Did you read the article? This is 100% the opposite of his point. He wants to, among other things, publicly fund development of open source, at the expense of private companies which are currently profiting from it in arguably-abusive fashion.
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I wasn't too psyched about reading this article, but I was surprised at how sensible it is -- among a bunch of pretty good points he makes, this is one of them:
Another straw burdening the Open Source camel, Perens writes, "is that Open Source has completely failed to serve the common person. For the most part, if they use us at all they do so through a proprietary software company's systems, like Apple iOS or Google Android, both of which use Open Source for infrastructure but the apps are mostly proprietary. The common person doesn't know about Open Source, they don't know about the freedoms we promote which are increasingly in their interest. Indeed, Open Source is used today to surveil and even oppress them."
From the end user's point of view, there is absolutely no open-source-ness to your Android phone. (BSD which iOS is based on was always designed to make this a possibility, but the GPL was not.) They're using all this software which was supposed to be authored under this theory of GPL, but except for the thinnest thinnest veneer of theoretical source availability, it's proprietary software at this point.
RMS actually talked about this. He laid out this vision of this bright future where you'd always have access to the source code for all the software on your computer and the rights to take a look at it or build on it or modify it, and some reporter said, well yes but what about all these other urgent problems that are ruining the world with private industry trying to make money at all costs and destroy it all. And RMS said, more or less: Yes. It bothers me a lot. But I don't really know about that, and I know software, and I felt like in this one specific area I could write a bunch of software and solve this one problem in this one area where I felt like I could make a difference. If other people could get to to work on these other more urgent problems that'd be great, because they also bother me a lot.
Get outta here with your 'f for "if"
Nope. The airlock effect inside the mechanism produces an additive effect with each coil that builds the pressure way beyond what a normal screw pump is capable of (he shows a friend who has one that pumps water to a garden 8 meters above just from the force of the river spinning it). That's what makes it worth its own whole Steve Mould video.
You're not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. "But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it's different") is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn't go to prison and it's okay when they cheat in elections.
I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn't mean someone who's on the other side suddenly shouldn't be an executive of anything.
You're not going to want to hear this, but this logic (i.e. "But MY side is the RIGHT one, so it's different") is exactly why the right wing thinks Trump shouldn't go to prison and it's okay when they cheat in elections.
I do agree with you that the left wing is the right side of history. That doesn't mean someone who's on the other side suddenly shouldn't be an executive of anything.
Why was appointing Eich as CEO so controversial? It's because he donated $1,000 in support of California's Proposition 8 in 2008, which was a proposed amendment to California's state constitution to ban same-sex marriage.
I want to try a thought experiment. Imagine that you observe this comment in reaction to the above:
I just don’t get why the author is so pissed about their political contributions. Guess what, people who are involved in big business are usually right-wing and support right-wing organizations. Shocking. Who could have known. I don’t even want to imagine how the author comes to the conclusion that this is some big conspiracy but I think we all know what political spectrum that guy belongs to.
What I just wrote is a mirror-image version of the top rated comment on that article from a few days ago about the Mozilla foundation funding left-wing organizations. Do you agree with one of those statements and not the other? If so, why?
It is one-sided to say that someone involved in Brave should only be "allowed" to do so if he doesn't support anything conservative. Just as would be one-sided and wrong to say that Mozilla shouldn't be "allowed" to support left-wing organizations. Flipping it around, and looking at the reaction when it's the other way around, is an easy way to analyze your own internal reactions on it.
(Generally, I'm in agreement with the idea that you shouldn't use Brave because of all these other shady things; just this one part jumped out at me as one thing that's not like the others.)
The town was infested with some sort of radioactivity from underground that was hurting people. I had to crawl underground, through these super-tight tunnels deep under the earth with things getting more and more evil as I went, until I was able to track the source of the radioactivity to a giant monster that lived back up on the surface (via the tunnels) in an abandoned barn. I had to fight the monster, but I could fly inside the barn. I ripped its head off, but every time I did, it was just like a big rubbery mask and a new head grew back, until I figured out how to do it fast enough that it wouldn't have time to pop a new head out. When I did that, the real head came out: Tux the Linux Penguin.
That broke the immersion enough that I woke up, all amped up from adrenaline from fighting the monster.
I think we're saying the same thing; maybe I worded it confusingly. BSD is supposed to allow proprietary-ization, and GPL is supposed to prevent it. Apple is within both the letter and spirit of the BSD license with what they're doing with iOS. Google is technically within the letter of the GPL with how they distribute Android, just as Redhat is technically within it in how they distribute RHEL, and honestly maybe both cases are fine, but it's far from the intent. The spirit of the GPL is that people who would receive an Android phone would know that the relevant parts of their phone's software are open source and have a realistic ability to modify them, which I'd argue is true for pretty much 0% of even tech-savvy users today.
Firmware? You mean kernel, right? (in addition to whatever low-level userland tools are GPLd, which I'm sure is a bunch.)
I don't think Google really did anything wrong here. The letter of the law is being upheld pretty well in what they're doing. I think the issue is the cell phone manufacturers making it de facto impossible to modify your cell phone. I don't think the GPL actually makes any requirement for modifying the software in-place being a requirement (nor should it IMO), and providing the source code is done carefully in accordance with the license. It's very different from the "fuck you I take your stuff, sue me hippie" stance that Broadcom took. Broadcom very clearly broke the law.
In my opinion, the issue is that a cell phone is such a free-software-hostile environment that arguably GPL software shouldn't "be allowed to" come into contact with it in any capacity if the spirit of the GPL were being upheld. IDK how you can write something like that into a license though. And I think that's what Perens is saying -- that we need a new model that comes closer to the spirit in terms of what the actual result is.
(Edit: Actually, maybe making it a realistic possibility to drop in a recompiled replacement should be a part of the GPL. I remember people were talking about this decades ago with signed bootloaders and things, so that a recompiled kernel wouldn't boot on particular machines unless you broke the DMCA by doing something to your hardware. I said I wouldn't like any attempt in the license to forbid that, but on reflection, it sounds like maybe a pretty good way to better uphold the spirit of the GPL with particular legal language.)