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Indeed; there are many reasons not to do business with Apple and many reasons to never use proprietary, user-subjugating software. Contrary to one of the follow-ups to the parent post, this has everything to do with TrueCrypt, VeraCrypt, and any other free software to which one entrusts their sensitive information. There's nothing these programs can do to fix the real problem. The user has to switch operating systems to a fully free software, user-respecting OS and install only free software on top of that to do the best we can do to avoid the aforementioned problems. So while nobody can blame these free software programs for leaked keys, passphrases, and other leaked information there's no reason to trust the underlying proprietary software these free programs rely on to do everything they do when running on non-free OSes.

Ed, man! !man ed.

“Ed is the standard text editor.”

--
Happy happy oh my friend

It's possible to remount a file system with new permissions. See the details here:
https://www.gnu.org/software/l...
Or to mount it in a other folder with different permissions.
Or to directly access the partition under /dev/sda1.

To make a read-only file system work as expected you have to use a hardware way to prevent writing to the memory. For example NOR SPI flash memory usually have a write protection pin. Of course that pin must be protected against unwanted operation that could drive it. In that case you can expect having a clean state after a boot. Secure boot is an other method to give the same kind of clean state after boot.

You still have issues that can live in the SDRAM as long as the device will run...

This sounds like another instance of proprietary malware to add to the list. And nobody should trust a proprietor to "roll back" their malware (just as some of the Twitter.com followups suggest), regardless of whether they say this was a mistake. There's no reason to trust unvettable, uncorrectable, unsharable code and there's no reason why people should have to live with months-old backdoors while the only programmers allowed to inspect or fix the code apparently don't fix that code.

From the article you linked:

You run these workloads in your on-premises datacenters, hosted at service providers, and in public clouds.
[...]
Several hundred thousand Linux and UNIX servers in production usage today are managed by System Center

Loving GNU/Linux on servers != loving GNU/Linux on laptops and home desktop PCs. Microsoft attempts to make up for it:

And if you look more broadly, Microsoft offers key productivity software such as Office365, Skype, and RDP clients on Linux-based and BSD-based client operating systems such as iOS, Android, and Mac OS X.

Of these three, a port of Skype with a largely outdated feature set is available for GNU/Linux. For the others, Microsoft falls back on "Linux-based" Android with Google Play, which isn't GNU/Linux and isn't intended to work on traditional desktop or laptop PCs. Android prior to 7.0 "Nougat" doesn't even have window tiling as a standard feature, instead forcing applications to run in the full screen. Enjoy your four-function calculator filling your 10-inch tablet.

Open source version of Mathematica: http://www.gnu.org/software/oc....

You confuse mathematica with mathlab

Of course there's also Emacs which most of us have been using all along with significant productivity.

It's been my experience that those that bitch about someone else's editor don't usually know how to use their own editor very well. I quit using Vi almost twenty years ago and can still use it better than most of my colleagues using Vim.

Open source version of Mathematica: http://www.gnu.org/software/oc....

I consume non-Twitter media

Nothing is being consumed.

use my non-existent Twitter account to follow better people

The word "follow" existed before Twitter. You view media published by particular people. Therefore, you follow those people.

That's only comforting if you only care about yourself, rather than about democracy and freedom in general. But mass surveillance is worrisome for dissidents, political opponents, lawyers, activists, whistleblowers, journalists, and generally just people who want to change the system or challenge authority. These are the people who help put checks on government power and therefore help democracy thrive. You or I, specifically, may not be interesting (but there's still a chance normal people could become targets for reasons completely unknown to them), but it's not all about you. Stop being selfish.

The FBI tried to make MLK commit suicide, law enforcement practices parallel construction to cover up illegal searches, the US has wronged many people in the past (e.g. Japanese internment camps), there are countless unjust laws on the books, etc. The US government and other governments have proven that if they can abuse their power, they absolutely will do so. This is a simple historical fact that only a blind fool would deny.

There are many pro-mass surveillance trolls on Slashdot. Less so for SoylentNews.

If "content creators" sounds too much like "happy gods", a better term might be "authors and publishers". A songwriter is an "author" as defined in the copyright statute, as is a recording artist or film director.

There was a GNU project to create free software for online voting. In 2002, Jason Kitcat the project coordinator abandoned development, pointing to this quote from Bruce Schneier: "a secure Internet voting system is theoretically possible, but it would be the first secure networked application ever created in the history of computers."

I don't see anything having changed in the intervening fourteen years, other than perhaps attackers getting more sophisticated. We may not have internet voting, but the idea that voting machines or those used in the tabulation of votes are connected to the internet is madness.

Binary blobs don't violate the GPL.

Yes they do, but I wasn't talking in particular about the firmware issue, if that's what you mean. I'm talking about the requirement to release source code as an "essential freedom":

The freedom to study how the program works, and change it so it does your computing as you wish (freedom 1). Access to the source code is a precondition for this.

Just as we come closer to ensuring no murders when we enforce laws against murder, we come closer to ensuring the software freedom described in the GPL when we enforce the GPL.

It's telling that Linus Torvalds said "I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux because it enforced that you have to give back, which meant that the fragmentation has never been something that has been viable from a technical standpoint." and hates enforcement ("Lawyers: poisonous to openness..."). The fork of the Linux kernel Torvalds distributes contains the "fragmentation" he claims isn't viable—Torvalds' variant of Linux contains proprietary binaries in it. These blobs of code are removed in the fully-free GNU Linux-libre kernel.

Linus Torvalds' position is more easily understood when you consider that Torvalds is a fan of the right-wing, proprietor-friendly open source movement which is a reaction to the older free software movement. The difference between the two movements has been described in writing (older essay, newer essay) and in every RMS speech for years.

You can see that difference playing out in Linus Torvalds' dig against GPL enforcement. Brad Kuhn, President and Distinguished Technologist of the Software Freedom Conservancy talked about the value of GPL enforcement in his most recent talk on the issue at linux.conf.au in 2016 in his talk "Copyleft For the Next Decade: A Comprehensive Plan", "Copyleft is not magic pixie dust; you don't sprinkle it on some code and then suddenly your code is liberated forever. I wish that were true but that's not how the world works." (9m2s). The way Torvalds talks about the GPLv2 you'd think the GPLv2 were magic pixie dust because that's what he wants Linux kernel copyright holders to believe—an unenforced GPL is fine—because Torvalds, like any good sycophant for proprietary software, knows what Kuhn reminds us of in Kuhn's talk, (around 13m1s), "If a copyleft license is not enforced it's indistinguishable from a non-copylefted license in practice.". But where Torvalds takes that as an instruction to not act in defense of the GPL, Kuhn says that as a warning against software proprietarism. Conservancy is the group doing that enforcement work to help assure all computer users actually get the freedoms of free software the GPL describes. That work includes GPL enforcement, specifically a coordinated compliance effort across multiple Conservancy projects.

Just as we come closer to ensuring no murders when we enforce laws against murder, we come closer to ensuring the software freedom described in the GPL when we enforce the GPL.

It's telling that Linus Torvalds said "I really think the license has been one of the defining factors in the success of Linux because it enforced that you have to give back, which meant that the fragmentation has never been something that has been viable from a technical standpoint." and hates enforcement ("Lawyers: poisonous to openness..."). The fork of the Linux kernel Torvalds distributes contains the "fragmentation" he claims isn't viable—Torvalds' variant of Linux contains proprietary binaries in it. These blobs of code are removed in the fully-free GNU Linux-libre kernel.

Linus Torvalds' position is more easily understood when you consider that Torvalds is a fan of the right-wing, proprietor-friendly open source movement which is a reaction to the older free software movement. The difference between the two movements has been described in writing (older essay, newer essay) and in every RMS speech for years.

You can see that difference playing out in Linus Torvalds' dig against GPL enforcement. Brad Kuhn, President and Distinguished Technologist of the Software Freedom Conservancy talked about the value of GPL enforcement in his most recent talk on the issue at linux.conf.au in 2016 in his talk "Copyleft For the Next Decade: A Comprehensive Plan", "Copyleft is not magic pixie dust; you don't sprinkle it on some code and then suddenly your code is liberated forever. I wish that were true but that's not how the world works." (9m2s). The way Torvalds talks about the GPLv2 you'd think the GPLv2 were magic pixie dust because that's what he wants Linux kernel copyright holders to believe—an unenforced GPL is fine—because Torvalds, like any good sycophant for proprietary software, knows what Kuhn reminds us of in Kuhn's talk, (around 13m1s), "If a copyleft license is not enforced it's indistinguishable from a non-copylefted license in practice.". But where Torvalds takes that as an instruction to not act in defense of the GPL, Kuhn says that as a warning against software proprietarism. Conservancy is the group doing that enforcement work to help assure all computer users actually get the freedoms of free software the GPL describes. That work includes GPL enforcement, specifically a coordinated compliance effort across multiple Conservancy projects.

Reminder that copyright infringement is not "piracy".

In fact a recent court decision declared it slander:
https://torrentfreak.com/mpaa-...
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

Out of curiosity, do you consider find(1) and its arguments "elegant"?

You can bludgeon it into doing useful work, but man I don't call it "elegant".

https://www.gnu.org/software/findutils/manual/html_mono/find.html

Sometimes power and flexibility come at a cost of some weird ugliness. Note, I've never used PowerShell so I'm not claiming anything about it specifically.

So you don't like kittens??

You cruel heartless bastard! We have a term for you all. You are called Ed users.

But... but... "Ed is the standard text editor:" when I use an editor, I don't want eight extra KILOBYTES of worthless help screens and cursor positioning code! I just want an EDitor!! Not a “viitor”. Not a “emacsitor”. Those aren't even WORDS!!!! ED! ED! ED IS THE STANDARD!!!

RT.

If you run Windows Phone or Windows 10 you should say goodbye to any sort of privacy.
https://www.gnu.org/proprietar...

As of now there are no commercially available smart phones that respect your freedom entirely. Depending on where you draw the line,
your best bets are Replicant or at the very least CyanogenMod without any Google Apps.

F-Droid is a package manager for Android that only contains software that respects your freedom.

This development reminds me of the things predicted this article from 2001. The article itself was written about Napster, but it's written in the vein of all the bad things that could happen *in the future* after Napster is gotten rid of, and the banning of analog inputs/outputs was a large part of it.

Now, his timeline was obviously way too fast, but moving analog headphone jacks would fit into his vision -- he does talk about the "hoarding of analog speakers", after all. (Which is kind of ridiculous, as ultimately, even a set of speakers with a digital interface ultimately has an analog speaker making the actual sound, but whatever.) If analog sound outputs do go the way of the dodo (Apple's move certainly doesn't take us there, but it could be the first step in a several decade process that does) ... then a complete DRM path like we're seeing with a lot of HD video now might actually happen.

In a similar vein, RMS The Right to Read dystopian short story (written about software and reading freedom rather than sound countent, but still similar) may actually be coming closer to reality, though he set his time frame further ahead -- 2096, 100 years in the future -- so we can't really say he predicted it or not yet.

Why not use GNU Messenger?

I can choose NOT to run a closed-source app.

Likewise, you can choose NOT to run a closed-source web app using the LibreJS extension. It's made for Firefox; I'm not aware of a counterpart for Chrome yet.

As well you should have, and so should have every car owner have the means to get complete corresponding source code with build instructions. Software freedom gives car owners the means to help themselves and prevent more outbreaks of this ridiculousness as Eben Moglen pointed out when we saw the first round of this.

My dad constantly asks me if he should get windows 10 (until I installed gwx control panel).
I tried to explain to him why it is a very bad thing, and this (win10) is "just the tip".
There's more to come and you won't be able to stop it. Just fight it as long as you can.

eyes glaze over...

A far superior genius and far superior crackpot said it much better...:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

He doesn't sound quite as crazy as he did a year ago, does he?

Also, IIRC Corey Doctorow has already predicted this, too. I think it was a short story about copyright--that *everything* is copyrighted before it's written (your new work will always be sufficiently similar to $copyrighted_work), so no new works can be created. Just can't find it right now...

The Right to Read

Oh /. where art thou!

P.S. LibreOffice is distributed under the MPLv2.0. This license is compatible with GPLv2 according to the FSF.

If you're into it (and like languages), you might be interested in learning APL. Gnu APL seems to work alright, and there's some good documentation. I've had to make my own key-mapping, but all the needed characters are in unicode, and that's part of the fun.

If you want me to care about "content creators", you're going to have to call them something other than "content creators". I find that appellation irritating in the extreme.

FSF isn't a big fan of the term "content creator" either, which sounds too much like "happy god". So mentally replace these terms with the terms used in the actual U.S. copyright statute: "creator" becomes "author", and "content" becomes "works".

It says absolutely nothing about what they've done to deserve my money.

With the terminology issue hopefully out of the way: How do we encourage people to continue being an "author of a work of substantial length"?

So why not encourage GPL violators ("pirates" too)? Instead we seem to cheer whenever we find a GPL violator.

First, we should understand what the propagandistic term "piracy" really means and understand that meaning as separate from sharing—a friendly, neighborly thing to do. As the GNU Project points out in it's list of terms to avoid on "theft": "In general, laws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change. A US judge, presiding over a trial for copyright infringement, recognized that "piracy" and "theft" are smear-words.". This difference gets to the heart of the problem in your point—you're conflating the legal with the ethical and then trying to get others to view all sharing as copyright infringement and all copyright infringement as equivalent because the law frames things in that way.

We should recognize that the terms of the licenses involved between, say, the GNU General Public License (GPL) and a typical Hollywood movie, are radically different when it comes to doing what friends do: share. One can and should share copies of GPL'd programs. It's easy to do, the GPL is easy to comply with simply by also sharing a copy of the complete corresponding source code of the program at the same time as one shares the binary. By contrast, other famously shared copyrighted items (such as most Hollywood movies) aren't legal to share even if done non-commercially and verbatim. So doing the thing that comes naturally with friends, non-commercial and verbatim sharing, is likely not allowed by that movie's license.

Since you mention the GPL, a free software license written by Richard Stallman, this is somewhat akin to what Stallman describes in his talks about the freedoms of free software specifically freedom #2: the freedom to help your neighbour. That's the freedom to make copies and distribute them to others, when you wish. This comes from a 2006-03-09 talk and you can see how the consideration here is akin to the dilemma one faces should a friend ask for a copy of a Hollywood movie:

Freedom two is essential on fundamental ethical grounds, so that you can live an upright, ethical life as a member of your community. If you use a program that does not give you freedom number two, you're in danger of falling at any moment into a moral dilemma. When your friend says "that's a nice program, could I have a copy?" At that moment, you will have to choose between two evils. One evil is: give your friend a copy and violate the licence of the program. The other evil is: deny your friend a copy and comply with the licence of the program.

Once you are in that situation, you should choose the lesser evil. The lesser evil is to give your friend a copy and violate the licence of the program.

[laughter]

Now, why is that the lesser evil? The reason is that we can assume that your friend has treated you well and has been a good person and deserves your cooperation. The reason we can assume this is that in the other case, if a nasty person you don't really like asked you for help, of course you can say "Why should I help you?" So that's an easy case. The hard case is the case where that person has been a good person to you and other people and you would want to help him normally.

Whereas, the developer of the program has deliberately attacked the social solidarity of your community. Deliberately tried to separate you from everyone else in the World. So if you can't help doing wrong in some direction or other, better to aim the wrong at somebody who deserves it, who has done something wrong, rather than at somebody who hasn't done anything wrong.

Howe

So why not encourage GPL violators ("pirates" too)? Instead we seem to cheer whenever we find a GPL violator.

First, we should understand what the propagandistic term "piracy" really means and understand that meaning as separate from sharing—a friendly, neighborly thing to do. As the GNU Project points out in it's list of terms to avoid on "theft": "In general, laws don't define right and wrong. Laws, at their best, attempt to implement justice. If the laws (the implementation) don't fit our ideas of right and wrong (the spec), the laws are what should change. A US judge, presiding over a trial for copyright infringement, recognized that "piracy" and "theft" are smear-words.". This difference gets to the heart of the problem in your point—you're conflating the legal with the ethical and then trying to get others to view all sharing as copyright infringement and all copyright infringement as equivalent because the law frames things in that way.

We should recognize that the terms of the licenses involved between, say, the GNU General Public License (GPL) and a typical Hollywood movie, are radically different when it comes to doing what friends do: share. One can and should share copies of GPL'd programs. It's easy to do, the GPL is easy to comply with simply by also sharing a copy of the complete corresponding source code of the program at the same time as one shares the binary. By contrast, other famously shared copyrighted items (such as most Hollywood movies) aren't legal to share even if done non-commercially and verbatim. So doing the thing that comes naturally with friends, non-commercial and verbatim sharing, is likely not allowed by that movie's license.

Since you mention the GPL, a free software license written by Richard Stallman, this is somewhat akin to what Stallman describes in his talks about the freedoms of free software specifically freedom #2: the freedom to help your neighbour. That's the freedom to make copies and distribute them to others, when you wish. This comes from a 2006-03-09 talk and you can see how the consideration here is akin to the dilemma one faces should a friend ask for a copy of a Hollywood movie:

Freedom two is essential on fundamental ethical grounds, so that you can live an upright, ethical life as a member of your community. If you use a program that does not give you freedom number two, you're in danger of falling at any moment into a moral dilemma. When your friend says "that's a nice program, could I have a copy?" At that moment, you will have to choose between two evils. One evil is: give your friend a copy and violate the licence of the program. The other evil is: deny your friend a copy and comply with the licence of the program.

Once you are in that situation, you should choose the lesser evil. The lesser evil is to give your friend a copy and violate the licence of the program.

[laughter]

Now, why is that the lesser evil? The reason is that we can assume that your friend has treated you well and has been a good person and deserves your cooperation. The reason we can assume this is that in the other case, if a nasty person you don't really like asked you for help, of course you can say "Why should I help you?" So that's an easy case. The hard case is the case where that person has been a good person to you and other people and you would want to help him normally.

Whereas, the developer of the program has deliberately attacked the social solidarity of your community. Deliberately tried to separate you from everyone else in the World. So if you can't help doing wrong in some direction or other, better to aim the wrong at somebody who deserves it, who has done something wrong, rather than at somebody who hasn't done anything wrong.

Howe

Disclaimer: Slashdot doesn't condone piracy.

Why not? Everyone should condone "piracy." Piracy enriches our lives and our culture. Copying brings us more of the things we love. The only thing that shouldn't be condoned is using smear words like "piracy" to refer to a basic decent act of human behavior.

I understand that this is about the Navy who is actually capable of piracy.
Reading further however makes it clear that it's just another case of copyright infringement.
Piracy is, in fact, an act of robbery or criminal violence at sea.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...
http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/...

The only non-free part is now the Javascript running in my browser

Even that would be enough for some FSF ad campaign to say "Say No to Skype". FSF is already doing that against GitHub and SourceForge. FSF gives them an F in support for free software principles because critical features are broken without running proprietary script. GitLab gets a C because it requires manual whitelisting in the tool that allows only free scripts to execute and encourages bad license choices (such as "look but don't touch" and not specifying a license version).

The dystopian world depicted by Richard Stallman in his short tale "The right to read" (https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html) is slowly coming. We already have DRM - Digital Restriction Management - now, sharing password has been turned into a crime. This has to be stopped. Now.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy...

Dan resolved the dilemma by doing something even more unthinkableâ"he lent her the computer, and told her his password. This way, if Lissa read his books, Central Licensing would think he was reading them. It was still a crime, but the SPA would not automatically find out about it. They would only find out if Lissa reported him.

Being mostly a PC user, I still remember when I bought my first Apple computer: a Mac Mini. I planned to use it as part of a home theatre system. On the first DVD I played, I wanted to skip past the annoying previews and copyright warnings.

When I attempted to skip the initial content, my brand new Apple computer plainly told me, "NOT PERMITTED".

That still burns me up. Despicable use of the passive voice to avoid taking responsibility for wresting control of my computer away from me. WHO is not permitting me to skip the content? Why the hell do I need permission from anybody? Just whose computer is it, anyway?

This problem isn't specific to Apple, but I've noticed that Apple devices tend to be more likely to restrict the user's use of the device. Also see: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/can-you-trust.html .

Assuming that you're referring to replacement of SWF wtih HTML5:

you replaced one format that [...] Was owned by a company that had no problem not only allowing it to be bundled with anything but ALSO allowed for FOSS alternatives

Initially, Adobe's SWF spec was licensed under terms that specifically forbade its use to create third-party players. Adobe didn't drop that provision until the Open Screen Project in the second quarter of 2008.

[Flash does] Not only did video but animation and gaming.

HTML5 also does gaming. See Cookie Clicker and Pirates Love Daisies, for example.

[HTML5 video] Had mandatory DRM baked in

It's not mandatory. A web browser publisher can just choose not to support Netflix and Amazon video.

[HTML5 video] Requires a codec that is not only owned by one of the biggest patent trolls around but is openly hostile to FOSS

Where does the HTML5 spec require use of MPEG-4 codecs? Last time I checked, WebM (Matroska container, VP8 or VP9 video codec, and Vorbis or Opus audio codec) was also acceptable, and only pack-in browsers on proprietary operating systems (IE and Safari) fail to support WebM out of the box. Even Microsoft Edge will get WebM support come Windows 10 Anniversary Update. Besides, SWF also used H.263 and H.264.

MPEG-LA has made it clear they will sue FOSS companies which is why all work on supporting that format has to be done outside Berne convention countries

MPEG-LA licenses patents, not copyrights. The Berne Convention refers to copyrights, not patents. It looks like you've been bitten by the false equivalence of intellectual property.

Doesn't support half the features of the supposedly "inferior" format its replacing

Could you list some SWF features that aren't supported in HTML5 and can't easily be polyfilled? Because if there were, it wouldn't be possible to build Shumway, a polyfill for SWF itself.

Of course, he said " people like me who run the XFCE spin". Then you linked to the xfce spin.

And the answer is yes, and gone over in the article- ipv6 ping, newer versions of compilers ( https://gcc.gnu.org/gcc-6/chan... ), new open source codec, and I think the greater Unicode support will affect us in XFCE land.

I will tell you what Fedora version I plan to skip: whatever initially switches us to Wayland. That will be a guaranteed shit-show, and a good call to avoid upgrading for a few months. But 24 is solid methinks.

That's the right direction. Apple already has a pretty good version of it. (See below.)

Bounds checking C like this now is weak and very, very late:
https://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc/199...
https://www.lrde.epita.fr/~aki...
http://blog.qt.io/blog/2013/04...
http://valgrind.org/docs/manua...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

But the grand champion memory debugger is the Mac OS X standard malloc libraries. You can simply set environment variables and instantly get better debugging than most methods on all other platforms. I presume this is because Objective C/C++ is such a pain to debug that they just built in features to always be available, even for production apps.

http://www.cocoawithlove.com/2...

Those libraries are clever because when debugging array bounds corruption and used/free, all mallocs get their own mmapped memory block surrounded by unmapped memory. Plus writing patterns into free / allocated memory to detect writing to freed memory, etc. This is great because it triggers a system signal that debuggers can catch deterministically.

I found and used those techniques on my last big project a couple years ago. The Windows desktop app and imaging C++ libraries were full of errors, memory corruption, struct and 32bit/64bit problems, etc. I had to do a lot of debugging and rewriting to port to Mac OS X, then a lot to solve corruption and threading issues. And found out, the hard way, what a mess the "standard" pthreads API / libraries were. Just spurred me on to switch to C++11 to have standard threads. This Mac OS X built-in debugging along with gdb made it a snap to find all of those kinds of errors, even for code meant for Android, Linux, and Windows.

One possibility is to switch to free apps that are actually free software. One store specializing in such apps is F-Droid.

There have been a few minor incidents where copyright law was used successfully to force sharing of GPL code from an otherwise unwilling party, but in my opinion none of these cases revealed anything but banal or poorly written additions to the original GPL code, certainly nothing of lasting importance that wouldn't have been shared otherwise.

BSD tribalists would be glad of this view, but I think it's wrong.

  - in the embedded world, a few years' worth of "banal and poorly written additions," which is a correct characterization by the way, added up to a substantial lead for Linux over BSD, even though NetBSD started out with as wide portability and fewer maintainers than Linux meaning it was better-factored for porting to new platforms which is exactly what embedded work needs.

  - the unspoken assumption is that free software's goal is to develop a code repository that functions as shared human knowledge we can all build from. It is that, but the four freedoms go further: it's the freedom to use the device you were given, but make one small change. It's much harder to turn devices against users in a free software world that includes this freedom. For example, Cyanogenmod's privacy extensions (eventually, after way too much hand-wringing and self-censorship) somewhat reversed Google and app developers' turning phones against users and bargaining them out of their personal data. There is no Cyanogenmod for iOS with better privacy features partly because iOS is proprietary.

If you get your apps from F-Droid, you can easily read the T and C in under an hour.

How can you say that when GNU's own web site says "The name 'GNU' is a recursive acronym for 'GNU's Not Unix.'" ?

I wonder whether the use of proprietary client-side script is a "serious repair" under consideration. Reliance on proprietary client-side script gives SourceForge an F rating among free software project hosts that FSF reviewed, the same as that of GitHub.

I wonder whether the use of proprietary client-side script is a "serious repair" under consideration. Reliance on proprietary client-side script gives SourceForge an F rating among free software project hosts that FSF reviewed, the same as that of GitHub.

I really shouldn't feed stupid Arrogant Cunts ...

pun:

* noun, a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word or the fact that there are words that sound alike but have different meanings.
* verb, make a joke exploiting the different possible meanings of a word.

Why do you think the GNU logo is a gnu animal.

The recursive acronym, GNU, means 3 things. So, YES, GNU is a pun. But I guess some self-righteous people feel that computer scientists / programmers can't have a sense of humor.

.

amazingly, there are open source games.

I can think of a couple practical problems with porting such a game.

1. First, a lot of these "open source games" have only the program available under a free software license, with the assets remaining under "all rights reserved" terms. Doom (1993) is in this position, as shown by the DMCA notice that Id Software's parent company sent to Mozilla Corporation about a JavaScript port thereof.
2. Second, on the whole, a game with both a free program and free assets is likely to be less attractive than a comparable proprietary game due to the lower production values associated with a project that had to be done in spare time due to lack of revenue. Gratis without libre is easy; libre without gratis is not solved to my knowledge.

there are also games in this nice thing called the public domain.

True, but these games aren't video games. The copyright term in Slashdot's home country is 95 years for pre-1978 works and works made for hire, and any game that old would have been developed before the invention of microprocessor-driven video games in the mid-1970s. But if the intended suggestion was to port a classic board game to Android, I can accept that.

I am a little less peeved at debian dropping support for it than GNU dropping the ball with GCC support.

What are youtalking about?

https://gcc.gnu.org/onlinedocs...

GCC still supports the original 386.

There isn't really an alternative to gnu on linux (outside 686+ x86, x86_64, and arm) and thanks to all the douchey changes in C11/C++11

What are you talking about "douchey changes". Many of us acknowledge that technology advances and don't like being stuck with languages which were the state of the art in the late 90s. And C++11? You're complaining about a 5 year old language standard? I'd hate to hear your thoughts on C++14.

it's basically required to have a modern compiler even for many apps/libraries that predated it.

Huh? The old code didn't magically break and neither did the old compilers.

Good clean code can still compile across all three, but the 'feature crowd' keep breaking shit just to try out new features and force people on the compiler treadmill.)

Except (a) no they don't and (b) no they don't. Although at this point I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to cross compile on to such an old machine given you could buy a $25 RPi will hammer it in terms of speed and cross compile from that.

I'm just waiting for when they break TPM 1.1 modules and demand everybody run 2.0 modules (Which REQUIRE a different motherboard thanks to changes made :l Meaning all the other DRM cpu/mobo cruft that the past 8 years has entailed.)

Tech market 2001: "No way anybody would accept such an upgrade. It would basically wipe out thousands of person-hours of download time to reacquire the scrambled data, and another thousand hours of CPU time to re-encode it."
Tech market 2021: "So what, your licenses to read that book, or listen to that piece of music, or watch that movie were all in the cloud. If you relied on that multi-terabyte hard drive to actually store data, or that multi-gigahertz CPU to process it, you're out of luck. Shoulda just used the cloud. Cloud."

Stallman was an optimist. Sigh.