Canadian software engineer living in Europe.
You’re being rather unreasonable here, responding to other threads, making out of context comments, “narrating” and referring to me as a “wasp”. I’m happy to have a civil conversation with you on this one day, but it’s clear that you’re not ready for that yet. I’m out.
I think you’re conflating “happy people” with “people living under a democratic system of government”. These are not necessarily the same thing.
The “material” presented was a series of articles citing the same study that polled the citizens of the US and China to ask if they thought their government was democratic. This does not change the meaning of the word, but rather outlines the general ignorance of those using it.
You make an excellent point about the US system, though I think we agree that the US is a shit model for democracy regardless.
Well if we’re going to agree to live in a world where words don’t have meanings anymore, then sure, China’s a “democracy”.
If however we want to have an adult conversation about it, then we need to agree on the meaning of words, and “democracy” is literally “rule by the people”. Given this (admittedly broad and forgiving) definition, China with its autocratic , centralised rule by a one-party government for which the public has no peaceful means of deposing is objectively not a democracy.
This isn’t to say that the US is much better of course, but you don’t do yourself any favours by measuring yourself against the dumbest kid in the class.
They’re both terrible, though at least the US has free(ish) and fair(ish) elections.
“Chinese democracy”
Fascinating! Thanks for sharing. I’m not sure I’d be happy in a fully remote role where you’ve got hundreds of employees voting on how you build stuff, but I know that there are lots of people who dig this pattern, and they’re clearly doing Good work.
True, but the mere existence of an AGPL project that follows the MIT one might be enough to convince would-be contributors to choose our version instead.
It may also be more likely to be adopted by non-corporate Linux distros that favour the AGPL over MIT (Debian for example) which in turn could help make the AGPL version the dominant one.
The best example I could point to would be BSD. Unlike Linux, the BSD kernel was BSD (essentially MIT) -licensed. This allowed Apple to take their code and build OSX and a multi-billion dollar company on top of it, giving sweet fuck all back the community they stole from.
That’s the moral argument: it enables thievery.
The technical argument is one of practicality. MIT-licensed projects often lead to proprietary projects (see: Apple, Android, Chrome, etc) that use up all the oxygen in an ecosystem and allow one company to dominate where once we had the latitude to use better alternatives.
The GPL is the tool that got us here, and it makes these exploitative techbros furious that they can’t just steal our shit for their personal profit. We gain nothing by helping them, but stand to lose a great deal.
Here’s a fun idea, let’s fork these MIT-based projects and licence them under the AGPL :-)
My shit is custom and rather elaborate.
From left-to-right:
/: commitThe code for this is on GitLab.
Absolutely. I’ve been running Debian for literally decades both personally & professionally (on servers) and it’s rock-solid.
On the desktop, it’s also very stable, but holy-fuck is it old. I’m happy to accept the occasionally bug in exchange for modern software though, so I use Arch (btw) on the desktop.
Ubuntu is literally just Debian unstable with a bunch of patches. Literally every time I’ve been forced to use it, it’s been broken in at least a few obvious places.
I have zero interest in anything Microsoft has to say about Free software.
I’m quite happy with EuroDNS. They even include free email housing if you want it.