(Part 2) Embrace, Extend, Extinguish and Free Software
More of my opinion on "free software support" by large corporations... (don't be fooled).
I consulted for a child education company. They used games for teaching, games written in Adobe Flash. But their goal was to move to the iPad, one per child. To understand their technology I wrote a new game in Flash. Unfortunately, Apple's newest iPad would not support Flash. Then Adobe killed Flash. So I re-wrote the game in Objective-C. But Apple moved to Swift so I re-wrote the game in Swift. I tried to distribute it for the company but it required an Apple developer license and a "lock in" to the Apple Store, which conflicted with their company goals. The company, and their hundred child educational games, died.
The idea of "The Store" and vendor lock-in has become the new battleground. I saw, but have not followed so I may be wrong, the Apple-Facebook fight about "The Store". Apparently Apple wants 30% of revenue, including in-game purchase revenue, just for hosting games. I don't game, I don't use facebook, and I now avoid the Apple ecosystem as much as possible so this is a "don't care" (so far). But it does show that "The Store" is the latest battleground technique.
Part 1 (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30269511) was the Microsoft motion to lock-in github developers, now requiring a Microsoft acccount. So I stopped using github.
"The Store" wars have taken another major step, this time on Microsoft's part.
I develop on Linux. One of my machines has Windows 10. I use WSL2 and X11 for some portable development work. I want to make sure my free software can run everywhere. I got caught up in "Embrace".
I bought a new Dell laptop last week. It runs Windows 10 S (W10S). I failed to do my homework on this purchase. New laptops are the latest victim in "The Store" wars. Apparently I needed a Microsoft account to even boot into W10S. I got caught up in "Extend".
I tried to install an X11 Windows server. That's when I found out that W10S only allows software from "The Store". That negates the whole idea of developing free software and making sure it runs everywhere. So I tried to make this new machine more "free software developer friendly".
You can turn off the "S" (Store?) lockdown, which I did.
The WSL2 setup was a great failing struggle (I won't bore you with details) so I decided to dual-boot the machine. That way I could do both MS and Linux development in their native environments.
I burned a thumbdrive with Ubuntu 20, booted it, and tried to set up a dual-boot.
That failed because Ubuntu installer could not find any disk space.
Boot W10 and shrink the file system.
Boot Ubuntu. Still no disk available.
Boot into BIOS. Disk is RAID6. Change to ACHI.
Boot Ubuntu. Still no disk available.
Boot W10 fails.
Boot BIOS, change back to RAID6.
Boot W10. Hard disk is encrypted. Remove encryption.
... (skip more of a 2 day struggle) ...
Get angry that I can't seem to use hardware I BOUGHT. (Part of the hidden cost of free software development nobody mentions because, ya know, it's FREE!).
Boot BIOS. Change to ACHI.
Boot Ubuntu. Install Ubuntu on whole drive, removing W10.
Everyone hears how the big companies are "all-in" on free software support. But the dancing elephants of large corporations are stomping all over the grass and free software is being crushed (Extinguish) as a side-effect.