@mntmn thousands of people across the world, universities, companies.. they all just really like Linus Torvalds and they just think Tux is very cute, absolutely nothing social to inspect here

/sar

if you depend on a secret machine, whose usage you rent from a secret factory, to write your code, you have become the downstream of an oracle that is now in control of you, it has become the new landlord of your skill, and you have also become its little pay piggie

@mntmn my impression of early Linux history is that Linus became an Important Person completely by accident

@mntmn
Even for people wanting a unix-like operating system free of charge in the mid-1990s, FreeBSD was an objectively better alternative. But a lot of really good programmers chose Linux for political reasons, and made it better.

I still run FreeBSD on my home server. I have considered switching because it would make things easier with docker and systemd, but by now I'm kind of happy I haven't.

@mntmn in my software dev career, since 2005 or so, I often heard from fellow devs that "open source is just a business model".

at the time I thought this was a cynical and greedy view. and also silly. do these people also think a bird is just a shitty fish?

I should have taken it as a warning. the industry would never stop until open source WAS part of the business model.

if someone says a bird is just a shitty fish, maybe they intend to flood the world

@mntmn This is something that has been bugging me about the whole AI/LLM for a while know: When I first dabbled in programming I was messing a around in some weird windows based ecosystem, where one would need to pay for IDEs, compilers or other tools (or "borrow" them from friends). I even bought a licence for a compiler, because I wanted to sell one of the small tools I made and needed an above board way to build the binaries.
Then I stumbled upon that Linux thing and it changed everything. The barrier of entry for writing software went from buy/obtain all these weird proprietary tools, to here's a free CD put it into any second hand computer and you can start making cool stuff. (I'd put something about the means of production here, but the wouldn't be appropriate as Linux is apparently not a political project...)

Now more and more codebases have a lot of LLM generated code in them and the documentation is intended to onboard agents instead of new contributors. At least from my point of view the barrier of entry to making software will soon be: Pick one of these providers and pay them a monthly fee to access their LLM code generator thing.

That's pretty much the antithesis of what got me into Linux and open source in general.