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In case anyone was wondering what TorrentFreak thinks of this whole thing: https://torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries-and-oppose-file-sharing-150510/
Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)
British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.
After he got a handle on it, Torvalds returned to the kernel. He's been much more mild-tempered since then. As he mentioned in Tokyo, he won't be "giving some company the finger. I learned my lesson."
This is probably a good thing.
Looking ahead, Hohndel said, we must talk about "artificial intelligence large language models (LLM). I typically say artificial intelligence is autocorrect on steroids. Because all a large language model does is it predicts what's the most likely next word that you're going to use, and then it extrapolates from there, so not really very intelligent, but obviously, the impact that it has on our lives and the reality we live in is significant. Do you think we will see LLM written code that is submitted to you?"
Torvalds replied, "I'm convinced it's gonna happen. And it may well be happening already, maybe on a smaller scale where people use it more to help write code." But, unlike many people, Torvalds isn't too worried about AI. "It's clearly something where automation has always helped people write code. This is not anything new at all."
Indeed, Torvalds hopes that AI might really help by being able "to find the obvious stupid bugs because a lot of the bugs I see are not subtle bugs. Many of them are just stupid bugs, and you don't need any kind of higher intelligence to find them. But having tools that warn more subtle cases where, for example, it may just say 'this pattern does not look like the regular pattern. Are you sure this is what you need?' And the answer may be 'No, that was not at all what I meant. You found an obvious bag. Thank you very much.' We actually need autocorrects on steroids. I see AI as a tool that can help us be better at what we do."
But, "What about hallucinations?," asked Hohndel. Torvalds, who will never stop being a little snarky, said, "I see the bugs that happen without AI every day. So that's why I'm not so worried. I think we're doing just fine at making mistakes on our own."
There were no questions about whether maintainers would start utilizing LLMs. The questions were focused on how maintainers would respond to LLM-generated (or -assisted) patches being submitted to them. This attitude seems perfectly reasonable to me, but it would have been more interesting to ask questions about whether maintainers would start using LLMs in their work. Torvalds might have responded with a more interesting answer.
What’s next? Hopefully, Microsoft won’t start injecting a poll at shutdown demanding to know why I’m turning my PC off for the day.
Well, if you decide to run Windows Server, I have news for you...
What really needs to happen:
Flatpak packages should ask for every permission they need, and the user needs to approve every one of them.
Right now, we have this weird in-between state where some flatpak packages ship with limited permissions (like Bottles). That's because every permission the package asks for is immediately granted. The user doesn't get a chance to refuse these requests. This current model serves to make life more difficult for non-malicious flatpak packagers while failing to protect users from malicious packages.
Also, GNOME needs a Flatpak permissions center like KDE. You shouldn't need to install a third party program to manage permissions.
This news is notable because a mainstream proprietary software publisher has chosen to officially distribute using Flathub. I couldn't care less about Discord, but it says a lot about Flathub's mindshare. Proprietary publishers tend to pick AppImage, but this is the first publisher I know of that has chosen Flathub instead. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a trend.
That being said, Cassidy obviously had a very active hand in convincing Discord to adopt the Flatpak package.
For a moment, I thought this meant Slack was now only going to work on Wayland compositors...
BMW thinks so too!
This is how the BMW a friend owns works, and it's not an EV. The unlock button in the driver's seat just stops working if the car is off.
How do I know this? I decided to stay in the car while my friend went to go get something, and it auto-locked as he walked away. After about 5 minutes of trying everything I could think of to get out (including attempting to climb into the boot, which was too small for anything except a malnourished child to fit through), he came back and unlocked it.
There is no manual way to unlock the door from the inside. I checked the driver's manual. It says it's impossible to do without "special knowledge" and does not provide any pointers on how to do so. The friend asked a guy at the BMW place after a service how to unlock it from the inside, and he said "oh, yeah, there's no way to do that," and laughed it off.
Previous BMW models weren't designed like this. I can't imagine what they'll do to the next generation...
Linus Torvalds, the Finnish engineer who in 1991 created the now ubiquitous Unix alternative Linux, didn’t buy into this dogma. Torvalds and others, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, believed that the culture of open exchange among engineers could coexist with commerce, and that more-restrictive licenses could forge a path toward both financial sustainability and protections for software creators and users.
It's kind of amazing that this article gets one thing right that most journalists don't, which is that pushover licenses are more restrictive toward the software's users than copyleft licenses, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that free software can be sold and the GNU Project actively encourages doing business with free software. However, I worry that by "more restrictive", this article isn't talking about passing on freedoms but instead talking about source-available licenses. I think this because it includes Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds in the same class, the former who was the CEO of a company that started the Shared Source Initiative, which was a source-available licensing program for Windows. Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds is a veteran of free software.
A little confusing, but I'll give them the benefit of the doubt here. They've got the history right for the most part.
As the tech industry grew around private companies like Sun Microsystems, IBM, Microsoft, and Apple in the late ’90s and early ’00s, new open-source projects sprang up, and established ones grew roots. Apache emerged as an open-source web server in 1995. Red Hat, a company offering enterprise companies support for open-source software like Linux, went public in 1999. GitHub, a platform originally created to support version control for open-source projects, launched in 2008, the same year that Google released Android, the first open-source phone operating system.
I don't understand why Github is being included in this list of "open source projects". Github isn't free software! It's as proprietary as it gets. Gitlab, Gitea, or Sourcehut make more sense as they are actually free software projects. It's a strange fact of life that the largest free software code forge is proprietary. I also think it does Apple a disservice by not mentioning the fact that Apple completely rebuilt its operating system on a free software BSD foundation in the late '90s, and then released parts of it as free software, like the XNU kernel, as well as CUPS, which I use today! Even as far back as the '90s, large private corporations like Apple were releasing both proprietary software and free software. Sun Microsystems of course was a much bigger free software contributor at the time.
All in all, I'm kind of confused by this paragraph. Is it trying to juxtapose "private companies" and "open-source"? Well, private companies just so happen to be the biggest contributors to the largest free software project today; the Linux kernel. Is it trying to say that private companies suddenly started releasing free software because of 'open-source'? Why list companies that have made big contributions to free software without listing those contributions, then?
This is made even more confusing when it talks about Amazon relying on the free software Java language developed by Sun, trying to make the point that private companies relied on a blend of proprietary and free software components. It confuses things a bit more by introducing patents when it starts off talking about copyright, which can also be registered for free software.
Others, including Kelsey Hightower, are more sanguine about corporate involvement. “If a company only ends up just sharing, and nothing more, I think that should be celebrated,” he says. “Then if for the next two years you allow your paid employees to work on it, maintaining the bugs and issues, but then down the road it’s no longer a priority and you choose to step back, I think we should thank [the company] for those years of contributions.”
I agree very much with this. Red Hat's many contributions to the freedesktop project come to mind.
There’s no singular definition, either. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded in 1998 to steward the meaning of the phrase, but not all modern open-source projects adhere to the 10 specific criteria OSI laid out, and other definitions appear across communities.
I find this very troubling. The OSI applied for a trademark on "Open Source" in 1999 and were not granted it. They wanted to trademark the term so no one could twist "Open Source" into something it wasn't (there's a quote earlier in the article referring to "openwashing"), meaning they foresaw this. The Open Source Definition is very specific and if we start applying the term "open source" to source-available projects (or whatever else, like Brave Search's "open" API), it loses all its meaning, and Windows suddenly becomes an open source operating system.
Here's the Open Source Definition: https://opensource.org/osd/
Read it, know it, use it appropriately. It looks a lot like the Free Software Definition.
GitHub helped lower the barrier to entry, drawing wider contribution and spreading best practices such as community codes of conduct. But its success has also given a single platform vast influence over communities dedicated to decentralized collaboration.
Yes. That's pretty scary.
While this volunteer spirit aligns with the original vision of free software as a commerce-free exchange of ideas,
...No, it was never like that. Since this article judiciously references our shared history, let's talk about how Richard Stallman funded the GNU Project. Richard Stallman originally made his living off selling GNU Emacs (free software) on tapes to programmers so he could employ developers to work on parts of the GNU Project. Free software isn't about not making money. Linus Torvalds, in fact, is the guy that originally didn't want to make money from software! He originally released Linux under a restrictive license that prevented anyone from making any money from Linux. The GNU Project celebrated the kernel when Linus released it under a free license that allowed commercial exploitation—specifically, the GNU General Public License (V2).
But allowing anyone to use, modify, and distribute AI models and technology could accelerate their misuse.
This isn't new. The GNU Project has a page about why software must not restrict people from running it. The entire point of free software is that no one is at the mercy of the developers and their ethics. Personally, I don't trust OpenAI to know what is good for me.
LLaMA 2, a new model released in July, is fully open to the public, but the company has not disclosed its training data as is typical in open-source projects—putting it somewhere in between open and closed by some definitions, but decidedly not open by OSI’s.
This demonstrates why the Open Source Definition is important and canonical.
Overall, I'd say this article actually rates better than most articles I've seen written about free software in terms of accuracy and history. It makes some good points about funding. The article also includes voices from very relevant people in the free software / open source space, which is good.
For me, it's:
- All software is shipped with as few changes as possible from upstream, so I'm getting the software as intended. If there's an issue, it's likely due to the software, not my distribution's unicorn configuration.
- Pacman. This includes PKGBUILDs, syntax, and speed.
- Good support. For all that this distribution isn't "the standard", you find install instructions in places you wouldn't expect, and more difficult things tend to work on Arch more easily than on other distributions.
- Easy to set new things up. Because Arch doesn't ship with much configuration, there's no existing configuration you need to investigate in order to wrangle it to work with something new. This is also a downside, but we'll get to that...
- Inertia. I installed it a few years ago, and I kind of want to move to openSUSE or Fedora, but I'm too comfortable here.
Downsides:
- You need to configure everything. That includes the security stuff like AppArmor and SELinux you don't understand.
- Occasional breakages. Arch doesn't break that often, but it's annoying when it does. Usually visiting bbs.archlinux.org is enough to set you on the right path.
- Some software is packaged more slowly than other rolling distributions. Notably, GNOME is usually packaged a few months after openSUSE and Fedora ship it.
- Constant updates! And HUGE updates, at that! Not great for computers you don't use often. If you do, make sure to
pacman -Sy archlinux-keyringbefore you install new updates.
It is interesting though that we find ourselves working around a bug we did not introduce triggered by code we do not control.
I imagine a lot of a browser's codebase looks like this. From what I understand, browsers expect webmasters to screw up their markup and make allowances for it.
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