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lolwut

Net/Free/OpenBSD are alternatives to Linux if that’s what you mean

I haven’t checked out the state of HURD in a while but possibly that as well

This has been 100% my experience as well. Most of the really good coders I’ve met are the types that also do it as a hobby outside work and also are reactionary/turbolib empire bootlickers. Literally regurgitating MSM slop and thinking they understand societal problems because they’ve read an op-ed in Bloomberg about why we need AI to fix the economy rather or something like that.

I think it comes from them spending so much time on that one thing that they just kind of dont even put any brain power towards politics or the state of the world

I’d also add to that the fact that this one thing they focus on has often been put on a pedestal (like coding for instance), which gets to many of them and makes them overestimate their abilities in other areas (“society says coders are smart, I’m a coder, I make good money, maybe I really am better than others, even at other things too” - an attitude I’ve encountered quite a few times).

Programmers, the senior ones who can court good money with relative ease at least, are gonna tend to be pretty well off, which I’m sure is part of it. For them, the concept of “skills gud, pay gud too, something something meritocracy vibes” pretty much applies (even if the reasons it works for them are probably not what they think) and afaik they don’t even have to fight for it with unions much of the time because the demand is high enough and the number of people at their skill level low enough. Entry level seems to be a much different story, having become saturated with all the bootcamp code stuff and “learn to code” rhetoric and such. But like, there’s stuff where it runs on some old programming language that virtually nobody learns or actively uses anymore, so knowing it could give you a lot of leverage.

The moment these types of people were faced with hardship in employment and wages, I’m confident many of them would start questioning a lot of things they never thought much about before. But as long as they are a relatively comfy class in high demand, much of the class struggle can fly under the radar for them and through that, much of the rhetoric that might persuade them to think about imperialism as well.

Yeah, we need to stop doing that. I’m so sick of coders that act like they’re big brain geniuses because society put their profession on a pedestal for the last decade or so

And a large part of the open stack as well, including g-libraries, gnome, wayland and everything hosted on freedesktop.org.

This is just phoronix commenters trying to extend the anger to their favorite hate targets.

I don’t like the BSD license very much, I am more in hope that GNU Hurd finally kicks off, but I doubt any of the two happens.

It’s entirely clear why the change was done

No, like please explain it!!! WTF

This is because of western sanctions. Chinese contributors are much more numerous and more important than any Russians ever were; and they’re also not a sanctioned country, so I highly doubt it

Uh they are sanctioned with more being added literally every year and once the US kicks off the planned war and decoupling against them in the next 4-5 years they’re going to throw down a wall of sanctions just like the one they threw on Russia and I bet you that Linus will cite legal once again in an opaque decision to remove them while crying about how evil the Chinese government is for oppression of Uyghurs, for reclaiming Taiwan after it declared independence at American urging and offered to host American nukes, etc, etc.

Oh they’ll let some back in, after they’ve signed a pledge that they are not associated with the Chinese military in any way (working for a company that supplies systems that are used by another company in a product that sells to the military counts), that they denounce their government and the communist party, that they are not Uyghurs or in Xin’jiang or associated with companies in Xin’jiang (as all enlightened westerners know all Uyghurs that were not killed in the totally real genocide are slaves so it’s not acceptable to use their work) and so on and so forth. Which will mean a shocking amount of their devs will be out and Linus will shrug and claim they made a choice to not take the simple step of siding with the west against their own people and therefore got what they got.

They of course hope to use such sanctions to force companies to gut-punch and weaken the Chinese military and state but having them choose to decouple from the west instead is also perfectly acceptable.

The west is pulling all its might to it, while it still has strength to do so. It will cut out Chinese developers but that doesn’t matter. If Linux desktop crashes and burns no matter because they only really need it for servers and Red Hat and other alphabet agency adjacent companies will keep those distros humming along on approved Intel/AMD/western hardware configurations.

They aim to then cut out China from Linux and hope the whole thing collapses and cannot be used for their own hardware meaning they’ll have to support a hard-forked kernel which many western planners doubtless think they won’t be able to do or it will at least hinder them badly for some time and more important draw a strong digital divide, a digital iron curtain between western Linux and users thereof and Chinese/Russian Linux and users thereof.

The planners of these things don’t care about some minor consequences, they’re in a life or death struggle, winner takes all, west comes out on top for another century+ of dominance and exploitation with western capital at the helm and white supremacy triumphing OR the multi-polar world emerges victorious and western hegemony and power collapses and with it their DoTB and their entire way of life and privilege.

Reshoring includes reshoring software jobs and if it’s important their thinking is someone will get paid to do it by some company, if it’s not paid for it clearly wasn’t important. This could cause problems for western corporations but it would likely be a down the road thing and most likely Valve or others would desperately try and keep Linux afloat just to have an alternative to Microsoft so they’re not destroyed by Windows locking down sales and apps via Windows store sales.