You don’t need to have wired across the room. You can put them through the wall like every other cable. If the wire tubes are not full, it isn’t very complicated. I put my Ethernet wires in the wall.

The definition of “operating systems” is not really clear. Some say the operating system is what is called the “kernel”. In the case of Linux operating systems, that kernel is called “Linux”. Most people, however, say that the operating system is the whole thing you install. That is, the kernel + a bunch of other apps.

For example, in windows: notepad, internet explorer (now edge), paint, and all those apps are part of the operating system, that’s what people mean when they say “windows”. It’s the whole package. Other less obvious parts are drivers for example.

In the case of Linux, most distributions ship with a bunch of GNU programs.

“Akschually people” argue that the GNU parts are as important (if not more) as Linux itself for the operating system, so they feel like all the hard work of the GNU developers is shadowed by the people that say “Linux”.

China has more infrastructure than what it needs. What they should do instead is not have their entire population as slaves. What does economic growth mean if the population earns almost no money. They don’t even consume the products they produce, almost all of it is exported. They are billions of people, it’s not like there’s a lack of demand, they just don’t have the money to buy what they produce.

Out of all the games I tried to play, only one of them worked.

PS3 in particular has very weird hardware. There aren’t any good PS3 emulators for PC. Basically the only way to play PS3 games is on an actual PS3.

The same Xi that violates Taiwan’s airspace continuously. That increases the airspace violations whenever Taiwan does something that he doesn’t like, like democratically electing pro-independence politicians or when US politicians visit Taiwan.

Yeah sure Xi, the only reason you threaten Taiwan’s democracy is because the US tricked you into it.

I know that the end user is the focus of GPL. But me, when choosing a library, as a user, I tend to avoid using GPL ones, because they restrict my freedom. In consequence, my end users (of which there are aproximately 0 anyway) don’t get GPL code either way.

How does GPL prevent Raytheon from using their software?

Open source is open source.

If I don’t want my software being used to make weapons I just won’t make weapon-related software. If they wanna use my 3D graphics library to display their missiles, cool, idgaf, that’s like putting ethical burden on a restaurant that serves food to soldiers because a military base was built nearby. The restaurant was there before the military base opened, and it’s not like they’re gonna use their food to kill people.

Well, it did improve someone’s live, didn’t it? I’m not claiming my library that has 3 stars on GitHub is gonna revolutionize all of humanity. But it’s a little improvement. That contributes to having a more complete software ecosystem.

That code is now available to everyone that wants it. If they need it, it’s there to use. Better than every company having to reimplements for the thousandth time the same closed software.

Which brings me to another point I didn’t mention before. If a company uses an open source library, even if they are not required to publish their improvements to the library, they might do anyway because it is easier than maintaining their own fork and migrating every upstream change.

Yes, of course GPL is good for some things. But it being called the pinnacle of freedom is just wrong. It claims that it’s freedom for the users, but that’s not true.

In the case of libraries, the users of the libraries are not the end users of the program. The users of the library are the developers. GPL is NOT freedom for developers.

I completely agree that programs having a GPL license is positive. You can even use them with complete freedom in commercial settings!

You can, but for most software companies that would mean changing the business model.

If a company has to change its business model just to use a library, they just won’t use that library.

.ml and antagonizing everyone for not having the exact same opinions. Name a better duo.

Yes, end products licensed as GPL are good. I use many of them. Libraries, however, are just avoided by companies and they just develop their own.

I prefer my libraries MIT licensed because then there’s a chance that people out there use it to develop products. If I make a GPL library then only products that were already GPL would use it. And there are way more proprietary products than GPL.

You seem angry at me because I don’t license my code as GPL. Is that what freedom means now? Freedom means everyone has to use the license I want or I’ll bully them!

It’s the code I wrote, let me license it however the fuck I want if I’m not using your code.

GPL means big corporations just won’t use it. If they have to make their software open source, they will just search for an alternative or make their own.

If I choose MIT it’s because I don’t care if people “steal” the code. This meme is stupid and condescending, if he didn’t mind that Intel used it’s code it’s because he didn’t mind, that why he chose MIT. Why is Intel beating him in the meme? It makes no sense. You are proyecting your thoughts onto him as if that’s how he felt, but then you show that he didn’t feel the same way you do. Why?

When I see a GPL license I don’t see freedom. I only see forced openness, which makes me immediately avoid that library, since I can’t statically link to it.

Freedom means that everyone can use your code. Yes, that means for-profit corporations. For free, without restrictions.

If I want to make a piece of software to improve people’s lives and I don’t care to do it for free, I’ll choose MIT. If it gets “stolen” by a for-profit corporation it only makes it better, because now my software has reached more people, thus (theoretically) improving their lives.

More like a democracy with no term limits and a leader with 90+% popularity rate.

Sure, steam looks powerful, as if they can do whatever they want. But you have to look at why steam is so powerful, it’s because people like steam. If steam uses that power for anticompetitive behavior, people will stop liking steam and it will lose a lot of power.

Just like if the leader does something that the people don’t like, suddenly the approval rating is no longer at 90+% and he loses the next election.

Tbf monopolies are sometimes unavoidable. Like the water company or the energy company (at least the ones that actually own the cables). Usually natural monopolies are nationalized though.

Even if steam is not a natural Monopoly, competition is possible, we allow it to be a monopoly because we like it, not the other way around. There are plenty of digital stores, you can at any time buy almost any game from an alternative, I’m not aware of steam having any exclusivity agreement with any game (except the ones that valve made).

Valve also doesn’t use shopping platform monopoly methods such as artificially making process low by selling at a loss, which is the main problem with other monopolies like Amazon.

It also doesn’t bundle 100 unnecessary services to the subscription. It doesn’t even have a subscription.

Sure, you can’t move your steam games to another platform, but you can get new ones. It’s not much of a problem having games from different platforms anyway, GoG for example even let’s you launch steam games from the GoG launcher. And you can always go back to good old shortcuts on a folder.

The moment steam starts enshittifing, it will be very easy to switch to another platform. Compared with other platforms, like any social media or YouTube.

I use home edition and never had this problem. EU windows is much better though, maybe this is a USA windows thing.

Well, of course you can have few indent levels by just not indenting, I don’t think the readability loss is worth it though. If I had give up some indentation, I’d probably not indent the impl {} blocks.