Comment by piyh

I feel this is the chief reason why the fabled "Year of the Linux Desktop" will never be a thing.

Microsoft expects Windows to be a means to an end: You run Windows to use your computer.

Linux neckbeards expect Linux to be the end to a means: You use your computer to run Linux.

If Linux is fragmented so bad that it is completely incompatible with the way software development and support work in the real world, the problem is Linux because Windows, Mac/iOS, and Android (incidentally a flavor of Linux) can all deal with it.

Of course, if you're not interested at all in mainstream desktop Linux adoption and are content hacking away at FOSS code while grumbling about the evils of capitalism and proprietary code, then more power to you.

FSF: you have to ship your code as GPL if you want to interface properly with the Linux kernel

Software companies: OK then we won't ship our software for Linux

linux users: (surprised pikachu)

like, what exactly is the "excuse" here? FSF set a deliberately onerous license on the assumption that you will either join (because you need to use the GPL codebase) or do it yourself... and companies either do it themselves, or don't release software for the platform. Or they do and it breaks.

Same story as with ZFS basically. The license that is necessary for commercial games/software to run in the necessary ways (that require interaction with the kernel) is incompatible with the license that FSF has chosen. And you can't build an anticheat without poking at the kernel, otherwise it's trivial to hide from it.

Anti-cheat is fundamentally a problem of controlling the code that can run on an end-user's system - looking at memory or packets to scrape out useful data that the game is not presenting to the user - and that's functionally incompatible with a free software system in the first place. And attempting to do so requires interacting with the kernel, and if you're not in the kernel tree then you're chasing the kernel ABI. And anti-cheat rootkits will never be in the kernel tree anyway, period.

Where is the excuse? These are just incompatible products at every level, both conceptually and legally/licensing. That's by design, that's what GPL is intended to do as a copyleft license.

People seem to have this weird idealistic view of GPL, that it's about "protecting user freedoms" and that just makes all the problems of the world go away and everybody happily falls into line, but the mechanism by which it works is by causing problems and removing interoperability for developers of third-party software with incompatible licenses. If you don't do GPL, you can't play with the GPL codebase, and if your kernel is GPL and you need to do kernel things, then as they say - "wow, sucks to be you". But that's working as intended: GPL is a license which is intended to cause breakage and hinder developer freedoms, strategically, in the interests of greater end-user freedom in the long term.

If you just want open-source, the linux kernel should have been MIT/BSD licensed and it wouldn't have been a problem. But GPL isn't about open-source, it's about pushing back on copyright licensing as an ideology.