Utopia Talk / Politics / FOSS, politics, and corporations

Pillz rank	Thu Nov 20 00:10:10 So this is more of a hot take than anything else, but I may post links later. FOSS (and specifically the Linux kernel and associated code bases for things like filesystems, drivers, etc) has always had a history of corporate sponsorship and code contribution. Intel, Microsoft, NVIDIA, AMD, Meta, Google, many others, and many other now defunct companies. They either donate money to projects/foundations, or they employ developers who contribute to or maintain parts of the Linux kernel, etc. An example is the guy who was employed by Meta to work specifically on btrfs. Well he either got let go or quit, but he's no longer making those contributions. Anyways, this used to be a low-level sort of thing. Kernel, file systems, drivers, compilers, whatever. There was one display server and that was it, so everyone used it (x11) and init systems were sort of scattered between various distros. But then came systemd. Systemd is heavily backed by Red Hat, which is the only successful SaaS 'FOSS' company, ever, and releases a Red Hat Linux based Fedora Linux. It is and always has been popular. So traditionally, Linux distributions relied on various init systems, so each major distribution or family thereof had its own system for dealing with this. And essentially, you would initialize system services individually and control them, start them, stop them, configure them individually. I'm going to go back to the presentation. Packages for applications and programs were compatible with their in its systems and vice versa. System D aims to centralize all of that under one kind of control hub as it were, which obviously decreases the work for developers of different applications and services as well as maintainers of Linux distributions. So, system D, while technically counter to the Unix philosophy, which is do one thing and do it well, it's grown quite popular and has significant corporate backing by Red Hat. Red Hat is however now owned by IBM. It's been a while actually. So, the thing with system D is that this is slightly less of a low-level thing. So, nobody is ever going to interact directly with a driver. It's going to work or it's not going to work. No one's ever going to interact directly with a file system. It's going to work or it's not going to work. You know? But people, especially people, and and everything else at least remains running, and it's very easy to see what failed. In system D, this is a lot more complicated. So anyways, this, but because of the widespread adoption of system D, this has left fewer options for other people. And other people have gone ahead and created their own solutions. But now, Major software projects are implementing hard dependencies on system D. So now this solution that isn't universally backed by anybody in particular. Major distributions supported or have adopted it. Some other companies that also function as software as a service companies have adopted it. But it's not universal, but now we're in a position where users are left with relatively few choices. And for now, there's still a fair number of options. But as more and more projects turn it into a hard dependency, that's going to be less and less true. The problem comes in when essentially projects that are controlled by or very deeply associated with fedora or red hat and consequently IBM begin to shut down discussion around alternatives or Disparage alternatives or discourage use of alternatives. Sometimes, at least in their rhetoric, punitively. And now we see exactly the same kind of situation with Wayland vs. X11, where X11 is the traditional and outdated model, and Wayland is the modern new corporate backed solution. The only thing is, is that it's been, essentially, despite being an open-source project, the organization, the Linux That's in charge of the X11 project has essentially just stopped accepting commits unless they are like vital. So development was just forcibly ended on the project. Despite the fact that it's still the primary display server of Linux users the world. and this was a decision by anyone who should be able to contribute to the project. People who oversee the project might now want to dedicate the time and resources to be involved in that, but they should be willing to hand those responsibilities off rather than just kill the project. And we're going to support the new alternative, Wayland, because now again, we've gone from a vast ecosystem of community or corporately backed in its systems to a single corporately backed alternative, and we're doing the same thing, well, I mean, we went from only one option, because it was the only option, to only one option, because we don't want you to have any other options because money. And it's funny because a lot of the projects that are most fervorantly in support of or not in support of but rather prone to enforcement of this system D and Wayland shift or modernization as it were, are also hyper-political and I mean that in like the very left is sense. It's somewhat unrelated because I don't want to get into the craziness that is the gnome foundation. So, despite the fact it's not systemd/wayland related, we'll look at the Python foundation, which turned down 1.5 million dollar grant by the U.S. government because the Trump administration stipulated that they would have to end their DEI policies to accept the money. And the Python Foundation happens to have a deficit of 1.5 million dollars. And subsequently, after, you know, turning down the grant and after it being publicizes that the ground would have covered exactly their shortfall for the year. They pushed out a DEI marketing campaign, targeted exclusively at women and minorities. Like, keep in mind, Microsoft has just petitioned the European Union to set up a 340 million euro fund I think it was to cover the hosting and infrastructure costs associated with maintaining services like, you know, the Python ecosystem - costs that are currently covered by donations, by Microsoft, and the other companies, and many more listed above, all of which happen to have the same corporate messaging that the Python foundation happens to be willing to throw away $1.5 million over. And finally, we have the fact that the gnome foundation in particular and projects tightly linked to that ecosystem canonical is another big one. Openly, employ convicted pedophiles, which is wild. Ones who spew calls to violence towards their political rivals on social media from their official project or corporate accounts. And all this to say that eventually we're going to be in a situation where there won't really be any free and open source software anymore because we won't actually have any say in most of the configuration of our systems any longer. and that kind of bridges into a point I was going to post about yesterday, which is essentially that the era of like a free market consumer, a free market consumer electronics, is that it's not a bit of a it. And I was going to post about yesterday, which is essentially that the era of like a free market consumer, a free market consumer electronics, is over. It's done. The cycle of annual or bi-annual upgrades in capacity and availability that we're used to are no longer going to be happening. And we're probably going to be forced into exclusively cloud solutions within the next 10 years, like I...it's not looking great for consumer electronics.
Pillz rank	Thu Dec 04 19:46:41 Micron announced they'd stop selling consumer ram to focus on AI. Micron is the largest producer of ram. https://ar...stop-selling-ram-to-consumers/ This represents a monumental shift in the consumer technology market.
Pillz rank	Sat Dec 06 03:17:35 https://x....?t=JQOdn6cOZTKEWx7VO34S0g&s=19 Wikipedia made $184 million last year. Hosting costs were $3.4 million. 'Awards & grants' = $28 million 'Travel' = $6.5 million 'Professional services' (which Lunduke claims are equity and DEI initiatives) = $15.9 million Total assest value for Wikipedia/wikimedia = $310 million. I will note that he doesn't acknowledge the massive salaries & benefits expenses at all, which should logically be associated with hosting costs, but at the same time... That figure is ludicrous at $114 million for a service that relies on volunteers.....
Pillz rank	Sat Dec 06 03:20:19 Idk why in the OP I said IBM owns red hat. Oracle owns Red Hat.
Pillz rank	Sat Dec 06 08:46:34 Gamer Nexus videos On the Micron story: https://youtu.be/9A-eeJP0J7c?si=X8HRZldgquybxTz5 On the nvidia/Chinese gpu black market & export controls: https://youtu.be/VbI4BAaSZb8?si=nEI5Cqmuk7kVfnro https://youtu.be/dCGRXuINFz0?si=waHdPN-hLSgtZRtA --- Everything depends on these companies the world over so I think this is relevant, geopolitically and economically.
Pillz rank	Sun Dec 07 10:23:30 https://ww...s-with-more-than-16gb-of-vram/ How To Geek article telling gamers they don't need more than 16 gigs of vram. While technically correct, vram capacity is going to make the biggest difference in your card's usable lifespan. That is why top end cards from a 8 years ago are still 'viable'.... They launched with more vram than was really required. Memory requirements move faster than commute in graphics.
Pillz rank	Mon Dec 08 22:04:46 Not Foss but fuck it https://ww...curity-flaws-in-sipeed-nanokvm Researcher finds Chinese KVM has undocumented microphone, communicates with China-based servers — Sipeed's nanoKVM switch has other severe security flaws and allows audio recording, claims researcher
Pillz rank	Fri Dec 12 03:04:16 https://youtu.be/QLK9G5zyU-Q?si=KsS8sv1-BwumS5Zn React.js which every vibe coded webserver and weba pp is written in, and which powers most major client facing servers, has a 10.0 vulnerability that allows for shell access & remote code execution. To say nothing of the fact that npm (and pip) are just inherently insecure.
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