I’m sure removing these maintainers would be of great help to the Ukrainian war effort…

More seriously: We need to help Ukraine more. But this doesn’t do that. It just hurts a bunch of people (both the maintainers, and the people using their code) for no benefit whatsoever.

Actually, much of that description, perpetuated by dystopian novels, is pretty far off the mark - and it’s the kind of mischaracterization that makes it harder to fight back against authoritarian governments.

The fact is, the vast majority of people in authoritarian states live ordinary lives, just like everywhere else. That’s part of what makes these governments so resilient. If everyone in there lived a nightmare, they wouldn’t last for decades, they’d collapse at the first sign of instability. After all, there are a lot more people than government officials.

For example, a canny authoritarian government won’t disappear anyone who steps out of line. Instead, they’d provide a “safe, legitimate” way to step out of line, that’s well regulated and doesn’t pose a threat to the government, but serves as an outlet. And most people will be satisfied with it. That’s both more subtle, and more effective, that instilling fear in everyone’s heart.

To add about the distro framgentation, and particularly:

If I run into a software I need and it specifically indicates it’s for another flavor of Linux than the one I run, how likely is it that I can get it to work on another distro without any real trouble?

You might have. Some software is distributed as a portable binary and can run on any distro. However, many installers are distro-specific (or distro family-specific, since they’re made for a specific package manager). For example, a software packaged for Ubuntu as a .deb file would install fine on Ubuntu or Mint, and probably install fine on Debian, but if you want to install it on Fedora or Arch you’ll have to manually re-package it.

Most distro-specific software usually ships debian or ubuntu package - so you might go with that for that reason. Or Arch/Endeavor: while you’ll rarely see an official Arch package, most often someone will have already re-packaged it and put it on the AUR.

That said, for the major distros, the desktop environment makes much more difference than the distro.

I’m not sure where the Linux kernel part comes from, but if I open the article and search for “linux” or “kernel”, there are no matches…

I don’t know - but I’m willing to get the instances where people were saved weren’t calls from anonymous voip numbers.

“Just works” is not a mentality imposed by Microsoft, and has nothing to do with loss of control. It’s simply (a consequence of) the idea that things which can be automated, should be. It is about good defaults, not lack of options.

It’s certainly good, I’m not arguing that. My point is, if the wine team is interested, they can fork the unmaintained project, and work on that. Eventually, people will switch over to the active fork. What Microsoft is doing, is helping the process along, and making it easier. So it’s good, and helpful - but not really a “donation” to winehq.

I guess it’s simply the framing: It was a not very actively maintained open source project. So they’ve decided to turn it over to a new maintainer. Calling that ‘donation’ is a bit pushing it

I’m confused - why is Microsoft trying to - or expected to, by the article authors - patch a vulnerability in GRUB?

In September the NixOS constitutional assembly should finish their work, and the community will be able to elect governance. I’m guessing that’s when the drama will start getting resolved.

In the meantime, there are multiple maintainers that have left because of the drama - which is more troublesome than the board members leaving - but nixpkgs has a LOT of maintainers, and there are new ones joining all the time. It’s still healthy and won’t implode so quickly.

They are major concerns, but they aren’t the only reasons people would use Linux, and also not everyone who uses Linux does it for these reasons. For example, while I care about them, my most important reason for using it is utility features such as my tiling WM.

That only works if the main reason someone uses Linux is personal privacy.

upcoming EU AI Act that regulates open source systems differently, creating an urgent need for practical openness assessment

So when they say “openness” they do put it in the context of open source rather accessibility.

Because FOSS shouldn’t add burdens. You publish your work and let everyone else use it. That shouldn’t add extra obligations on you. Usually, you’d also write some docs - after all, without them nobody will know how to use your program, so why bother publishing - but it shouldn’t be an obligation. Make it easy for people to open up their code without this attaching strings.

Documentation is nice, but it’s kind of different thing that open source: a program can be open and undocumented, or closed but well documented - and I don’t see why we’d want it different for models.

A bunch of these columns are outright absurd TBH, to the extend I’m not sure the author really knows what FOSS is about. What’s open API access even supposed to be - API access is closed by definition.

Also there has never been a requirement that open source software needs to be documented - and for good reason - so I’m not a fan of the documentation column as well.

However, it also uses halium and libhybris. That means you can’t just install your favourite distro and upstream tools. Everything that needs GPU acceleration needs to be patched for libhybris. For example, that means no upstream wlroots - and the latest patched version I think is 0.12 or so.

Actually, no, this seems to work on a very different principle.

Not really. It seems to use a very different technology from termux.

I like the idea, but I really hate that they’ve hardcoded the provider.

How do you declaratively apply the configuration? Is that a feature of Kvaesitso?