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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available? Nobody cares but they do.

    Why do they?

    They are BSD licensed (very similar to MIT). According to the crowd here, Apple would never Open Source their changes. Yet, in the real world, they do.

    Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.

    How do we explain that?

    There are many companies that use BSD as a base. None of them have take the BSD utils “commercial”.

    Why not?

    Most of the forks have been other BSD distros. Or Chimera Linux.

    How about OpenSSH?

    It is MiT licensed. Shouldn’t somebody have embraced, extended, and extinguished it by now?

    Why haven’t they?


  • Some people might say that so many companies contributing free and open code to clang/llvm instead of GCC is real world evidence against the idea that companies only contribute to free software because the GPL makes them. Or even that permissive licenses can lead to greater corporate sharing than the GPL does. Why does Apple openly contribute to LLVM but refuse to ship GPL3 anything?

    According to the web, Red Hat is the most evil company in Open Source. They are also the biggest contributor to Xorg and Wayland. Those are MIT licensed. Why don’t they just keep all their code to themselves? The license would allow it after all. Why did they license systemd as GPL? They did not have to.

    The memory allocator used in my distro was written by Microsoft. I have not paid them a dime and I enjoy “the 4 freedoms” with the code they gave me because it is completely free software. Guess what license it uses?




  • Since you seem so reasonable…

    The restriction that some people object to is that the GPL restricts the freedom of the software developers (the people actually writing and contributing the code).

    Most people would agree at first glance that developers should be able to license code that they write under whatever license they like. MIT is one option. Some prefer the GPL. Most see the right to choose a proprietary license for your own work as ok but some people describe this as unethical. I personally see all three as valid. I certainly think the GPL should be one of the options.

    That said, if we are talking about code that already exists, the GPL restricts freedom without adding any that MIT does not also provide.

    MIT licensed software is “free software” by definition. Once something has been MIT licensed, it is Open Source and cannot be taken away.

    The MIT license provides all of the Free Software Foundations “4 freedoms”. It also provides freedoms that the GPL does not.

    What the MIT license does not provide is guaranteed access to “future” code that has not yet been written. That is, in an MIT licensed code base, you can add new code that is not free. In a GPL code base, this is not possible.

    So, the GPL removes rights from the developers in that it removes the right to license future code contributions as you want. Under the GPL, the right of users to get future code for free is greater than the right of the developer to license their future contributions. Some people do not see that as a freedom. Some even see it as quite the opposite (forced servitude). This “freedom” is not one of the “4 freedoms” touted by the FSF but it is the main feature of the GPL.













  • Having these guys shill for Tesla is not going to help the stock. It looks desperate. It turns off the core buyers even more.

    There are two groups of Republican at this point. There are quite a small number of ultra rich people. There is an army of mostly not that well off folks. The latter cannot afford Teslas and have seen them as the enemy forever. This is going to highlight that the main GOP principle is supporting rich allies. It shines sunlight on a very dangerous fact.

    Elon is really unpopular right now and “regular” republicans feel like he and DOGE are attacking them. Then they see the Trump administration rallying to support him. The GOP does not care about them but does care about him.

    This could backfire on the GOP and it is not going to sell a lot of cars.



  • The US will not invade Canada. At some point, it would require political integration. It would be a generation after that before the Republicans won an election.

    There are 40 million people in Canada and more land area than the entire US. At least 75% of Canadians would vote Democrat and that is before the bitterness of an invasion. Even as a single state Canada would swing the House and every President. As multiple states, Canada would swing the Senate. Think of the Supreme Court that would be appointed. The GOP would be completely locked out.

    Just allowing Canadians already in the US to vote would have cost the Republicans every presidential race since Reagan.

    For the above reasons alone, somebody will stop Trump from pulling the trigger. The US will not invade Canada. Even if they did, they would give it back.

    That said, Trump may wage an unbelievably destructive trade war. And the end game for that may be for Canada to submit to total subservience to the US.

    We are in a negotiation. The threat of war is just part of that. We hold some decent cards. By appeasing Trump, we start to lose cards. We can get more cards by aligning with the rest of the world both economically, militarily, and socially as fast as possible. The good news is, the world seems to be there for it.