You are wrong. I doubt I will change your mind.

1. There are many, many, many more companies using Linux without giving back than there are for BSD. And not just “using it” either. Practically the entire embedded universe is one giant GPL violation.

2. Linux is not “true” GPL anyway, so it is a poor example for how the GPL impacts success.

3. The companies that build businesses on FreeBSD tend to give back. There are many examples, the biggest being Netflix.

4. The classic example of a company not giving back is Sony and even that is wrong.

5. People choosing a BSD license value different things, rendering your entire premise meaningless for them and your framing of “the problem” inappropriate.

I do not want to get too deep into Sony. But let’s acknowledge that they first tried to ship Linux on PlayStation. They had to stop. Why? Well, it was not because people tried to copy the operating system. It was because people used it to circumvent other protections to copy proprietary games. The problem was not with Sony’s ethics but with those of “the community” and the lack of respect “the community” had for the concept of copyright.

So, Sony switched to a FreeBSD base and they no longer share that code. True.

However, Sony does contribute to BSD. And Sony is a significant contributor to Clang/LLVM and they do share their work freely (even though the license does not require them to). The FreeBSD project benefits from this as Clang is the system compiler. I benefit from this as my Linux distro also uses Clang as the system compiler.

The BSD license is “free software” and provides all “4 freedoms” touted by the FSF. It protects your rights with regards to the code you have and are using. It does not give you guaranteed access to FUTURE code that you do not write. Those future contributors are free to choose their license. You know…freedom.

BSD lags in features, particularly hardware support, because it has fewer users and therefore fewer developers. That is mostly an accident of history and not, in my view, due in any way to the license. Look up the BSD lawsuit that was happening when Linux appeared. If your argument for the popularity of Linux is the GPL, why did Xorg become the dominant window system instead of something GPL based? Why did Rust, Swift, and Zig appear on LLVM instead of GCC?

Anyway, I could write 100 paragraphs and not change your mind. You certainly have not changed mine.

Yes, the big feature seems to be their package manager. But just because an update succeeds does not mean it did not break anything.

They also have their own boot manager and they seem to be fans of Rust, which explains the COSMIC desktop option. They have their own build system.

It is not clear to me that they are doing anything novel beyond that.

They do not have centralized configuration as far as I am aware so they do not go as far as Nix. As a Chimera Linux user, the atomic updates and bespoke build system feel like things I already have.

Overall it sounds like a nice project. But the improvements seem more incremental than revolutionary.

The Fedora Project was created by Red Hat explicitly to be a community distribution so that they could focus on RHEL (Red Hat Enterprise Linux) as an explicitly commercial dostribution.

Before Fedora, there was Red Hat Linux (not RHEL). Red Hat Linux was commercial but inexpensive. I remember it being around $50 but that could be wrong.

Red Hat made installing Linux easy back when it was not. They created the Red Hat Package Manager (RPM). They bundled configuration utilities and a commercial X server back when XFree86 was less great and had far worse hardware support.

As Red Hat Linux became more successful, there was increased tension between the “free software” community and Red Hat’s commercial ambitions.

An individual Red Hat user created something call “Fedora Linux” which was a repository of software for Red Hat Linux that Red Hat did not ship (it was not a full distro). Very soon after this, Red Hat announced the creation of the “Fedora Project” as a collaboration with “Fedora Linux” (the original Fedora Linux project was absorbed into the Fedora Project). The Fedora Project shipped a full Linux distribution called “Fedora Core” which was Red Hat Linux with the third-party commercial software removed. On top of the “Core”, the Fedora Project shipped the packages that Fedora Linux had been shipping. After a few releases, Fedora dropped “Core” from the name and we have Fedora Linux again (but as a full distro now).

Fedora was defined as a purely community distribution with a mandate to ship only Open Source software and to exclude anything commercial. Red Hat provided infrastructure and paid Red Hat employees to staff key positions in the project.

The original Red Hat Linux was discontinued, leaving Fedora as an explicitly community distro and RHEL as an explicitly commercial one. RHEL was slow moving and conservative. Fedora was faster paced and innovative. Tech that would later appear in RHEL would appear in Fedora first, often funded by Red Hat or built by Red Hat engineers. This was before CentOS even existed and it continues to this day.

Red Hat has already “taken over” Fedora. They created it. They still largely run it (staff it). But it is critical to their strategy that Fedora be a fully free software “community” distro. That is the whole reason it exists. So the idea that Red Hat will “take Fedora corporate” or “make it closed source” is completely ignorant of the history of the project.

If Red Hat did not find Fedora useful in its current form, they would simply abandon it. They would stop paying employees to work on it.

In the years since the creation of Fedora, the CentOS project was founded. CentOS was originally a “clone” of RHEL. It was compiled from the same sources as RHEL. It was “downstream” of RHEL. It was not created by Red Hat. It was a problem for Red Hat as RHEL was meant to be an explicitly commercial offering.

Red Hat took over the CentOS project. And they completely changed how it worked. They release “CentOS Stream” as an entirely new distribution. It is “upstream” of RHEL. That is, instead of CentOS being created from RHEL (and being essentially identical to it), RHEL is now created from CentOS. This means that CentOS is actually more of a community distro (for example AlmaLinux participates its evolution) but CentOS is no longer bit-for-bit compatible with RHEL.

I bring up CentOS as I see it as instructive for Fedora. Red Hat wants it to be LESS identical to their corporate offering.

How is it unenforceable?

Real question

If you are a registered entity (even non-profit), you can be fined millions of dollars.

It is a very dumb law.

They need to do what Midnight BSD did, exclude California residents from the license.

If Canada was a state, the Republicans would never win the electoral college again. There would never be another Republican president.

And the House of Representatives would be permanently blue.

And even just 2 more senators would be a massive risk for the Republicans too. If each province was a state, it would be game over in the senate as well.

California, Texas, New York, and Canada would all be blue in 2028. There are only so many Floridas and Texas is not guaranteed.

And if the Canadians in Florida and Arizona and Nevada could vote, they may not be as red anymore either.

Canada will never be a state. But it would certainly kill the US Republican Party if it did.

Agreed. The need for Flatpak goes way down in a distro with access to the AUR.

I use Flatpak for pgAdmin because the Arch packages are terrible. But it is the only one.

He is doing the same kind of rewrite that the Ladybird founder did recently. They are just reacting differently to how well it is going.

Monoculture is bad for everything.

For one thing, it protects you when your BDFL loses their mind completely.

I made this point below but it is telling that the first project was a total rewrite of the entire JavaScript engine. There is no shared hierarchy and a well defined boundary between the C++ and Rust code. That may be a sign of things to come.

The Ladybird founder initially rejected Rust because he found it hard to integrate into their deep C++ OOP hierarchy. That problem likely remains.

We may see entire modules that are either all Rust or all C++ rather than more fine grained mixing.

Andreas did not like the Rust community. It sounds like that is still true.

He also thought that Rust integrates poorly into project with a deep C++ OOP hierarchy. That is probably still true as well.

It is telling that the first project was a total rewrite of the entire JavaScript engine. There is no shared hierarchy and a well defined boundary between the C++ and Rust code. That may be a sign of things to come.

We may see entire modules that are either all Rust or all C++ rather than more fine grained mixing.

It IS the early days of GNOME. MATE started with the source code of the last GNOME 2 release.

MATE exists because people loved GNOME 2 and hated GNOME 3.

Canada would have done anything for the US. Canada is a good friend.

But the situation has become more like freeing the German soldier in Saving Private Ryan. Helping the USA in 2026 is like putting a bullet in your other friend yourself.

And it is not just how Trump treats Canada. Denmark bled for the US over 9/11 and they got Greenland belongs to the US as thanks. How many Ukranians have died as result of current US policy?

And is it just Trump? Important men all over the world are being held to account over Epstein. Anybody in the US?

The US itself is the biggest victim. The US is murdering its own citizens in the streets. No reaction. Not really. How exactly is that genie going back in the bottle? I was in Chicago when 9/11 happened. The US was never the same after. This has changed it more and more irreversibly.

It is such a sad and tragic end. So much for the shining city on a hill.

I have tired of hearing how many voted for him. How many did anything to stop him? How many are doing anything now?

That is what matters. Lines have been crossed.

And totally ineffective if the other two parties are already colluding (which we are).

It would hurt but honestly I would be ok if Canada stopped trading with the US completely.

First off, do you have evidence that negotiating with terrorists is a historically successful strategy? Because otherwise, I am not sure why you are suggesting that Canadian capitulation has any influence over US tariff policy.

Second, who has had famously higher egg and dairy prices over the past year? The US or Canada? If the goal is lower prices, which administration should we be cheerleading?

I will am pretty free enterprise but I will take “price fixing” over submission to an abusive and unreliable narcissist every day of the week.

The idea that the biggest threat to Canada right now is internal economic policy is laughably disconnected from reality.

How about some of us choose with our heads. That sounds like an idea.

Maybe not “dead” but it is permanently broken.

Also, get the numbers right. Two thirds of Americans did nothing to keep Trump out of office.

The midterms have not happened yet. We will see.