Sorry for the compound-sentence question.

The first part is in reference to this story which I've seen in a few different publications now.

Today, I happened to look up the price of Bitcoin (because it was relevant to a conversation I was having) and found it had shot up recently and was now at about $77,400 (up from the $63,000 when I last checked). Doing a little bit of searching, it seemed like the reason was the bond buyback.

(Sorry also for the sensationalistic hype article. I'm about as critical of blockchain snake oil as anyone can be. But I didn't find a better article about why it affected the price of Bitcoin.)

My questions are, in simple terms:

• Is it roughly correct that buying a U.S. Treasury bond is loaning the U.S. money?
• And that this story about bonds is basically saying that the U.S. government is "working on paying off its debts" (to bond holders)?
• How is the interest rate on bonds decided?
• What are bond "yields" exactly? (Is that just the same as the interest rate on bonds?)
• Why are yields skyrocketing?
• What reason does the treasury secretary give for buying back bonds?
• Are there probable hidden ulterior motives for doing so? If so, what are they?
• It seems like the idea to buy back bonds came from the White House, so this is probably a MAGA thing, yes? (Or is it more bipartisan than that?)
• Who (if anyone) thinks the buyback is a bad idea and why?
• Why are the blockchain bros so excited? What do they think this has to do with cryptocurrencies?

Thank you in advance, people! I like to think I know a fair amount about a fair amount, but finance (let alone fake blockchain Libertarian fairy tail finance) definitely isn't my strong suit, and I'm curious to know more about the dynamics at play here and where they're likely to lead.

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.bestiver.se/post/1301386

Comments

The question is basically the title.

It's very hit-and-miss. But mostly miss. That picture of a cat hiding under wrapping paper taunts me.

It doesn't seem to be related to what instance the content is on. But I haven't been able to find any pattern.

Is there an alternative (for non-instance-admins) that works more reliably?

Context

The whole list of "top 10 best Linux apps" is already nonsensical. But just wait until I go one-by-one.

• Vim - Honestly, a bit heaver-weight than I'd like. The customizations I do are quite minimal and mostly involve turning features (like autoindent and syntax highlighting for instance) off.
• Nechet - Never heard of it. Does it actually exist or is the name "Nechet" an hallucination? I can't find anything about "Nechet" on DuckDuckGo. And the description in the image under "Nechet" mentions "nmap"...? Searching "nechet nmap" yields no useful information. I think "Nechet" is the Madthumbs equivalent of "covfefe".
• Htop - Yeah, pretty good and useful app I use on a fairly regular basis. Not as often as I used to have to use Task Manager 20 years ago when I primarily used Windows.
• Ranger - Never heard of it until now, but at least this one exists. I really don't think it belongs on a "top 10" list. I've heard of Midnight Commander, but I've never felt the need to use it.
• Curl/Wget - That's two apps, both of which are incredibly useful. In my day job, I maintain an extensive RESTful API, and I prefer Curl over Postman. When downloading attachments from the web, all else being equal, I prefer Wget over my browser.
• NCMPCPP - Again, never heard of it until now, but it does exist. Sounds pretty cool. Maybe some day I'll have a reason to use it.
• BAT - Never heard of it. Looks like a CLI syntax highlighter. Not that the description in the slop image would tell you. WTF does "The only thing pretty pretty in pretty in my CLI" mean?
• BTOP - Never heard of it, but it looks like it's kindof "yet another TOP/HTOP clone". Why have both this and HTOP in the same list? It's just slop. That's why.
• TMUX - Yup. I've used it, but it's a little too heavy for my taste. I prefer dtach for CLI detaching/reattaching functionality. It's been a long time since I've used a terminal multiplexer, but I liked DVTM the last time I used such. Dtach and DVTM can also be combined to get mostly everything TMUX (or screen) supports.
• SSH - Likely the one app in the list that actually most belongs on a "top 10" list.

Clearly Madthumbs didn't give a fuck about the content of his posts. He's apparently the sort of person who copy/pastes shit out of an LLM and takes credit.

I don't do a lot of travel between cities, so mostly the driving routes I take are pretty close to home.

I have a couple of appointments over the next week and have prepared by planning my driving routes to avoid Flock cameras in my area entirely.

Of course deflocked.org may not be perfectly up-to-date, so it might have some false negatives, but at least I'll be doing my best.

It's my intention moving forward to simply never drive(/do the worm/parachute/unicycle/etc) anywhere a Flock camera can see me moving forward. We'll see how long that remains feasible as my city, I expect, keeps installing more cameras.

For anyone else also doing this, how far out of your way are you having to go? For me, it's not terrible, but I don't know necessarily what the density of Flock cameras is like in other cities.

(I'm in the U.S. midwest if that helps.)

I ran across this video the other day that I thought did a great job of summing up all the reasons why I intend never to touch GenAI bullshit.

And it's from a former "vibe coder". I'll definitely be keeping this in my back pocket to share with people who ask me why I eschew GenAI.

I know that "past the best-by date" doesn't necessarily mean "unsafe" or illegal to sell. And to be fair, most of what I'm talking about is canned/jarred sort of stuff that probably is pretty decent for a good amount of time after the best-by date.

But...

I used to do my regular shopping at the place within walking distance of my house, but they had kindof a scandal and were terribly mismanaged and just within the last few years, it became clear it was no longer safe to eat food from there. (Not just "past its best-by date", though that definitely started happening. "Fresh" produce isn't fresh and smells terrible already on the shelf, cheese is moldy on the shelf even when it isn't past its date, etc.) They're still open (they do have the advantage of being the closest grocery store to a big highway for folks driving through/near my town not familiar enough with my town to know better) but it's very clear that their customer base has shrunk drastically and it wouldn't surprise me at all if the whole chain closed or sold or some such in the near-ish future. Before they went down hill, I don't think I'd ever really seen anything on the shelf that was past the best-by date at that store or any other. Maybe extremely infrequently at most, and it was usually because something was obviously "lost" somehow. Kicked under a display case or way in the back of the shelf in the wrong section of the store behind stuff that stays stocked up or some such.

So I switched my regular shopping routine to the fancy new grocery store a little bit further away. (This location was built within the last 5 years and I started shopping there pretty exclusively about 2 or 3 years ago.) It's fairly ritzy. (There was a time when I would have called the other store "ritzy" as well.) But tons of stuff is past its best-by date on the shelves. Dry/powdered spices, condiments (hot sauces in particular), jarred pickled stuff, etc. All months or sometimes years past their best-by dates. But even the things that aren't already past their best-by dates are hard to get with a decent best-by or expiration date. Milk in particular is often hard to find with an expiration date more than a week out (and usually milk does start to taste off like a day or two after that expiration date at most), so I tend to buy it in quarts.

(I also know there are stores dedicated to dumping substandard/old food on poorer communities for a lower price. But I really don't think that's a factor here.)

I dunno. Just seems weird compared to my previous experience to see things on the store shelves already past their best-by date. Do you folks avoid buying things from the grocery store that are past their best-by dates?

I'm in the U.S. midwest if that makes a difference. And I wonder if the fucking tariffs might be a big factor in that. Maybe keeping things on the shelf past their best-by dates is a way to reduce the costs for the store while they're having to pay a lot more for goods, allowing them to pass the cost on to consumers partially in the form of lower-quality, less fresh food so they can reduce how much of the cost they pass on to customers in the form of prices going up.

Or maybe this has always been more common than I realized and I've just gotten more observant more recently. 🤷

Edit: Ok, I'll name and shame. I guess I only avoided doing so to avoid doxing myself, but yeah. The first store I mentioned that is just terrible is a Price Cutter location. The second store is a HyVee.

Context

Take a look at that post first. The rest of this won't make any sense unless you do.

What on earth does that have to do with Linux? Maybe Madthums is anti-Android because the Android kernel is a fork of Linux? It's not entirely clear from his post history what his opinion is on Android. But just for one quote, he did say:

An Android is technically using the Linux kernel, but no one out of his or her mind would call an Android a Linux.

He's made his disdain for F-Droid clear many times in the past, but I'm not quire sure how Madthumbs' original post is really relevant to F-Droid either. F-Droid's official repository doesn't include FUTO Keyboard (because FUTO Keyboard's license is not FOSS and F-Droid only carries FOSS in its official repository.)

FUTO Keyboard can be installed via F-Droid but only because FUTO provides an F-Droid repository that must be manually added to F-Droid. Blaming F-Droid for FUTO Keyboard's failings is like blaming your ISP because you don't like the pizza topping preferences expressed in a post you found on Facebook.

Mind you, FUTO's fucking evil and deserves a huge amount of condemnation. But I honestly think Madthumbs must be confused about something to be making that particular post in his anti-Linux community.

Hopefully this is a good place to ask this question.

I think of myself as "generally tech-savvy", at least in some ways. But my expertise is way more STEM-y and less related to any artistic pursuits than maybe this calls for, so this particular problem is well outside my area of expertise and I haven't been able to solve it satisfactorally.

My mother has been warring with the problem of colors not being the same between her monitor and her printer for a very long time. She doesn't do photography per se (but I figured probably if any community would have expertise that could help, it'd probably be this one), but she does a lot of crafts that involve printing stuff. Right now, the main craft she's into in that area is that she's decorating a dollhouse and wants to print wallpaper to affix to the walls. It's all mid-century modern and she's pretty picky about the color scheme.

Her concern is that when she makes or finds an image that looks good on her computer and prints it, the result from the printer looks "pink-tinted" relative to what's on the screen. The hue is off.

I've done a good amount of research on the subject and advised her on how to try to resolve the issue. First she got a SpyderExpress Colorimeter to calibrate her monitor. That one doesn't support calibrating the printer, but it was (relatively) cheap and I thought maybe it would be good enough. The profile I got from that definitely changed the colors on the screen, but the result wasn't really any closer to what was on the printed page. So she got a Calibrite ColorChecker Stuido which does support calibrating both monitor and printer. (Even projectors, which is cool, but irrelevant to my question.) Using both the monitor profile and the printer profile produced by the Calibrite device and software still didn't give great results.

Side note: she's on a Windows 11 laptop, and of course built-in laptop screens don't typically support things like color adjustment or anything. So I lent her an external monitor for these experiments. It's a cheap, fairly old ViewSonic LCD monitor (a VS15451 if that helps any). Not to use forever, but at least to validate whether an external monitor with more controls than the built-in laptop monitor would be likely to have some success. This monitor does support things like tweaking the individual R, G, and B channels of the output. I spent a good deal of time tweaking everything to be exactly as the Calibrite software asked and all. But didn't get result that matched well between the monitor and printed page.

Another side note: She doesn't have Photoshop and doesn't really want to invest in Photoshop. She's using Paint.net primarily. And mostly the experiments we've done used a Brother color laser printer on regular typing paper. (She wants to use the laser printer in partiulcar because the pigments won't run/bleed if you use glue on it.)

My mother's pretty frustrated with all of this and she can't imagine that, say, professional photographers could possibly have to tweak colors and "guess" what the image will look like when it comes out the printer, so she thinks surely there must be some solution.

Mind you, I understand that there are colors that monitors can't produce and colors that printers can't produce, and which ones can't be produced may not line up. (Plus the monitor is backlit and paper isn't and that of course will affect what colors each medium can produce. Also, the lighting in the room can make a difference as far as color perception is concerned.) She doesn't really understand that. (Like, it kindof doesn't compute to her that a hex code isn't some universal, objective standard of color.) But still, I'd think she should be able to get better results than she's getting.

Also, I guess I'll mention that she does have cateracts and good reasons why she can't have them treated at this particular time. But her perception of the difference in color between what comes out of the printer and what appears on screen (whether with or without applying the Calibrite-produced color profiles) seems greater than mine. But... is it unreasonable to think that isn't "the whole issue" because catacts should be expected to reduce the perceived difference btween colors rather than increase it? (I hope the admission that she has cataracts won't make everybody throw up their hands and withold any other helpful advise. I don't have cataracts and again, I feel like probably we should be able to get better results than we're getting.)

I'll mention that the other thing she doesn't really "get" is that changing how the monitor displays colors (by applying a color profile, say) won't change what comes out of the printer when you print. She's asked me several times after recalibrating a monitor "ok, now print it out again and let's see how it looks". I have to remind her that if I print it out again using the same printer profile, it'll produce the exact same image in exactly the same colors. Also, I've had to explain to her that after applying a monitor color profile, the image won't look like it does now, and even if you did have color parity between monitor and printer, you'd have to edit the colors on the image after applying the monitor profile to look "how you want".

I also tried taking a photo of a printed page next to the monitor to show the color disparity here, but the difference in color on the photo is basically imperceptable (but in person it's not).

I guess my question at this point is: is there any hope of getting better color parity than what I've tried has produced, and if so, what would be my best direction to go?

I guess the approaches I have in mind off the top of my head are:

• Better/different monitor.
• Better/different printer. (Maybe inkjet is better for color? I dunno.)
• Better/different paper.
• Better/different colorimeter?
• Better/different computer? (I mean, Macs have a reputation for being good for this kind of thing, but I can't imagine that getting better color parity on a Windows machine would be a complete no-go.)
• Maybe I'm missing something super basic and I just need a little more knowledge.
• Maybe we're just being unrealisticly picky about color parity?
• Maybe nothing can be done without cataract surgery?

She's asked that I pick out a new monitor that may fix the issue, but we've sunk a fair amount of money into things we thought should help and at this point I'm not terribly confident that just throwing more money at the problem without getting better information from someone with expertise in the area will help.

If you do end up recommending that we purchase a product, I'd appreciate specific model recommendtations. (Like, if we should get another colorimeter, which specific one? Or if we need a better monitor, which one would you recommend?)

Definitely if there's more info I can provide, please ask! And thanks in advance for any advice you can provide!

My mother's birthday is coming up, and she loves jewelry and likes QVC's stock. So I went to qvc.com and navigated to one of the categories. In response, I got the following:

Not sure why I go the error message, but it's funny that the response code is 418.

(Also, I don't get that error if I use Chromium.)

I posted about this once before, but...

The long and short is:

• Vizio put a bunch of GPL'd software on their TVs in compiled/binary form only in violation of the terms of the GPL.
• the Software Freedom Conservancy is suing Vizio to force them to follow the terms of the GPL and release the source code of said GPL'd software.
• The courts seem quite sympathetic to the SFC's arguments.
• And if the SFC wins, we can expect 1) a FOSS Linux distribution for smart TV's (think OpenWRT but for smart TVs) and 2) moving forward, demands for GPL compliance to consumer electronics manufacturers from regular folks like you and me will have more "teeth" than they did previously, potentially resulting in a proliferation of new FOSS distributions for various consumer electronic devices.

I really think this is something to get excited about, and I can't wait to follow along as more news comes out about the proceedings.

Full disclosure, the trial has been delayed at the last minute more than once already, so I suppose there's a possibility it won't start tomorrow, but I think this is more "last minute" than any of the last delays have been. So I'm crossing my fingers extra hard.

Edit: Damn! Looks like it got delayed again. Now the trial date is listed as "late 2026". :(

Context

Toolchains? GCC and LLVM exist because proprietary Unix and proprietary compiler research came first.

The first compilers were made in the 1940s, well before software covered by copyright in the U.S (which started in 1980). Even well before people started thinking to lock down source code under NDAs. Non-proprietary was the norm for software for several decades, just like non-proprietary is the norm for recipes and fashion designs today. (Terms like "Free Software" didn't exist until later just because they were a response to the rise of proprietary software.) And much development was done under those conditions.

OpenGL

Funny he should mention OpenGL given that it's FOSS, as is its successor Vulkan. Speaking of which, a snippet from the Wikipedia page for Vulkan:

[Vulkan's] overall concept and feature set ... were later adopted by Microsoft with Direct3D 12 and by Apple with Metal. - Wikipedia page for Vulkan

Tux Racer is the ceiling in that alternate universe

I'm pretty fond of Luanti, myself.

ASCII penguin sliding down a slope made of slashes and backslashes.

Does Madthumbs know what ASCII is?

FOSS is terrible at inventing entire industries from scratch.

Just as an example, the home 3d printing ecosystem started in the FOSS space and is still dominated by FOSS projects. And the development of home 3d printing was prevented for a good while by patents -- proprietary development hindered and continues to hinder that particular industry. Asshole proprietary companies and industry practices have tried to make inroads into that particular sphere, but the two mix like oil and water. It kindof feels like maybe the reason why FOSS has ruled in 3d printing is because proprietary innovation models are antithetical to the existence of such an industry.

Meanwhile, the sort of industries that live solidly in more proprietary areas can't really be engaged in without making a "deal with the devil" as it were. Anti-cheat is probably one of the better examples I can come up with. But hell, my car has in its privacy policy that it will damned well record any audio in the cabin of my car and send those recordings back to the mothership where they'll do WTF ever they want to with it.

Proprietary development may innovate, but it makes stuff that actively works against your best interests.

I find I often have direct, simple, pointed questions regarding the content of Madthumbs' posts. But he bans everyone who asks questions in his community, so I can't very well ask my questions in the obvious place (in the thread that brought up the question). So if I'm to ask him such questions, I'll have to ask somewhere else. Somewhere like here.

This thread is for anyone who has a question for Madthumbs. Theoretically, we could just make a whole post every time we have questions for him, but I figured in the interest of keeping the Linuxsucks Sucks community tidy, it might make sense to keep them to one thread.

So! If you have a question for Madthumbs, just @ him here and ask your question. I don't have any control over Madthumbs, so who knows if he'll answer. But there's only one way to find out.

I'm kindof thinking of this thread being mostly for direct questions with factual answers, not for long debates or anything. Probably best to keep it to that, I'm thinking. But then again, I'm not your dad. (Or Madthmbs'.)

context

He starts his post with: "LLM Answer:", making it clear the following is just copy-pasted from ChatGPT or some such.

What I have to wonder is: what makes this post special? He's definitely getting most of his content from LLMs. Why actually call it out in this one?

I think probably because he and his target audience trust LLMs. By calling out that this one's straight from an LLM, he's trying to make folks think it's some source of objective truth rather than just... like... his opinion man.

As for the content of the post, just go search monster.com for "Linux". You'll find lots of listings for over $100,000 yearly salary positions.

context

Just like MAGAts and other fascists portraying "woke" or "antifa" as some insidious thing, so have corporate interests (and in this case, their shills) villified anything they can't exploit for profit.

In responding to the post on /c/linuxsucks, may I first point out the irony of dunking on the GPL on a platform running on software licensed under the AGPL, while also advocating for Lemmy to people on Reddit.

To the content of his post.

We’ve dickered over changing the rules to focus on GPL rather than ‘FOSS Advocates’. -But the thing is; it would confuse some and FOSS advocates are really generally GPL cultists. So, disregard this information when it comes to the rules because the rules are in a way that’s understood to most people.

"We"? Who is "we"? On a previous post where he used that particular plural pronoun, I assumed he was intending to post the same post to his Reddit community which does have multiple mods. But neither that one nor this one has been posted there. Now I'm starting to think rather than from ChatGPT or whatever, most of his posts are summarily copied from Reddit posts, and not (only) Reddit posts in /r/linuxsucks101 -- Madthumbs' own subreddit.

1. Permissive FOSS (BSD, MIT, Apache)

• Freedom = you can do anything with the code
• Including: make it proprietary...

Well, yeah. If a developer doesn't want, say, a corporation to redistribute their software in a way that denies downstream users the rights they intend for the software to have, that's exactly the point of a copylefted license.

1. Copyleft FOSS (GPL)

• Freedom = you must keep derivatives free
• If you distribute a combined work, you must publish your source
• Focus: preserving openness through enforcement

What do they expect? That big corporations are going to just nicely comply with a pleasant request? Yes, the terms of the license require enforcement.

• It’s “freedom via restriction,” which is philosophically contradictory for many people

Tell me you haven't actually thought through any of what you're arguing without telling me you haven't thought through what you're arguing.

Both are legally FOSS.

"Legally"? Where in "law" is this definition of "FOSS" exactly? They don't say, of course.

Permissive licenses give you freedom. GPL gives you obligations.

It's not necessarily true that permissive licenses don't give you obligations. BSD- and MIT-style licenses have requirements regarding preserving certain notices when conveying copies of the software. By the author's logic, FOSS licenses shouldn't exist. All software that isn't intended to be proprietary should be dedicated to the public domain.

The GPL is anti-freedom

War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

it does not allow you to:

• build whatever you want
• integrate with whatever you want
• ship whatever you want
• keep your own code private

Literally none of these are true in the slightest.

GPL culture historically treated:

permissive licenses as “sellouts”

[citation needed]

proprietary extensions as “immoral”

That's not entirely untrue, particularly where the FSF is concerned. But... honestly... aren't they, though?

commercial use as “exploitation”

Well yeah. It is.

You can’t mix GPL with:

• App Store distribution

Huh. They actually have more of a point than I realized. This is the first I'd heard that GPL'd code can't be distributed on Steam, for instance. I have no idea what Steam's thought process would be other than "we want to exploit people and the GPL thing gets in the way of that", really. Maybe they think they can't distribute compiled GPL'd code and include with it the source code or a written offer thereof (that they can make good on). But that's clearly false. They could easily just include the source code in the install directory.

• closed-source drivers

If what he's referring to is that you can't make proprietary Linux drivers, he's (at least in theory) correct. But if that hadn't been the case, we wouldn't have OpenWRT or DDWRT today. (The origin of OpenWRT is that the SFC helped copyright holders to sue Linksys to release many Linux drivers on their WRT54G router. When they did (though I think it was settled out-of-court), a FOSS distribution was built for the WRT54G, and OpenWRT traces its ancestry back to that distribution.)

• proprietary libraries

They're being pretty imprecise here. The position of the FSF is that dynamic linking proprietary code against GPL'd libraries is not any kind of violation of the license, but static linking is. But the way the author of this post is putting it, it sounds like it violates the terms of the license to create a Linux distribution with both proprietary and GPL'd code on it.

• many cloud deployment models
• embedded systems with NDA’d firmware

I have no idea what they're referring to with either of these.

The GPL code becomes isolated, not collaborative.

Still preferable to proprietary code.

The industry overwhelmingly prefers permissive licensing. Look at the last 15 years of major infrastructure:

• Go → BSD
• Rust → MIT/Apache
• Swift → Apache
• TensorFlow → Apache
• React → MIT
• VS Code → MIT
• Kubernetes → Apache
• LLVM → Apache
• WebAssembly → Apache

GPL is essentially absent from modern foundational tech.

Can't argue with that, but I wish it would change.

It’s a relic of a 1990s ideology where “freedom” meant “everyone must share.”

I think they're saying that GPL "forces you to share". It does no such thing. You're perfectly free never to share any GPL code with anyone. You can take anything I've put under the GPL (though I tend toward the AGPL) and make derivative works of it and never distribute those. There's no requirement that you share.

And if you want to keep your source code proprietary, just make your code dynamically link against GPL'd code, not statically.

If software is truly free, why impose usage restrictions?

Simple. To keep it truly free.

By imposing restrictions, you’re admitting the software has value

Huh? Was that something I wasn't supposed to admit?

-but also declaring the original developer isn’t entitled to monetize that value.

This doesn't make sense. Unless it's work-for-hire, it's the original developer putting it under the GPL. Even if they think the GPL doesn't allow for profit (which is not the case), what do they have against the author doing so to themself? Is this author saying that there are companies hiring people to write GPL'd code and insodoing denying them the ability to make money off of it? If that's what they're saying, they're wrong. It's legal to sell GPL'd code whether you own the copyright on it or not. And the developer's clout in the community can also be leveraged into work opportunities.

Yeah, this bit just doesn't make sense to me. I wonder if it make sense to the author.

-this is before LLM rewording (my own words):

Certain software becomes practical to make free, and if it’s really free, why bother limiting its use? -By doing that; you’re saying it holds value, but the original dev isn’t entitled to monetize it directly.

(does it matter?)

Yuck. Whoever posted this originally wherever it was originally posted uses LLMs to write their posts. Let me state now that none of my words in this or any post I've ever made came from an LLM except ones blatantly making fun of LLMs being stupid or evil, and I intend to keep it that way.

Finally, two comments that I thought were worth preserving:

I feel that GPL should be even more Free (“restrictive” in your parlor). That’s why I prefer AGPL.

You try to pass the open source licenses that are permissive as a good thing just because “the industry prefers them”. So what? We now know what corporations do with it, using the code, never giving back, and milking their customers in the process and selling their data. And that permissive license and that code are essentially an accomplice to that.

I mean, look at the BSDs. They used it, few gave back, and the projects are in a state of disarray compared to Linux.

So yeah, A/GPL all the way. In fact, I believe that a more modern GPL, that contains the AGPL points, plus new AI stuff, needs to be released by the FSF. More “restrictive”, not less. Because it’s the only way to ensure that the code is not misused.

• @eugenia@[email protected] (post removed and user banned from /c/linuxsucks).

I would argue that GPL gives more freedom to the end user than the license so beloved by corporations: MIT.

GPL imposes corporations to not take away freedoms; MIT does not.

Imagine you purchase a device that comes with GPL firmware. You are legally entitled to a copy of the source code, so that you can exercise your freedom to customize it to your needs.

Now imagine you buy the same device, but its firmware is MIT. You have no rights on the software.

Don’t fall victim of the illusion that MIT is more free than (A)GPL just because it has less impositions, it’s a trap! Those impositions are actually privileges for the end user.

• @[email protected] (not removed and user not banned, but I'd be surprised if that didn't change soon).

(Also, if anyone whose post I preserved here would like their post removed, please let me know and I'll be happy to oblige.)

Context

What he's doing is exactly what's he's accusing Linux users of.

• He's clearly more obsessed with "purity" than the significant majority of Linux users are.
• His absolutist thinking in the face of obvious evidence to the contrary similarly would make many consider him cultish.
• He uses Linux whether he realizes it or not. (Even if he's careful to research every smart/embedded/applicance device he has to make sure it doesn't use Linux, which itself seems both unlikely and cultish, it's very unlikely that none of the switches and routers that relay his HTTP requests to lemmy.world run Linux, for instance.)
• He expels and silences anyone who disagrees. Not even just those who disagree. Those who ask a question, even. Those who have the audacity to think. (I was banned from /c/linuxsucks for asking for a source for an assertion he made.)

To some of his specific points in that post:

• He thinks Linux users should be using Uutils rather than GNU coreutils without giving any reason to think it's better except an empty assertion. I'd literally never heard of Uutils until his post mentioned it. It didn't have a website before late last year as far as I can tell. He thinks Linux users will reject it for not being "pure", but Ubuntu is working on adopting it as the default coreutils implementation.
• He spouts some bullshit about how Linux users spend hundreds of hours learning and fixing broken things are succumbing to "sunk cost falacy" as if Microsoft doesn't a) make you jump through ridiculous amount of hoops just to get Windows installed and b) excel in vendor lock-in.
• He accuses Linux users of evangelizing. I'll present this bullet point without further comment.
• He accuses Linux users of schisms and forks after in previous posts advocating for using Tiny10/Tiny11 and Haiku.
• He calls technical documentation "sacred text". The fact that he doesn't see any value in technical documentation explains a lot, but honestly I think this one is more just that he got ChatGPT to generate something about how "Linux use is like a cult or religion" and then blindly copied the result into a Lemmy post without thinking it through. (Which is no excuse or get-out-of-consequences-card, mind you.)
• The "rituals" section is just straight up nonsensical.

In the "Witch Hunts" section, he talks about "our mods". For a minute I was thinking "WhoTF is he talking about? He's the only mod listed." But I guess he runs a subreddit and got confused about where he was posting this post. (He doesn't seem to have posted the "The Linux Cult -Religious Parallels" post to the subreddit. I'm guessing he's planning to.)

The other thing I noticed about his activity on Reddit. His subreddit is called /r/linuxsucks101. He's been banned from /r/linuxsucks and /r/fuckmicrosoft. And even commenters in /r/bansfromlinuxsucks call his ban "deserved" and tell him to "get help". (I'm not going to link to Reddit. You can go find it yourself. He's /u/madthumbs on Reddit.)

Also, I just ran into a post on /r/linuxsucks calling /r/linuxsucks101 a "cult". Heh.

For the last few hours, I've been defending something I made from encroachment by another artist. I figure my (much) earlier claim to the space justifies me holding the line. Whatever the case, it's annoying!

Update: Looks like they've given up at least for the moment, so I'm systematically "bending" their work just a little further away from mine in a way that makes it still look pretty good/natural. Hopefully they'll consider that a good enough compromise for them.

Update 2: The "encroacher" made a "rat" who overlapped with my contribution, but later someone came along and removed the rat's head.

Update 3: Looks like maybe whoever removed the rat's head half-heartedly started putting the rat's head even further from what I did, but hasn't really followed through.

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