waits for RMS to get mad
Edit: We were talking about CPUs, not complete systems. And yes, the performance would be poor, but RMS has already strongly established that in his book performance is a distant runner-up to free.
A bit more tricky with or1200, but this way you'll get a fully functional Linux workstation.
The exact same argument can be made about the operating system.
I have no clue where I'd even start to patch a bug in my hardware.
The problem with 'patching' hardware these days (oh, I'm that old) is that most of the time you'll find your problem is located inside a chip, and it isn't the traces are in planes that you can't access (if you're lucky they might run in a spot where you can dremel through and then cut and solder two small wires to the buried trace). Via's don't help either (especially not in layers that start and end under BGAs).
Patching hardware was never easy, but with todays degree of integration of components and SOCs it is harder than ever and frequently downright impossible.
Lots of things have gotten easier since the hole-through era, but hardware fixes aren't one of those.
You probably have a bigger chance that there is an FPGA on board that you can re-load.
To him, maybe. Not all of us have the luxury of getting paid to be a techno-luddite, using antiquated workflows and having the spare time available to re/write drivers when necessary.
If I made the same performance/freedom trade-offs I'd be completely unable to do my job.
The people who want non-copyleft licenses to succeed are those who which to make a profit from the control and ignorance they can impose on their users by closing their source and platform or those who are willing to trade their user's freedoms to appease them.
Businesses have a huge amount of leverage on the OSS software ecosystem and so it's really no surprise that the licensing choices are to benefit the businesses funding the development rather than the users. It's to be expected but no less sad. There's a small group of passionate people who have basically dedicated their lives to making the world a better place by writing software that's truly free and respects its users, they built an entire community and movement around the idea, and actually stand by their beliefs -- yet people dismiss them because the company worth hundreds of billions of dollars has a better UX.
True, mostly thanks to shitty companies like Apple, Microsoft, Autodesk, etc.
>You as a developer and a user should want the freedoms afforded to you by the GPL or any copyleft license for that matter.
I do.
>In the ideal world your high performance software would be released under the GPL you would have the best of both worlds.
We don't live in an ideal world and never will.
>The war won't be won by rewriting every single tool and releasing it under the GPL, it will be won by pressuring existing companies to license their software under the GPL.
This doesn't work, especially in software for engineering where there are often sole, hegemonic powers and established monopolies and where the cost to enter the market as a new competitor is non-trivial. We're not talking a desktop manager or a text editor here, we're talking millions of dollars of R&D for things like CFD suites. Open alternatives exist (like, say, OpenFOAM) but they often lack accreditation/certification/rigorous testing and when you're dealing with people's lives the choice is often proscribed entirely.
>The people who want non-copyleft licenses to succeed are those who which to make a profit from the control and ignorance they can impose on their users by closing their source and platform or those who are willing to trade their user's freedoms to appease them.
There's a financial incentive to creating walled gardens and proprietary software that you can charge for.
>yet people dismiss them because the company worth hundreds of billions of dollars has a better UX.
When the choice is between "being able to function at my job, at all" and "use free software", well, the choice is clear.
Probably because it's not software.
I am annoyed by the FSF dogma because they lay an exclusive claim on the word ethics when applied to software. I consider myself an ethical person even in software. But my definition of ethical is less strict than the RMS definition.
I'm not sure that's a fair characterization. They've defined an ethical framework for software and then they discuss things being ethical or not within that framework.
Anyone is free to use a different ethical framework and decide if an action is ethical or not within that framework instead.
We're already very close to that world. Many people seem happy to see GNU losing ground every day. For myself, I am not sure that we are working towards the best possible future, but I'm not even sure what that future should be.
Maybe GNU is just a stop-gap movement to get everyone on board the FOSS train, who knows. BSD licensing hasn't caused any apocalypse yet and arguably it provided a networking stack for Windows that was superior to anything MS could rush out the door back in the NT 3.5 days. There's something nice about being able to put the code into commercial products without worrying about strict GNU/GPL-like conditions.
If most people defaulted to sharing code like was done pre-Microsoft then BSD would be fine. Read RMS's rant that is linked above. He's still at defending against "adversaries" of Freedom. This is war!
OK, so even MS is now open sourcing (some of) their code. Maybe it's not "war" anymore, but you need to understand the history a little.
Didn't Gates' letter come out ten or more years before the first version of the GPL.
This is why rms is the way he is. He's old. He remembers the days when all software was free. He's been trying to get that back ever since.
It is hard to see the entire impact of Free software and even harder to predict how the world would like if people actually stood up to it but I can say that I am sure we would have:
- more secure Internet - more decentralized/distributed Internet - no ISP blocks - much harder if not even impossible NSA spying - no disgusting DRM - no patents and patent trolls -> more inovation - no force updates, no abandoned users - more competition in hardware and software field - things being developed for people and not sheer profit - ... - add your points
A lot of hard problems come from the fact that you need lots of developer attention to build and maintain solutions that just work. The domain is tricky and complex enough to where, you can make it zero-effort for one configuration, but making it zero-effort for all possible or even all likely configurations takes more resources than is available.
The example relevant here is cryptography software. It's not hard to encrypt stuff. It's hard to make end-to-end solutions that just work, for all possible uses and across all possible platforms.
Free software has a restrictive effect of only making software platforms that are open and extensible, vastly reducing the effort needed to maintain end-to-end, user-friendly encryption.
It would make it pretty much impossible for the NSA to spy on citizens if we only had free software platforms to support.