Money and control was always the goal though. Linux has always been popular with sysadmins that used it to run their company's servers so they could, you know, make money. Some of it was invested back. I don't think those big initial investments really came from anywhere else.
The quoted statement is not entirely accurate, polkit is compile-time optional in systemd. Though most distributions will use it because it's an enhancement over the even older sudo-type authentication mechanisms.
>Its now all about "How does this project help me and make my life convenient as a developer" rather than "How does this project help software users like me"
I don't think this is a new thing, or something that is necessarily correlated. I've seen plenty of old open source projects that are totally obtuse and obscure to everyone but the developer -- having that attitude is not mutually exclusive with being a FOSS enthusiast. Probably more people are developing this stuff for money now, but that's a different thing from the "selling out" you were talking about.
Github didn't change much here if you ask me, in the old days it was Sourceforge, and you can still find a lot of those obscure projects still hosted there.
No, not at all -- it sounded like you were saying the developers and users of such things were being naive, but maybe I'm mistaken. To give an example of what I was saying, if I was contributing to Postgres, it would be because I want to help make a good database and fix bugs. I wouldn't do it because I had a chip on my shoulder about Oracle, even if I did have that (I don't). But that's just me. OTOH I believe Oracle even offers some level of support for Postgres.
In my experience, it's very easy to denounce something else as wrong, but it's a lot harder to actually put in the work to improve the situation and to demonstrate that things have actually improved. That's all I mean by building things. If you are an open source company, you still need lots of lawyers, lots of licenses and lots of contracts. You can't really avoid that, copyrights and patents are still an issue that everyone has to deal with, because these are still copyright/patent licenses after all. So maybe in some cases things are better but in other cases it seems that they aren't. For myself, I personally won't try to claim the high ground without the results to back it up.
>because you wanted to fuck Microsoft and the entire concept of proprietary code
I think I would describe that as spite. Is it not? By long term strategy I mean strategy for building things in general. Like, I get it, I don't particularly enjoy using certain Microsoft products either. But once you get that off your company's machines, then what? There has to be somewhere to go from there.
Just from my experience, building something purely out of spite is not a good long term strategy. All those companies ended up using a lot of open source because as it turns out, it is a good solution a lot of the time.
Just a small correction -- The GPL does not require you to release code diffs. The requirement is that people who receive binaries from you are entitled to receive the source to that binary upon request.
>OSS work becomes just a source of free labor for large tech companies.
I really don't understand why there are always comments of this nature every time this is brought up. Why is the size of the company relevant? Do people here not have jobs in the IT field? When people contribute to open source, anyone is able to use that code, including you. That means when you go get a job at a new company, you can keep using that code. It doesn't matter if you go to a small company or a large company.
That seems to be a mostly orthogonal concern -- you're talking about a general issue of "doing business with big corporations" and not really something I would say is specific to any given project. One way to help improve the situation would be to help them win those battles so they can negotiate for more time to upstream useful things.
I've never liked that approach, it's leading with the stick and not the carrot and IMO it defeats the purpose of open source. It cuts away one of the main benefits of open source -- that companies can use it and start contributing back to it right away with no friction. AFAIK Microsoft, Amazon and Google actually DO hire a lot of open source maintainers at this time, for exactly this reason.
That's just making their argument for them. What is the argument in favor of them making unlocked devices? Can it be done while increasing their profits?
More horrific than having to guess what switches are supported by any given command on the target machine, even though shell scripts are supposed to be cross platform?
You probably just want to use the Remote SSH extension in VS Code. That should work a lot better than X11 forwarding, and it should be a lot easier than rewriting the whole GUI to use the terminal.
Is that really an issue? If the user makes more uncivil comments then you flag them again until they get the picture. There are plenty of other places on the internet that seem to welcome and encourage flame wars -- they can go there to work out their resentment and then come back when they're ready.
I don't understand what you mean extra point of failure. There is a boot process, you can't get rid of it because then you can't boot the machine. So you either secure it or you don't. I get the concern that the hardware implementation could contain bugs, and that's a real concern, but your system is not going to be less secure by having this -- at worst, it seems it can only be as insecure as it would be without it.
>However, the TPM is insufficient to protect against such attacks. As such, secure boot fails to provide the one thing it claims to provide.
I don't think anyone is saying TPM or secure boot alone is going to prevent against such attacks. It needs to be combined with some other physical protection measures, e.g. a tamper-proof case of some kind.
So don't buy that device? Those devices already exist, that doesn't prevent you from buying other devices where you control the keys. If manufacturing an unlocked device becomes unprofitable and stops happening everywhere, then we can talk about what to do, but I don't think the existence of secure boot on Linux is going to make much of a difference either way.
Am I missing something? This seems to be incorrect, this is explicitly a case where you, the hardware owner, controls the signing keys. It's nothing like DRM, that is a case where an outside person controls the keys.
If you don't trust the CPU vendor, a solution there would be to buy multiple CPUs from multiple vendors, run the same thing on all of them, and compare the results. You would still want them all to have the equivalent of SGX.
>the TPM does nothing to protect from security issues beyond that point, which is the vast majority of security issues.
I hear this type of thing often but it's the wrong mindset to take when dealing with this stuff. Security holes in one part of the stack are not an excuse to avoid fixing security holes in other parts -- if you do that, you now have multiple security bugs that are going unfixed.
>And the much lower complexity means many fewer places for security bugs to be accidentally introduced.
This doesn't seem to make any sense, avoiding securing the boot process does not mean the boot process is any less complicated or somehow has less parts that can be compromised. TFA is just describing how to secure the parts that are already there.
>They can simply put in a hardware keylogger, or get direct memory access, in which case it's game over anyway.
I'm not sure how this is related, building a tamper-proof case seems to be outside of the scope of this. This seems to cover only the software parts.
How? You can use this to secure your own devices from tampering. Lots of (cheap) devices are already locked down like this, would it really help to deprive yourself of the capability to secure your own devices too?
I'm not sure what you mean -- it makes sense to me that if you are paying for an email service, they would continue to charge you as long as you store and access those emails in their server, and they would have to take steps to prevent abuse from people who might try to store too much data. Can you be more specific about what the behavior is? Maybe you could show a good way that another email provider has solved this, and provide a helpful guide as to how they could implement that?
That seems like a misreading, the very toplevel post says that you can stop paying by deleting all the data. Then the response says you can also do that by contacting support. Did I miss something?
This seems to be assuming bad faith, you've changed a complaint of a missing feature into a different request for a new feature (because contacting support is inconvenient), which are two different things. It would be best to not confuse the issue, and to focus on doing what you can to support the feature request, if that's what you're interested in having.
Just from doing a little bit of research, the problem there seems to be that the netcode in that game is pretty old and has a lot of unfixed bugs that trolls are taking advantage of, not really anything to do with Linux. If they don't want to pay people to fix it, maybe they can open source the server code so someone else can fix the bugs?
That has not been my experience, do you have any studies that quantify that? From my perspective, the entire concept of legal rights and due process is what is actually the new thing, considering the total span of history anyway. These were not things that anybody had 1000 years ago, and even now some political entities still don't really have it or consider it valid (unfortunately).