Jul (they/she)

But why are the patches kept separate at all. Especially if it’s a copyleft licensed code they’re patching. Many of those require release of the code. And the spirit of that was to make companies who profit off of the code release anything they add as they add it. Otherwise, they’re welcome to instead of taking open source code and patching it, creating closed source code from scratch without using any of the code from the open source version and selling that. It’s very simple. The license says, you want this code, you’re welcome to it, but release any fixes or improvements you make do we all benefit, not just developers, but users all benefit. If they keep it locked up, even if they release it as a patch that’s not accessible to the large majority of users, then it’s violating the spirit if in some cases not the letter of the license.

Exactly. But the corporations do it because it benefits them more than starting from scratch. They should release all changes to the central repository for all to consume as part of the agreement to get the benefit of the already created software. Not hold onto the patches to give them to their customers and people who pay them with their personal information.

Same they did before or red hat does or every other corporation who has benefitted from the labor of open source developers. Services built on those things or built around them. Not the things themselves. Their corporate customers benefit from the stuff they produce, but they didn’t produce most of it,so either start from scratch with, propriety software, or they need to give the content to everyone at the same time, not hold onto it for some time. That’s against the whole idea of open source and probably technically violates some copyleft licenses, but definitely violates the spirit of them. Even if they fix some bugs or add some features, they didn’t come up with the ideas, build the thing while it wasn’t producing income, or build the communities that they collaborate with. They just add what benefits them to the existing content.

Ubuntu has that dumb subscription to get security updates that pushed me away. Sure it was free for personal use, but I don’t want to have to give my personal information to get updates that are created primarily by volunteer open source developers anyway.

If they’re using “AI” to find bugs, why not use it to submit a patch along with it?.. Oh yeah, because LLM “AI” is shit at coding which is why Microsoft and other companies resort to firing their own employees for not using it to code even though it just adds extra work unless you’re doing simple stuff (which assembly never is). As if they aren’t already overwhelmed from having to do the jobs of the 5 people they laid off for every one they kept.

X11 is way, way older than that. But it also was more actively developed for most of that time.

Wayland is still too new for a lot of complex functionality. It works well enough for the vast majority of use cases, but X11 is still superior in terms of functionality. But like many systems, control means higher learning curve due to various quirks and complex configurations.