Re: interop and fair use
Being Obama's "finest legal mind" doesn't make him right.
27 publicly visible posts • joined 24 Oct 2011
The keyword being "non-technical consumer." What practical difference is there between the only driver the user knows about bricking the device and the only driver the user knows about not working? A useless device is a useless device. A simple warning message accomplishes nothing.
The dfference is that learning the Queen's English as a first language isn't a barrier to communicating with Americans (or Canadians, or Indians, or even Australians). Having your first language be something that is spoken by fewer people than the population of a decent sized city is.
It's great to keep a language alive, but most communities do it by creating more and more works in it, to pick up momentum. The only time I see the Welsh language is in posts complaining that various sites don't offer a version in their language.
P.S. - English imperialism is not dead, and even if it was, it's hard to blame it for killing a language (unless they killed all its speakers). There are 2 million Irish Gaelic speakers, 545 million Hindi speakers, and 18 million Malay speakers. Scots Gaelic is mostly dead, but I suspect that's because Scottish people don't care, because at the end of the day they still have to live in Scotland.
There's no need to "anoint" one distro. Only lazy fuckers like Oracle do that. All the major distros use the same or similar library versions; once compiled it should run "everywhere". A simple script would then pack it into a DEB/RPM/tarball file that should take car of 99% of Linux users right off the bat. Steam would probably have its own libraries anyway, so bundling a copy of the library versions they prefer would make even dependency tracking a non-issue.
1.) Windows Fundamentals for Legacy PCs **IS** Windows XP. Running Windows FLP when the system supports Window XP provides no real advantage.
2.) No, you do not have to distribute the source code when you make modifications to programs you don't plan on sharing.
There are moles in every government. The choice of operating system does not change whether someone will try to leak information. If anything, using Linux makes it less likely that anything that was leaked would be useful, since the source code to Linux has been publically available for years, with relatively few holes found.
Their drones probably require a proprietary blob that isn't available for BSD and can't be effectively wrapped.
Imagine if one of those things crashes. They'll pull the black box to see what happens, and all they'll see is:
[20.209801] rudder: module license 'NORTHRUP' taints kernel.
[20.213241] Disabling lock debugging due to kernel taint
We all have to start somewhere. Not all of us were born in the days before generic whitebox PCs. I bet 99% of the people who use Linux now first tried it on a Dell, or an HP, or a Toshiba. This is about adding a barrier to entry. Lots of people might try Linux if all they have to do is put a CD in their computer and reboot. Not as many will try if they have to enter in a new signing key.
Builidng your own computer (or paying someone about as much as an off-the-shelf computer would cost anyway, what with the cost of Windows to OEMs) won't stop you from having to enter the key. What motherboard manufacturer isn't going to want their motherboard to be certified for use with Windows?
It doesn't take that much skill to stick a CD in a drive and reboot the computer. It might take a bit more to press Ctrl+Delete at boot up and then type in something like "set EFI_SEC_BOOT 0" and then "nvram update" (or however EFI does things.) Many people who would otherwise be more than capable of installing an alternative operating system will probably avoid an EFI shell or menu for fear of breaking something.