IriYan

The largest machines, the largest servers, nearly all supercomputers, are running on linux, or some form of unix to a lesser extent, not MSwin or other crappy non-FOSS mass-produced profit maker for the dumb and innocent “user”.

I am surprised nobody even acknowledged your post, and this may be an indication that not many have made this connection. So I applaud your initiative that has not received much attention since everyone is too scared to append classical political theory (are you listening Marxist?), let alone challenge it in its inability to interpret material realities of today.

Yes, the idea of contributing “work”, produce, openly and freely, for anyone to consume, alter, reprodruce, without a direct “exchange” is probably the only area of the market that this is happening. Maybe public domain documents, art, theory, A/V material licensed as CC or Gpl are also important. Imagine we could do this with basic core survival necessities and construct autonomous communities with such an economy (or really lack of an economic system). But it may be happening with products that are not really material, and can be shared through a medium of low or no-cost. It would be hard to do this grains, building materials, fruit, vegetables, eggs (vegan god forbid :).

But, but, but, there are problems within this “commune” of open AND free sw.

1. The small problem is the elitism pushed by the ultra-libre foss crowd which lacks the self criticism that in order for people to locate the proper hardware so they can run ALL libre-sw they have to pay high prices, which some can’t afford. Getting pseudo-refurbished used industrial equipment (DELL/HP workstations/pcs mostly) in sub 100 ($/Euro) values is what the vast majority of the world can afford and use. Nearly all hw in x86-64 platform though, even those that provide libre firmware/drivers etc, are not all open/free source. Most only work through binary blobs that are neither open or free. We can speculate but we may never know what is “iinside”… and just the specs of what they can do are scary enough.

2. The apolitical, non-critical, perspective among FOSS developers is that if “corporations” provide FOSS, or just open source, we can use that is good and we should rush to use it if it is functional and helps our experience and work. But especially large corporations have used this FOSS channel to manipulate, steer, and control the FOSS development, towards a direction that benefits them (and maybe the state agencies under which those mega-corps are protected, can profit, and exist). It is always an exchange system that rules those relationships. So companies like IBM/RH, Qt, Oracle, HP, google, facebook, …etc. can provide foss code and push development towards something that is compatible with their tools, so independent developers can and will incorporate their platforms and move their direction.

It is like creating an autonomous community and allowing representatives of a corporation to work the fields but also participate in assemblies on how to run the community.

With linux foundation having the largest industrial names as seats of the board, and be paying 7digit salaries to the top signers of the kernel, within a year or two alone the kernel has grown more than 2X in size, full of industrial firmware and code, that most common mortals will never even see from a distance. So who are they contributing code to/for? Yes, 7digits in $/Eu yearly salary + “benefits”, paid trips, paid talks, workshops, … and the occassional consulting contract to sweeten the defaults of the next gen kernel.

So, enjoy your stay in this hippie pacifist commune called FOSS, but don’t expect too much critical political thinking. Most devs are really dreaming of those 6-7digit salaries in the industry doing non-foss work while you are thinking commune. This is why their big fat name is placed on every little bit that is published. BUY ME BUY ME I AM FOR SALE!!! :)

3. We are at war, remember, nobody is innocent till proven not-guilty.

I can hardly find one thing I could agree in this and wonder what on earth is such useless documents be promoted in here for?

This analysis could have come from any Marxist party, in a cowardly traditional manner of being unable to challenge a comma or an exclanation mark of classic M&E theory.

In the dead ends and tremendous contradictions of marxist theoretical development this is just another attempt of trying to paint a reality in such a way as to fit the theory, and we all thought it was meant the other way around, and in this “WE” I would include Karl Marx but especially Engels who was the true dialectical materialist. There is somewhere in Karl’s writing that says that he would have been most happy to alter and revise the thery if reality show that the theory is invalid. Marxists since then have elevated those books into theology where terror and exile is upon those who dare challenge the theology.

Neo-liberalism in the 80s … because this is what fits in theory? By the time the term neo-liberalism was announced and made public as part of politics it was at a period where a 40+ year transformation of state an economy was taken place to fit this propaganda. It was safe to mention it. It was pretty much the same time that social democracy died, for which many Marxist would die defending.

You can’t reverse history, you can only write the future, and going back to social democracy would mean a revolution and a total overthrow of the globalized economy.

Unless the Marxist has the all powerful, autonomous, and manageable state as a safe harbor, the Marixst has nothing to step on and propagandize. A bankrupt ideology based on a weak theory, even though it may be the only theory we have ever had.

1st of all globally libertarian is a specific mode with the anarchist movement, definitely anti-capitalist and anti-inequality of any sort (economic or political). What the FBI fabricated a pseudo ideology full of contradictions and sold it/financed it as libertarianism since the 50s (part of their counter-movement anti-communism enterprise which some of it was later banned in court) and spilled over to 3-4 other English speaking nations, has nothing at all to do with libertarianism (left libertarianism or libertarian socialist are also fake tags admitted by passive people that wanted to distance themselves from this “disease”. Anarcho-capitalism is equally a pseudo ideology. The rest of the world just laughs at the immaturity of the English speaking people shifting tags around to contradictory things because they are “pop”. The US effort to redefine a century and a half of political philosophy tradition to serve its own internal governmental pathology is purely a laughing matter for the world. Immature people develop immature movements. Or should I say people who refuse to read more than a page at a time can go out on social media and speak as theoretical authorities.

Libertarianism is well documented for a century and a half, it doesn’t need US fed propaganda and social media to defend itself. Pathetic UK monkeys seeing the US propaganda and reproducing it like good pups, have also fallen for this anarcho-capitalist/libertarian construct for the mentally challenged.

The one thing libertarians are known for is the proposal for class and social organization, to organize under certain minimal principles that ensure and protect the absolute equality of its members. And for communities (either work or living communities) to accept one and only one authority, of their collective organization and assembly, their collective decisions, on which they are free to participate and whose decisions only affect those who are part of it. That and rational communication within the assembly because individual leaps into the supernatural and metaphysical can only develop to collective chaos. So before entering the assembly you can leave your personal individualistic philosophy at the front door basket and pick it up on your way out.

Now, you want to build a house, within a libertarian community, other than your own labor and physical technical abilities, to house yourself, you need resources (tools and supplies, metaphysics you can add on your own to your own house, see if some entity through preyer holds the beams up on top of your head). The available resources are those that are collectively available to the community, whether in shortage or abundance it is a communal problem to determine, One thing will be for sure, if there is shortage you can’t have more than your share because that will prevent someone else from also building a needed house. Fortunately, since the libertarian uprising there is no market, no industrial market you can get supplies, You have what the community has.

You must be building that house for yourself, not to rent or exploit other people by it, correct? I don’t see why any libertarian community would have a problem with it.

In theory, in practice I suspect that a true libertarian community helps as a community everyone to build a house and expect everyone to be helping you, not because it is a law or a decision of the assembly to do so, but as part of solidarity and the realization that shelter, food, health care, education, entertainment, are all human necessities and the community is founded in providing all this for the community.

Does everyone get to have the same house, just as big, or just as complex, it is not up to theoretical or ideological criteria to determine, that would have been anti-libertarian, to have some mora/ideological authority to enforce an agenda on the community. It is simply up to the community to decide. If all one needs is a shady room, or a basement, to sit and play cello in their free time, why oppose it. If one needs a room and a kitchen and a small pad to raise spices and herbs and cook funky things, why not. Now if one wants to build a motorcycle that does 350km/h and we have no raw titanium and machining facilities to make valves for it, I am sure the community will have their objections to prostituting collectively just to get you those much needed 16 valves.

So, libertarianism is not for all, it is for those who are in need to end their exploitation (economic) and oppression (political), whether that is by boss, parent, spouce, teacher, cop, those who feel it know who they will be liberated from. The rest are only worried about losing luxuries and toys during a possible transition to an eggalitarian social organization. They are not ready because they benefit from capitalism, Fortunately they are a small minority in N/W Europe, N.America, Japan, HK, Australia/NZ and a handful of urban centers elsewhere where either intense industrialization is controlled by them or extraction of tremendous amounts of raw materials in high demand by industry (oil minerals etc.). The rest of the world is happy to be able to grow beans, rice, corn and eat it too without been treated as slaves.

Now this is a wider issue, the Red Army did liberate the largest part of Europe from Nazi rule, the US basically tried to liberate France but the Red Army was in Germany before the US crossed the border. In Yalta the three, US/UK/USSR divided the pie, Spain and Greece went on the other half and remained fascist till the 70s (meaning anticapitalists were executed, prisoned, exiled, etc). Yugoslavia went its own way. The US UK handed Hung/CZ over to them, but unlike other places the USSR had to use force to take over what was given to them in the pe cutting.

This is not defense of tankie-ism it is pretty much what happened. Now between 90 and 2024 the 90/1 agreement was no Nato expansion beyond its current borders, and that was severely violated by NATO, to the last ring around the chain being Ukr and Belarus. So the not so red not so hot army anymore had to either react or accept total defeat and submission to NATO. There was no alternative for Russia other than to turn history back which in 30y proved impossible.

I am not passing judgement on which dictator is better, I hate Biden as much as the next guy, but the narrative of recent history appears to have left out all petitions to the UN filed by Russia for the violation of the agreement. The UN’s excuse, NATO is not a UN member, and you can’t blame any particular state member of NATO for what NATO does. Unfortunately a state (Russia) which wasn’t part of the Yalta agreement the SU was, signed an agreement with NATO, not with any particular country. They should have had a better lawyer and not a drunk for a president.

So Russia will evolve to yet another oil-rich country that is blockaded and cut-off from world markets like Iran and Venezuela. Unlike Iranians and Venzuelans Russians get really nasty when they get pissed, hungry, or out of vodka. So this is not going to go well too far too long. We shall see. Oil production and distribution, held by a handful of US based multinationals, will increase their profits in a further restricted oil market. So Iran, Russia, and Venezuela’s isolation does serve a profitable industry’s interests.

It was the mishaps of the internet effect and social media, being inherently hierarchical and non-democratic, “owners” of virtual space dictating communication to be a-political, under the preface that people get along when they are a-political. It is the same generation that you see as winning to be the motor for losing. The reason you can’t develop democracy on the internet is that “the internet” doesn’t exist over public space but is solely built on private space (land or wire doesn’t matter). It is always the host, not the tenants, that place the rules for being on or off.

The age-polarization was a dillemma for many generations it was always a false polarization. Unless you would consider an anarchist/libertarian community of equals participating in decision processes, all hierarchical systems of organization will float the elders to the top and youth to serve in the bottom. Whether it is GOP, or a communist party, a club, or anything else, when do you find anyone young at the top. And by what means do you expect that someone younger will be more democratic, and less of a fascist?

With the democratic party moving as far to the right as it had, there was little room for the rep.party to move to, other than where it is now.

This is the US political system’s reaction to the popular uprising of the Trump years, the transition of Occupy-xyz to BLM … It is like America of the 30s reacting and ending in the AmeriKKKa of the 50s.

One thing that the American left has way overlooked is the power over 80% of the population that Sunday morning propaganda and indoctrination has. Zombies like Biden can be drawn out of the alter closets and dropped as saviors of a crisis.

The health of the democratic tendencies of the US was evaluated by the revolution the Snowden revelations created. Since there was none, consider the corpse cold and stiff.

If I told you there are people with MS degrees (that is MS not MA) who believe now the earth is flat, what would your reactions be? I ask because there are many who believe formal education in science serves as immunization to stupidity. It doesn’t!

and from which trees many fascists will hang

Speck was pushed and provided by Google to linux, they added the content to the kernel having your naive belief, it was later found containing a backdoor to ALL systems, and Google raised their hands up and said it was passed to us by NSA. Is this what happened? Or did I dream all this up?

Facebook provided 0 FOSS, not a bit, suddenly they make an algorithm they “bought” including the author, and make it foss, to build it it needs google software, like a bush fire more than half of distributions adopt it and all data provided as comparative to xz are false, based on poor use of xz to make zstd appear better, while still admitting zstd can never attain the level of compression, but it is fast (ONLY when xz is run on a single thread while zstd is multithread by default). They claim xz sums are different when run on 1 cpu or many, still not true.

Just wait for that bomb to explode, the guy who wrote the code for zstd doesn’t seem possible to have enough knowledge to write it, he appears as a front for something.

Things that smell like shit don’t have to be actually tasted to be called shit.

Have you audited any of it? Would you like to try gcc or systemd for that matter? By the time you go through 1% of it the code has changed already. How many times in the past years has tremendous security breaches been caused by FOSS and was discovered months after it was in effect, and some of this by coincidence, or corporate teams that review code.

This is the classic reaction that is so empty of content, I am sorry, but systemd can’t keep hiding behind the excuse of being better than sysvinit. Ever since daemontools (decades ago) those who defend systemd keep talking about sysvinit. Out of daemontools many forks or inspired systems were developed. Runit reached the end of development 8 years ago, 0 bugs, 100% of goals met, still works with every distro and kernel flawlessly. s6 makes runit look archaic, and unable to do what s6 can.

Yet systemd’s defense is “it is better than sysvinit, or BSD scripts”.

For proper critique of systemd see the skarnet.org site under the specific thread. As far as I know there is no rational counter argument to what is presented there. If you have such I am sure the authors of skarnet.org would publish it, it is how s6 got better and better.

lynx elinks links :)

I find console text only browsers more effective than iceweasel, when pages break with iw you get no text, at least with links/elinks/lynx you get the text.

That’s not a good reason to hate it, there are others (like the chrome engine underneath it all). You don’t want ads, you want them blocked, block them, you let them play you get money for it, crypto money. It sounds like a good proposal. If all browsers did this advertising would get really expensive and ineffective, not a bad thing.

That took a dive as well in the last edition, unless you have systemd running many features like the top menu fails. Revert back to previous edition and your profile is ruined and you need to start from 0. A clever way mozilla has forced users to abandon their settings and be forced to go with their defaults. By the time you figure out what to disable again … it is bye bye!

All librewolf community are large systemd only distros, it was all OK with them to stick it to non-systemd users. IBM pays good, and money is sweet! FOSS … my w

I hate to burst your bubble but when it comes to 6-7digits of cash at stake what does “trustworthy” even mean? You mean between millions and his word to you he will choose his word? His previously stated values and principles?

The guy who made waterfox seemed pretty nice, friendly, committed to the cause, then sold the project to a data-miner, and so did the honest people who made startpage, the trustworthy privacy minded search engine? Now they see waterfox is independent again and not part of the big multi-natinal data miner.

Mozilla once again made a sudden change that breaks your previous profile or other functionality and if you dare roll back the upgrade your profile has been ruined in transition, so you are forced to start from scratch reconfiguring, setting up you std tabs, bookmarks, history … Same stuff with TB, addons/plugins disabled, new “features” added, whether you trust them or not, added dependencies … you roll back you lose.

The google chrome-engine is so intrusive in the way it runs, degoogled or not, it is hell to have on a system. Maybe inside a vm without anything else other than specific browser session may be ?ok? for fluff work, nothing private I hope.

The naivity of people to accept and sometimes welcom large corporations producing FOSS is what got us to this mess, and I don’t mean users, but devs, distro managers, … if it is legally FOSS it is OK, even if it is a huge trojan horse manufactured by corporations to penetrate an other wise safe and secure system. FOSS - no corporate involvement - may be it, but will it boot? LinFound. gets millions and millions to have board seats to influence kernel, and it seems to be dancing with their wishes.

Have you tried custom ROMs?

No, even when I did try years ago, to break into one device to get another system in, just the concept of what it takes to do so upset my stomach. I don’t even like secure-boot hoops and EFI and try to get to bios booting everything. I did try it for a while, efi, and hated it some more. Bios - mbr … and my nearly 10y old PC is faster than I would ever need.

It is amazing what google and MS project as security, both providing dummy terminals to their supercomputer as operating systems. What is security for android if you don’t trust google (same manner for MS).

One can take it further, to any hardware we use, since we really don’t have open-source free hardware. Maybe pre-Ryzen AMD and possibly core2duo may have been the closest less evil alternatives to what goes around now as 99% of computing.

may randomly become universal, like the Nokia BL-5C

I still use a small light old Nok with no camera, with my use I can go a week between charge, and have a few more and took the batteries out a few days and recharged them all. I can probably hike in remote areas and have a month of talk time now :)

By hating android the only ones I have are friends’ old phones and tablets whose batteries died and costed too much to have it replaced. I would love to try a pinephone though to install my own linux on it.