Comment by matheusmoreira
3 years ago
Exactly. I'm so tired of this excuse. They need to fix their own intellectual property problems, not bend the entire Linux ecosystem to their world view.
3 years ago
Exactly. I'm so tired of this excuse. They need to fix their own intellectual property problems, not bend the entire Linux ecosystem to their world view.
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.
You can absolutely choose Linux for strictly practical reasons - if you do serverside or embedded programming choosing anything else is counterproductive. But for desktop programming Linux is a struggle.
And yet, successful software are developed and run on Linux.
Doing productive distributed computing for about 25 years, most of them not spent on GNU/Linux.
Nowadays, with cloud platforms making the underlying OS transparent, even less.
You run GNU/Linux because you believe in free software. It's not surprising that you run into problems when developing nonfree software for it.
No, you run GNU/Linux for the freedom. Everyone else* runs Linux because it’s cheap, it’s fast, and it works with all their GoRust ElasticDockernetes gizmos.
We want things on our terms, not theirs. They're the ones who need to learn to do things our way, not the other way around.
Are you seriously telling me these billion dollar corporations can't manage to get in contact with some popular distribution's maintainers and work something out?
Why on earth would they ever do that? Nobody in the entire world, to several approximations, would ever know or care. I doubt any of those companies are interested in writing off the wasted dev cost for ideological purity.
>Are you seriously telling me these billion dollar corporations can't manage to get in contact with some popular distribution's maintainers and work something out?
Nope, because those Linux distros aren't making them any worthwhile money while sending over far too many worthless end-user complaints.
If Linux neckbeards truly want to realize the Year of the Linux Desktop, they have to accept how the rest of the world at large works and play by those rules. It's how Android obtained mainstream success despite being Linux, and it's something any other Linux distro can do if they ditched the neckbeard pride.
Or to put it another way: The vast majority of computer users don't care about free-as-in-freedom or open-as-in-auditable source code. The only thing users care about is getting shit done. All other operating systems, including Android, understand and respect this. It's only Linux that chooses to be either willingly naive or in denial.
9 replies →
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.
FWIW, one of the things that's been happening in FreeBSD for the past couple of years is linuxkpi; essentially implementation of various APIs that a Linux kernel would provide, implemented as wrappers around FreeBSD's native kernel APIs. This is being used for graphics drivers - For Intel and ATI FreeBSD uses the drivers from Linux kernel... 5.10 I believe. Linuxkpi, while not ideal, makes maintaining them practical, compared to gazillions of patch collisions on every merge from upstream if they were ported in a traditional way. The same is happening with WiFi drivers, and it's quite obvious that it will get more common.
Which is to say:
freebsd users: wave
Stop damning the GPLv2 no derrivatives. Given the main author, the project leads and the supporting developers and steakholders on the Linux kernel project have defined what they expect the phrase "derrived work" to mean already in extreme detail given past court cases it's closest that is and isn't expected to be allowed the lisence and its scope is now a resolved issue. Unless you plan to prosecute this in a territory in bad faith.
The ZFS situation here is a completely different (as is past bad behaviour by Nvidia/VMware) kettle of fish and doesn't need to be dragged into via a license discussion on an ABI thread.
The kernel keeps an evolving ABI as expected. This is a win pro/con for Linux, but frankly its so rare to hit an incompatability at the kernel layer it's as good as stable. More things break elsewhere typically many times before this is an issue on MacOS or Win1x for that matter...
As for anticheat what's that even got to do with Linux' API situation is beyond me.