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.

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.

Because the random alterations create variations that allow survival of the species, not the individual, in changing conditions. For an example of what happens without that, just look at bananas. Without any evolution through DNA alteration during procreation, a single disease van wipe them out across the globe. Happened once and the current strain is being wiped out by disease, though more slowly due to human intervention, as we speak.

It’s nice to have a GUI for those things sometimes rather than a command line for everything. If you’re doing things right, your daily login shouldn’t have access to modify system settings or read sensitive logs. But troubleshooting requires that often and ls, vim, cat, tail, etc., can become cumbersome compared to a GUI file manager and proper GUI text editor like Kate or Gedit.

That future might not be far off considering what Trump did today. Balance of power is seriously about to shift.

If it’s POSIX compliant then it will work on all versions of Linux/Unix. Otherwise it depends on specific implementations that have branched for decades.