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RE: Tormenting my Wife via Open Source Software
That's great at a personal level, learning is always a gift to yourself, but almost every line of code in several free software projects was written by people working for Google, Oracle, Microsoft, Apple and other software/hardware jerks. Can we talk about something PURE on the software ecosystem?
It's not the people that are jerks: it's the corporations, the "shareholder returns above all else" mentality. While the corps may occasionally throw some crumbs to open source, it is in many cases selfish. Android does not exist because Google is being nice.. and anything MS does is likely part of an "embrace, extend, extinguish" strategy. Hard to trust.
What would you consider a pure software ecosystem?
I think that nothing pure exists in capitalism. And even when microsoft indeed have that strategy in several ocations, recently the most of the time they truly put money, time and people into the linux kernel development. I'm a free software user too, don't get me wrong, I just don't know a mid size or big project (like apache, gnome, kde, the linux kernel) that doesn't have strong support from the jerks. The tale of the independent developers who work driven by a philosophy is really nice, but is nothing but a tale, all the software is in a way or another related to the jerks, most of cases it is only possible because of the jerk's money.
Never trust anything Microsoft does .. ever. They got their start by thieving, they have a long history of screwing people/organizations .. the Gates foundation is involved in some extremely shady shit with their vaccines, and now that they cannot belittle and ignore Linux anymore, they are embracing it. But it is not for the benefit of anyone except Microsoft.
In the tech circles I like to follow, Gnome and KDE are not used, seen as bloated and insecure. Apache is eschewed in favor of nginx, or even the base httpd in OpenBSD (which is also an example of a project that did not have its roots in big money.) Although they get some funding today, they did not, for a long, long time.
I don't disagree with you: corps are definitely around and definitely contributing.. but they weren't always, and there are projects that are not unduly influenced by them. Going back to DOS and the Freeware/Shareware paradigm, there have always been developers who create their wares for free, and offer them for free, or at a small charge. Today, maybe you have to treat the path less traveled .. but it's out there.
I think it's also worth mentioning that, if you look at what these corps have TAKEN from the open source community, versus given, I think you'll find the are still owing! Minix, as an example, was secretly taken and deployed in almost all post-2007 Intel processors. OS X is re-hashed BSD. Playstations are also BSD based, the Switch.. etc.
What you say about the code they have taken is a big true, several "boxes" indeed runs linux, minix or bsd in a way, and the code is closed.
Apache http server may had it's better days a long time ago, but that foundation develop and support lots of high level projects besides their http server.
I think the limit is still in the hardware, but i can't see in the near future a way out to proprietary hardware. Peak oil will smash our way of life soon, we have no time to develop free and open hardware, we (the people) don't have the skills to make a simple usable transistor.
Hardware is definitely a tricky one. The Talos POWER9 stuff looks interesting, as does some of the RISC stuff.. but overall it is definitely not there yet.
Ahh well, we do the best with what we have, I guess.
That's true. We can't do much more. I enjoyed your post, we all lived (or still living) that process your wife is in, is an universal FOSS story.
Indeed. An oasis for the mind. It is so easy to fire up a web browser, think "what OSS rabbit hole shall I fall down today", and get started on something. Ansible was my latest foray into the unknown.. fun stuff.