Man, I'm really keen for this. The GBA Sonic games are often slept on but I think they were amazing at recreating the feel of the original Mega Drive games, with great music and sprite work too. I've long thought they deserved a modern PC port in the style of Sonic 1 Forever or Sonic Origins, to free them from the cramped GBA screen.
Sonic fans have been making a lot of these unofficial, enhanced, moddable PC ports using decompilation, recompilation and emulation techniques, including Sonic 1 Forever, Sonic 3 A.I.R. and recently, the Sonic Unleashed PC port. PC (including Linux) is getting to be the definitive platform for playing a lot of these older Sonic games, which is great to see.
Also, for those who aren't familiar with anime fansubbing, I can't emphasize enough how optimized it was. Shows would be released online within 1-2 days of the original airing on Japanese TV, with fan-translated, high-quality, QC'd subtitles. The community had high standards, and they'd normally beat the official English-language release at accuracy and readability. Aegisub was a big part of that and it's one of my favourite FOSS programs to use.
I'm not surprised at all. LLM responses are just probability. With 100s of millions of people using LLMs daily, 1-in-a-million responses are common, so even if you haven't experienced it personally, you should expect to hear stories about wacky left field responses from LLMs. Guaranteed every LLM has tons of examples of dialogue from sci-fi "rouge AI" in its training set, and they're often told they are AI in their system prompt.
Is there a reason why this isn't Nokia branded? It seems insane to me that HMD own the most respected phone brand in history and... just choose not to use it for some of their phones? I feel like I'm missing something about the HMD/Nokia situation here.
It's not unfair. I have a different standard for proprietary payware and proprietary freeware. With the former, you know where you stand, but in my experience, the reasons for not releasing freeware under a FOSS licence are normally user-hostile, like baiting in users with a free product and charging money once they're hooked. I've been bitten too many times, so I don't tend to install proprietary freeware anymore.
- Support for multiple monitors with different scale factors, eg. a high-DPI internal laptop screen and a low-DPI external screen. Dragging windows between each display is seamless with Wayland, which is better than you can even say for Windows.
- Touchpad scrolling in web browsers is now smooth tear-free 60fps+. For some reason, both Firefox and Chromium-based browsers had frame pacing issues with Xorg, especially on low-powered hardware or with full desktop composition. These issues were so well known that testufo.com refuses to give results on Linux browsers. But both browsers work about as well with Wayland as they do in macOS and Windows.
If a game doesn't work in Wayland, you could always launch it in gamescope[1], which AFAIR doesn't expose WAYLAND_DISPLAY by default, so games should treat it the same as an X11 desktop.
> In any case, it changed years later when a startup using Nodemailer was acquired for half a billion dollars. I was financially not in a good place back then, and when I saw the news, I started to wonder – what did I get out of this?
This is really what you should expect when you work to improve the commons in the same world where there are entities that are hyper-optimized to make the most short-term profit out of anything they can exploit. Of course they're not going to give anything back. It could happen to any FOSS dev. It sucks, and it's definitely human to look at all the money they're making and feel like you deserve some of it. You do deserve it! Everyone deserves to make a living. But the world is still a better place with FOSS in it. It's a shame for this to happen to someone and for them to decide that improving the commons was a mistake and instead they should have been making projects that FOSS orgs can't use and individuals and small orgs are priced out of (but is still "peanuts" for big businesses.) If you make best-in-class software that's FOSS, everyone benefits, and you can feel proud that individuals have access to the same resources as big corps because of what you've done.
I'm also tentatively in favour of the idea of scaring away big corps with GPLv3 or AGPL licensed software.
Some do. If the current state of things is what happens when vendors are required to publish their source by law, imagine how much worse it would be if they weren't - there'd be nothing. What little we have of FOSS OSes on cheap consumer devices would be gone. Imagine no LineageOS, no community-supported postmarketOS devices, no installing mainline Linux on old Chromebooks etc.
I don't think having a great liberally-licenced microkernel-based OS is as good for the world in a practical sense compared to forcing every Android and Chromebook vendor to publish the changes they made to a copyleft monolithic kernel. I can totally understand being worried that the rise of Fuchsia would result in a dark age for running alternative open source OSes on cheap consumer smartphones, SBCs and ARM64 laptops.
Not Android but I think PinePhone and Librem 5 meet your standards. AFAIK they have proprietary WiFi/BT firmware, but they use virtualization (IOMMU) to protect themselves from it. I don't see how that's fundamentally different to your Qubes laptop.
Also I think you're ignoring my first point. I don't think any of this paranoia is reasonable. Unless you're being targeted by state actors, none of it is necessary to fill a reasonable definition of "controlling your device." This is all in response to an article about a child who doesn't like phones because he doesn't like social media. The adtech machine that powers social media is pervasive and it has its fingers in proprietary smartphone OSes, but it doesn't have its fingers in AOSP ROMs like GrapheneOS, so installing one of those is an easy and achievable way of avoiding it. Whether it's possible to remove every last drop of proprietary software is a side-issue here.
There's a difference between avoiding the very-real tracking for targeted advertising that companies like Google do, and the paranoia that your camera blobs are tracking you just because they're proprietary.
> proprietary [...] firmware
Your tiny laptop has this too.
> proprietary [...] applications
There are plenty of AOSP-derived ROMs without this.
This is just learned helplessness. If loss of control is a concern for you, there are FOSS privacy-focused operating systems you can install to your phone. You do control your phone.
Something you omitted is that one of the ways you can break the terms of your subscriber agreement with Red Hat is to exercise one of the rights guaranteed to you by the GPL, which is the right to take the "specific code and build instructions to build exactly what they distributed to you" and give them to someone else.
Or to put another way, Red Hat dissuade their subscribers from exercising their rights under the GPL with the threat of punishment - the termination of your subscription. The GPL is designed to grant you a right and the Red Hat subscriber agreement is designed to prevent it from being exercised. It really couldn't be clearer that this is against the spirit of the GPL. I don't see any other way to interpret what Red Hat is doing.
> I really don't understand the outrage from RH cracking down on clones.
I think it's very straightforward. A core tenet of the free software moment is that someone who uses a program (a Red Hat subscriber) should be able to share the source code of that program with their friends (Rocky Linux maintainers) for any purpose (updating Rocky Linux,) but Red Hat are threatening to terminate your subscription if you do that. Regardless of whether that's legal, it's definitely against the spirit of the GPL.
RHEL wouldn't exist as a commercial product if not for 10,000s of unpaid volunteers who contributed to GPL-licensed projects with the understanding that no one would be allowed to do what Red Hat is doing with a product derived from their contributions. Some have argued that Red Hat is owed an exception because of how much they've contributed back to the software they use, but I don't think it's right to say that on behalf of every unpaid contributor. There are definitely some who disagree with what Red Hat is doing.
I've always wondered why they can't just use custom ASICs for these. The common response to this question is that these mini consoles don't sell enough for the economy of scale to work out for designing and shipping custom silicon, but is that the full story? There were officially-licensed system-on-chip Mega Drive clones sold up until 2011, at cheap bargain-bin prices. Modern day mini consoles are priced like collectables and still sell hundreds of thousands, or even millions of units. Is that really not enough? Why could the Mega Drive clones do it?
As a new Pixel 7 owner, it really bothers me that Google went from championing the open source kernel drivers on their Snapdragon-based phones to using the proprietary Mali stack on their Google Tensor-based phones. This isn't the first Mali vulnerability to affect these allegedly security-focused devices.
Ever since AirPrint (IPP) became standard about 10 years ago, I think less about Linux-compatible printers than I do about Linux-compatible laptops - I just basically assume they all will work, which has been true for me so far.
It's a shame that, unlike with Win32, using WinUI places pretty harsh restrictions on which programming languages and environments you can use. Only C# and C++ are supported, the latter only with Microsoft compilers. For everything else, including Rust[1], Python and MinGW C/C++, there is no answer for OP's question, and the effect of this on the visual consistency of the Windows desktop is obvious - there is none. Every third-party app uses a different toolkit with a different look and feel, because the library providing the standard look and feel simply isn't available to the majority of developers.
I love Steam, Valve and Proton, and what they've done for Linux gaming, but nothing will make me compromise on DRM. To me, ending DRM is just as important as supporting free operating systems, so unfortunately no amount of good will gives Valve a free pass in my eyes.
So I've started buying games from DRM-free platforms like GoG and adding them to Steam as non-Steam games. Same compatibility and no need to use an external tool to maintain Wine/Proton prefixes. With the boatloads of money Valve makes from Steam, they probably won't miss me too much.
For what it's worth, I think I am. I got a gift voucher from work a little while back, combined it with a few other gift vouchers I had lying around and bought a convertible ChromeOS tablet. It seemed like a good choice, since I didn't have a tablet form-factor device at the time, it was a lightweight ARM thing that could natively run Android apps and Linux apps, and it ran a mostly-OSS stack including open source graphics drivers. I found it way more appealing than the equivalent devices running Android or Windows.
As soon as I got it home, I realized that all my passwords and bookmarks were in my Firefox account, and I remembered that I don't really like the idea of using Chromium-based browsers on the web for philosophical reasons. I tried to install Firefox, but the Linux version didn't work too well in tablet mode, so I had to suck it up and use Chrome. Kind of dumb on my part, I know, but I still like the device, and I'd like it even more if Firefox worked better on it.
Even if training a model turns out to be similar to human learning, I don't think it necessarily follows that it should be treated the same, legally or morally. There's nothing wrong with human laws or morals that enshrine human behavior, like the human way of learning, as special and distinct from machine learning.
This is exactly right. Almost everything you see on the internet is copyrighted, even if you're allowed to view it for free. Even FOSS and CC-licensed content is copyrighted. It's just as copyrighted a proprietary codebase. But for some reason, you don't see coding LLMs trained on proprietary code, eg. you don't see Microsoft training Copilot on private GitHub repos. It all smells very hypocritical, like these companies feel entitled to harvest free labour from the internet to make their proprietary AI models, but they're not willing to do the same with their own.
This is always such a reductive position. There's a little bit of evidence that ANNs learn and create in a similar way to biological neural networks, and a lot of evidence that they're quite alien to us, including being way better than the average human at reproducing parts of their training set verbatim (eg. Copilot reproducing `Q_rsqrt` verbatim, including the magic numbers, formatting and comments.) So it's not obvious that training an ANN should be treated the same as a human watching a movie under copyright law, which is designed to protect the human creative process only.