China
Yeah guys we can't trust China it's a surveillance sta---- whuaaa?? The USA?! Well I never...
12 publicly visible posts • joined 1 Dec 2021
Hey could you tell me what you're entertained by when looking at the firmware of a Chinese phone? I own a Chinese phone, I have Linux, and I've looked at the firmware. What am I supposed to be entertained by?
Or is it that you're just making stuff up and trying to scare monger people into anti-Chinese opinion like the rest of your article? Does the State Dept pay the Reg per article or is it like a package deal?
Responsibility should come with the code one designs and programs to ensure it's secure and stable.
Open source is a relatively simple concept. Trying to do what this article is doing, attaching it to global politics, is silly. The only countries that have signed up to a sanctions regime against Russia are the EU, Canada, Australia/NZ, and Japan. South Korea and Singapore have enacted lighter sanctions.
You have the entire middle east, all of south America, Mexico, the continent of Africa, central Asia, southeast Asia, and India that perceive the war as an Atlantic regional conflict and don't care to participate.
All of the world contributes to FOSS development, and to say that because America and the UK shouldn't have it's developers contribute to open source that a south African is contributing to, or a Malaysian, etc. Is super euro-centric and super chauvanistic.
The reason codes of conduct or mission statements or other governance principles are attached to Open source as add-ons, is because if someone tries to change the concept of open source, it's no longer open source, its some warped political thing that will never survive.
The problem with the ICJ is that the USA won't abide by its rulings if they ruled against the USA. The illegal invasion of Iraq for example, is something the ICJ couldn't prosecute because the USA is not a state member.
IOW it's a another tool of imperialism for the USA to go after nations it's in competition with that it wants to convince the international community it has moral superiority over.
I was really excited that if China, with all its manpower, decided to adopt Linux desktop as a mainstream, they would commit upstream to a global distribution like Debian. These increased resources would make Debian improve a lot quicker and maybe this would make is the OS of choice for people who didn't want to pay for Windows or Apple. Sort of how like China investing in Riscv is leading to it becoming the CPU design of choice for the future.
Instead they fell into the NIH syndrome and linux distros remain heavily fragmented. :(
I'm a bit more concerned about Microsoft monetizing intellectual property that is intended as a public (or common) good than them innovating with AI.
You're framing this as a luddites vs. progress debate when the issue I think for many (if not most) is the largest for profit corporation in the world is making money off the goodwill and hard work of people labouring on code to better the human condition. At minimum they should be compensating FOSS developers for the data they're pulling from their codebases to train tne AI model. If not, I think coders should leave the github platform and go to the co-operative platform Codeberg where the membership have a say in how the profits are distributed.
It's almost insulting for you to frame it as them fighting yesterday's war.
It's pretty rich for Nextcloud to be claiming they offer a competing service when Nextcloud doesn't actually have a consumer arm. If a regular user wanted to use Nextcloud they'd be directed to a partner website with multiple different hosting providers providing inconsistent services and features. Even if they succeeded non-technical users would default to Microsoft because of the ease of use and consistency. Nextcloud's hubris prevents it's ability to be a major player, not anti-trust.
I suspect this will lead to the promotion of Deepin OS as well as one of those communities. Looking at the Deepin Linux Chinese forums, there are about 30 new topics being posted a day. I just hope they upstream any improvements into Linux proper.
Worldwide adoption of open source software for everyone's benefit could really be helped by Chinese developers adding hundreds of thousands of more minds to it. The west just need to be accepting of the incoming translation issues and patience with cultural differences.