HN user
society rewards extroverts as leaders
It's even worse: some societies reward quick thinking and shun deep thinking.
Mostly the English-speaking societies, people can even become unsettled or giggle if they see someone staring at a wall, deep in though.
GPL is cynical at best, hypocritical at worst
It's not different from soldiers taking weapons from the enemy they are fighting. A pretty common tactic.
Fighting fire with fire. Where's the hypocrisy?
There's a lot of software that I would like to use in my day job that I can't touch because it's GPL. This is by design.
Good: the license is working as intended.
I have no sympathy for FAANG, but that happens to be correct. GPL is explicitly political in its intent.
Don't be cheeky. The sentence was [ push the narrative that MIT is "practical" and GPL is "political" ]
The MIT is equally political - just siding with the freeloaders.
However, I'm under no illusion that it'll prevent my unpaid work from being used by billionaires.
There's plenty of evidence that AGPL is reasonably effective at that. SaaS providers are clearly afraid of it.
not every business model relies on keeping their source code secret.
I was never talking about secrecy and business model.
It's about allowing end users (including myself) to have some reasonable chances to inspect / update / reflash their devices.
far more abstract principle of the home PC user being able to recompile their own software stack from source.
I contributed hundreds of hours of work into libraries. They are used by the same companies that sell me locked-down devices that I cannot modify or even inspect. They even invade the my privacy and I cannot disable that.
At least GPL tries to mitigate this problem. MIT turns volunteering into unpaid labor for some billionaires.
Calling it "far more abstract principle" is quite absurd.
These companies try hard to push the narrative that MIT is "practical" and GPL is "political" - guess why.
Reminder: github star history is in no way a measure of quality.
Let me remind you that revolutions happened throughout history.
After thousand of years of cynics saying "nothing changed", one day, a tipping point is reached.
Nobody cares.
Repeating this mantra all the time is not helpful.
People have been told that modern computing and privacy cannot coexist. That all software companies spy on them and users can only choose between giving up privacy or giving up technology.
On top of that, privacy, by itself, is meaningless. What matters is information inequality. Inequality is power.
When people can monitor a government you have democracy.
When people cannot monitor a government and the government monitors people you have tyranny.
Unsurprisingly, there are many paid privacy and anonymity services for wealthy people.
Please don't say that people just don't care. People have been educated to be meek to authority.