that allows “any” usage.

Closed source browsers are rare today, and even those are built on the open source browser cores.

Any browser that’s not Chrome is rare today. I’m not sure pointing at Chrome as a well-managed open source project is a good idea. Although one can view the source, Google controls the codebase and development process with an iron hand. Any feature that is a good idea technically, but will hurt Google is a no-go to have merged.

I can’t wait for the surge in cheap PCs available to buy and install Linux on. Please, Microsoft, lock down Windows more.

Meanwhile, poor Jellyfin just quietly doing the job.

That doesn’t undermine my point, that proves my point. Making something “FREE” (as in libre) comes with the consequence that people can use it for whatever they want. I assume you don’t agree with bombing Gaza, hence it is a perfect example of “freedom” leading to poor outcomes.

Yes. Open standards always win, given time. No one keeps paying for a closed standard, once the open (free!) one is just as good.

Like Gimp? Oh, wait that didn’t take over. Well, at least Libreoffice is the standard office suite today, oh wait, that didn’t take over. Well, Linux is the most used operating system at least. Whoops, except Android counts as that and it’s increasingly locked down.

Simply grabbed it, and without contributing anything to the project did nothing except stripped the branding and then go sell it.

Unless this is specifically called out in the license, this is an activity allowed by many permissive open source licenses. If they knew that this type of activity was unwanted initially, then they didn’t choose the proper license.

Easy, because they want the social credibility of being open source, but also later, when the project gets big, they want to dictate exactly who uses it and how.

If you care about how your software is used to this degree – don’t open source it! Every open source package I have ever made has come with a permissive license, because I want people to be able to use it however they wish. That’s actual freedom. Unfortunately, a subset of “however they wish” can also be “used to bomb Gaza”, but that is the cost of liberty and freedom. You have to take the good with the bad.

Is there anything, ever, that’s trended towards more open?

Mozilla has tried so many things: I wonder if anyone there has considered releasing and maintaining a browser. They might have some luck against Chrome.

I wouldn’t trust that company to be their customer if I knew they operate like that

Hahaha, I suggest you never look behind the scenes at an F500 then. This would be one of the more sane things to happen in that environment.

They have always been open and clear about letting you build it and use it however you like.

I don’t disagree with the want to license software like this. The downside then is a subset of “letting you build and use it any way you like” includes registering N trial accounts every 30 days. If this isn’t actually spelled out as illegal under the license, some jerkbag will do it. I wish we didn’t live in this world, but we do.

Company sizes must be limited by law. No person shall own more than one company, no company shall employ more than 1000 people, any company with a net worth over 50 million has taxes go to 100% for any of the worth after those 50m.

Good luck with that one. Try to convince congress critters about this point of view while they take a second or two to look up from the pork barrel. I 100% agree this would be great, I just fail to see any possible way to get there.

Easy, just have two of your staff do alternate 24/7 shifts, renewing just in time. As long as this costs less than the price of licencing the proper way, still a “win”.

As a small aside “Open Source Free Trials?” If it’s open source, can’t they just disable the trial part? I think (as usual) some essential nuance got destroyed converting this article to a clickbait engaging exciting headline.

To anyone that isn’t aware of this: big companies don’t give a fuck about anything except stock price going up. They will crush dreams every quarter to do this. They don’t care.

If you don’t like how a company is using your software and you’re hoping they will have a conscience/heart… don’t! Fix your license to make this use case illegal/impossible if it really matters to you.

Or, consider if Open Source is even the right license here (although I think the headline is a bit confused here)…

If you want this “fixed”, tweak your license and/or send a cease and desist to that company and/or seek damages. Changing nothing and waiting for them to do the right thing, you’re going to be waiting infinitely, because they will never do the right thing. They will do the thing that gets them the most revenue with the least spending. That’s all you can count on.

Explain how to mesh that with “the stock price must go up each quarter, no matter what”

My favorite one that I’ve heard is: “ban it”. This has a lot of problems… let’s say despite the billions of dollars of lobbyists already telling Congress what a great thing AI is every day, that you manage to make AI, or however you define the latest scary tech, punishable by death in the USA.

Then what happens? There are already AI companies in other countries busily working away. Even the folks that are very against AI would at least recognize some limited use cases. Over time the USA gets left behind in whatever the end results of the appearance of AI on the economy.

If you want to see a parallel to this, check out Japan’s reaction when the rest of the world came knocking on their doorstep in the 1600s. All that scary technology, banned. What did it get them? Stalled out development for quite a while, and the rest of the world didn’t sit still either. A temporary reprieve.

The more aggressive of you will say, this is no problem, let’s push for a worldwide ban. Good luck with that. For almost any issue on Earth, I’m not sure we have total alignment. The companies displaced from the USA would end up in some other country and be even more determined not to get shut down.

AI is here. It’s like electricity. You can not wire your house but that just leads to you living in a cabin in the woods while your neighbors have running water, heat, air conditioning and so on.

The question shouldn’t be, how do we get rid of it? How do we live without it? It should be, how can we co-exist with it? What’s the right balance? The genie isn’t going back in the bottle, no matter how hard you wish.

Great! With this source code out, I can finally complete the port to Linux. I call it WSL24L, aka “Windows Subsystem For Linux 2, For Linux”

No, that one was actually pretty spot on. My uncle works at Nintendo and he told me it’s pretty similar there.

Silo is absolute pants on head as far as realism. Here’s just ONE example: the light bulbs in the bunker(s). To show what an immense challenge it would be to keep light-bulbs in the bunker, let’s make some assumptions:

Suppose the silo houses 10,000 people and has around 150 floors. If each person uses about 1.5 rooms on average, and each room has two light bulbs, that’s already 30,000 bulbs just for personal and work spaces. Add another 7,500 bulbs for common areas like hallways and stairwells, assuming 50 bulbs per floor. Throw in another 2,500 for things like emergency lighting and equipment. That brings the total to roughly 40,000 bulbs.

Now, consider that the average bulb lasts around 2,000 hours. If lights run about 16 hours a day, a bulb would last approximately 125 days. With 40,000 bulbs in use, about 320 of them would burn out every single day. That means someone needs to replace 320 bulbs a day, every day, just to keep the place lit. That alone is a full-time job for a crew of maintenance workers.

Storage becomes another massive problem. If they want to keep a 10-year supply of light bulbs, they would need 320 bulbs a day times 365 days times 10 years, which adds up to about 1.17 million bulbs. That is a staggering amount of fragile, breakable glass to store in an underground bunker.

And what about manufacturing? Are they making glass, vacuum-sealing bulbs, mining tungsten, and wiring filaments all inside the silo? Are there glassblowing workshops next to the hydroponics farm? Are they running vacuum pumps on diesel just to get replacement bulbs?

This is just one mundane aspect of life in the silo, and it already falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. Unless there’s a whole floor dedicated to crafting light bulbs by hand like some sort of monastery of electricians, it simply doesn’t add up.