Reading about FOSS philosophy, degoogling, becoming against corporations, and now a full-blown woke communist (like Linus Torvalds)
this post was submitted on 26 Sep 2023
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Linux is a family of open source Unix-like operating systems based on the Linux kernel, an operating system kernel first released on September 17, 1991 by Linus Torvalds. Linux is typically packaged in a Linux distribution (or distro for short).
Distributions include the Linux kernel and supporting system software and libraries, many of which are provided by the GNU Project. Many Linux distributions use the word "Linux" in their name, but the Free Software Foundation uses the name GNU/Linux to emphasize the importance of GNU software, causing some controversy.
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Also without open source the capitalist tech sector would collapse
It wouldn't necessarily collapse (it wasn't exactly suffering before FOSS stuff "hit the shelves", so to speak) but the gatekeeping that comes with it would certainly cause a tremendous amount of stagnation
I work in software development. Almost all modern architecture would collapse without the open source ecosystem.
Isnt every important server run on linux?
Half the user-facing internet broke for a few hours when one guy withdrew a shitty one-liner piece of JavaScript (the whole leftpad thing) because someone somewhere added it as a dependency to a dependency to a dependency until it was pulled into an enormous frontend library. The internet relies more on random open source contributions than a lot of people are aware of.
Relevant XKCD
I do too. To be clear, I did NOT mean that we could go without it today. What I meant was that if we didn't have it to start with, things would've likely still developed albeit much more slowly.
I'll also preface this by saying I definitely slightly misread everything before and so my reply was kinda crappy
I dont think we will ever know, but Im not sure I agree. I dont know what the landscape would look like without relying on open source and patent theft. A lot of the stuff would probably not be financially viable.
The counter point would be - with only state protectionism in the form of IP the crony-capitalist sector would monopolise and dominate.