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?

How is actually writing and contributing free software not “actively helping the FOSS community”?

You could do that. MIT is a very free license.

Of course, that would only be a useful thing to do if you were also going to contribute to the code.

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.

I believe that NTsync delivers better compatibility. I do not remember the details but Fsync can cause problems sometimes. So this is more like performance without compromise.

Now that it is in the kernel, I would expect Wine to move to it and for Proton to follow suit.

One less hack to maintain.

Somewhat ironic example.

X (Xorg) has been MT licensed for 40 years. So is Wayland. So is Mesa.

I think Xorg is a good example of the real world risks for something like core utils. If you did not know or care until now that X and Wayland were MIT licensed, you probably do not need to care too much about utils licensing either.

Text is better. Not perfect. Better.

That explains all the fragmentation with Xorg, Mesa, libxml, and Haiku OS.

You can import and export to CMYK but, internally, it is still sRGB.

Not even a fork. New code.

People underestimate the issues that stale packages cause as well as the fragility that comes from the ways people introduce either newer packages or packages missing from the repos.

With Arch, everything is super up-to-date and you pretty much never install from outside the repos. It makes the system extremely robust and reliable (what I want from “stable”).

Finally pacman (and yay) are awesome and I trust them to do updates of thousands of packages at once. With Debian and Ubuntu, I lived in fear of those kind of updates uninstalling essential parts of my system. I had Fedora botch more than one upgrade release to release.

So, I also find Arch the most “stable” system I have used (though Chimera is looking awesome so far as well).

In the Linux world though, the word “stable” has come to mean “static” and unchanging as in RHEL and Debian. Arch is not “stable” by that definition.

I did have an issue with Arch in the past couple years. A kernel update cause the WiFi on one laptop to stop working on the latest kernel. I also have an LTS kernel install so rebooting into that brought me back up in a minute. When I checked a few days later, the problem had been fixed in the current kernel as well.

Most of it is historical momentum. Regardless of relative quality, far more people try Fedora and so far more people stick with it.

As for Tumbleweed specifically, many people do not like rolling distros. I do.

Does Sea of Thieves work on Linux? I thought it had kernel anti-cheat.

Same boat. As a user, I greatly prefer everything to come from the repos. However, as a distributor, Flatpak makes so much more sense.

The only Flatpak I have installed is pgAdmin. I looked at the build on Flathub with the idea of porting the package myself but got scared off. It was a maze of Python dependencies running in Electron. That seems like exactly the kind of thing that may be better off in its own sandbox.

Glad it is working well for you. What does that have to do with this post?

It just has to always be the first question in a big report or forum question. Have they verified their issue with the Flatpak version?

I prefer packages from the AUR myself but I do not expect the software authors to support me. Distros need to support their own packages but the AUR is not part of the Arch distro. Arch does not support the AUR. The only support I should expect would be from the package author (the AUR package) and they likely do not have the ability.

I think the right way to understand Flatpak is that it is essentially its own Linux distro without a kernel. You have to be running that version if you expect support. People think of Flatpak as a “sandbox” which it is. But it is also like running an app in a Docker container or Distrobox where you have to pick a distro to run in the container. With Flatpak, you are running on the “freedesktop” distro. It is not the same environment as the rest of your system (right down to the filesystem layout and C library).

Fedora for PPC (I kid)

Sort of. The person that made the initial commit is not the one that quit (Rust side).

Whoosh