Refusing the GPL'd code, prevents the non GPL'd code from becoming "contaminated" plus - GPL is regarded by some as a viral license.

Hence the school of thought that GPL isn't a good thing and why some 'BSDs have policies which exclude it from the base system.

You are actually stating what I have been saying for at least the last 10 years - that GPL is not some anti corporate or anti capitalist safeguard, which prevents corporate involvement/takeover.  As you have noted, corporations have infiltrated free software and simply pay the people / fund the projects and in doing so achieve control and can steer those projects as they see fit.  This also means that"unfunded" projects lack/lose developers and die.  One could argue that, if the code were under,e.g. BSD 2 clause, they would just throw some donations at the project, walk away and do their own thing.  Who can say for sure.  I think that horse has bolted.

All GPL really does in a nutshell is seek to prevent a company (or an individual in fact) from taking code and "turning it proprietary".  That's really it.

And when corporations do develop "free" code?  They use the non copyleft (permissive) licenses wherever possible (for example, code developed by AMD or Intel for the Linux DRM/KMS graphics stack is mostly permissive licensed.

If they do use GPL - you can bet they have done so for a reason, in that there is a business motivation for releasing the code under a restrictive copy left licence (having no option but to release the code, but at the same seeking to prevent a competitor from using the code without also having to release their own derivative works).

There is another valid argument however - costs.  Despite Microsoft propaganda of the early 00s, Linux is a cheaper alternative for e.g. IBM or HPE than developing their own in house UNIX.  They essentially get the same "solution" they had to pay many millions of dollars to develop, for what amounts to peanuts.  So you can already see that it's very much in the corporate interest to "hijack" projects such as the Linux kernel and steer them to suit a corporate agenda.

I'm almost certain OpenBSD contains no "non-free" stuff - in fact there are strict policies with regards to that.

FreeBSD, I'm not so sure about.  I do know they have signed NDAs in the past and I know their focus is on providing something that works rather than something primarily provided to meet some ideological objective.  But yes, despite this - one could argue that FreeBSD is "more free" than Linux as it is not funded and controlled by a consortium of "Big Tech", but instead relies on donors (some of those also being "Big Tech"), who throw some money at it.  That is ironic, considering all the criticism leveled at FreeBSD over the years by GNU evangelists (while corporations crept in and stole almost everything from under their noses).

No project is perfect or "better" however.  I can see a lot of problems in many FOSS projects.  It seems that corporate influence, even something like those nefarious "CoC" documents are everywhere these days.

@Ogis1975:  100% agreed.  It's a pity politics can't be left out of this, but it seems we're too far down that rabbit hole now...

The western media has completely glossed over and hidden the fact that Neo Nazi militias actually rule Ukraine, through a puppet.  And when I say "Neo Nazi militias", that's precisely what I mean - i.e. fanatics who style themselves on the SS, worship Adolph Hitler and would ethnically cleanse most of Europe in a heartbeat if they had the chance.

The "west" are arming these militias, just as they armed Islamist death squads in Syria in order to force out Assad.  That was a proxy war against Russia, this is no different.

Some of you need need to turn off the fucking TV news / put down the biased tabloids, which only ever repeat the state sponsored narrative and start thinking for yourselves.

I think ESR is way off...

WSL/WSL2 shows that MS is hellbent on keeping Windows as the installed OS and is researching and developing means to ensure that.  UEFI and Secureboot were another means of creating a gradual slippery slope towards vendor lock in and greater influence and control by Microsoft.  Business is business and "security" is often touted in sales patter.  Unfortunately some are unable to separate the sales talk from the technical talk when it comes to those two.  The "corporate Linux" vendors, signed in blood for Microsoft (of course they did, as they're MS partners, in bed with MS and have been for well over a decade) and unfortunately some Linux fans bought the whole "security" thing.

The idea that MS will eventually scrap Windows and rebuild from the ground up seems outlandish - I seriously doubt that will happen - for decades anyway. and then only as a matter of necessity.  At this moment in time, it's a pipe dream.

Consider that Linux itself dates back to the early 90's.

Windows NT (i.e. the current Windows OS family) dates back to the late 80's and has it's roots in OS/2.

BSD is even older, late 70's, with the current 'BSD OS having their origins in 386BSD (early 90's).

macOS/iOS is based on parts of BSD and the Mach kernel - again 80's and 90's OS,

So, while it could be argued that Windows is getting "stale", so in fact are all of the other mainstream OS.

If Microsoft were to switch to Linux with some "Wine like" emulation layer, they would have to go through a massive retool, overhaul and exercise in retraining.  The migration alone for their enterprise customers, would be a massive and highly disruptive undertaking, which could be catastrophic - for very little return.  And that's before you even consider all of the hardware support implications.  It might be great way of sending a big proportion of customers running to Red Hat/SUSE/Canonical.  It won't happen.

Generally enterprise doesn't care if their MS exchange server now runs on Linux - they just need it to work and shareholders just want a return on their investment.  While Windows may be crap, it's predictable crap for the sysadmins and other professionals who are paid to keep it running.

DuckDuckGo was marketed by Wienberg as being a "privacy" focused search engine - it turned out to be no different to the worst.

There is Microsoft collusion (conclusively proven facilitation of MS trackers, hosting on Azure and github, scraping of bing search) and the same political bias/censorship as other "Big Tech" based search engines.  To cap it all, it's actually proprietary software.  Using DuckDuckGo with the expectation of any privacy is what amounts to either "head in sand" naivety or willful ignorance.

Not incredible at all.  She was pure evil.

At LQ there was a moratorium on covid topics - and quite rightly so.  I'm wise enough to keep my opinions on it to myself...

But any covid thread quickly deteriorates into social media style puerile squabbles, both sides waving supposed "facts" around, neither side actually having a clue.  Not worth all the trouble.

Unless your writing your own rc scrips / services / unit files, I'm not sure why you'd care.

That may be the product of fear mongering.  Linux is not just GNU/Linux + systemd.  In fact it's mainly Android:

https://www.theverge.com/2021/5/18/2244 … oogle-2021

That's over 85% of mobile devices.

Desktops are < 2%.

Servers and embedded (including smartphone OS) is the main market for Linux, that's what the corporate funding is all about.  Of those only servers and only those server products from Red Hat, SUSE and Canonical are really invested in systemd.  But make no mistake about it, they want users and exposure.

Desktop distributions get it, because they are well downstream and serve as free beta testers for those enterprise server OS.  systemd entanglement with the gnome project (another Red Hat funded project) also ensures that systemd is shoehorned into desktops as much as possible, to increase the numbers further.  Consider that most of the major desktop distributions are corporate owned or funded - or reliant on a distribution that is.  systemd does more and more, because it's goal is to achieve as wide adoption as possible.  Those desktop distributions are after all hardly different to their server counterparts.

It's about cheap development - developing the kind of software that Microsoft and historically the likes of HPE and IBM had to pay out many, many hundreds of millions to develop, maintain and support over decades.

https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manua … figuration

Hyperbola BSD was what I was referring to.  If you read the links I posted, you'll see that:

* The intent is to abandon the Linux kernel. See the interview with the developer.
* HyperbolaBSD is new name of the project, to be based on the OpenBSD kernel (refer again to the interview)
* As hevidevi menioned, an Alpha was supposed to be out by now.(refer to the itsfoss interview)

* HyperbolaBSD git repositories have seen little to no activity, Hyperbola repositories aren't that active either.  I provided the link to the git repository, so you can check for yourself.  In terms of HyperbolaBSD, from the git repo, it looks like they are about as far away as you can imagine from an Alpha release - with only two commits 5 months ago and nothing since.

There has also been no news posted on the website since February 2020.

Last post in the "development" forum back in May: https://forums.hyperbola.info/viewforum.php?id=99

(Which consists of a lot of chat and not a lot else.)

That's not quite correct.  There are four distinct BSD derived OS.  Those OS use a different kernel and userland - each is a complete OS, rather than just a kernel.  So if you port the kernel from any of those projects to the "userland" of a different OS, you actually have a "GNU/someBSDkernel" operating system.

I'm not seeing that kind of activity in the git repository.

If PC-BSD, TrueOS, "Project Trident", etc is anything to go by, I wouldn't count on the Lumina Desktop being around for much longer either...

headstick will be nursing a semi reading this....

UEFI is the Trojan Horse, Secureboot is the Trojan inside, the "payload" if you will. If I can boot my chosen OS using CSM, and it boots normally then I am not convinced of the benefits of UEFI.   UEFI features such as GPT, are possible with a PMBR.  So if an OS does not support GPT with a legacy BIOS, that's a business decision they are making, not a technical one. If you search the web for the advantages of UEFI, you will find a lot of hot air about a GUI using a mouse and of course "security". That latter claim is insane, as UEFI increases attack surfaces and introduces vectors which weren't there in legacy BIOS. For example: remote management / networked capability....