Again I'm not saying it is or isn't a valid argiment. There are 50 easy counter arguments without even trying, but that doesn't mean there is no argument to be had there and there might be 50 counter-counter-arguments in the end.

This argument holds no water at all.

I'm not saying fake child porn should be allowed or not-allowed, just showing there exist possible exceptions and rationalizations for them even without two parties.

The GPL clearly grants every recipient the same full rights as whoever they received something from, so copyright law itself says that you can take that source and redistribute it.

But starting a year or so ago RedHat says you may not redistribute, which they can't actually say, so you still can, but if you do you will be fired as a customer and lose all future access, so you only get to do it once.

Given the clear wording that makes the intent of the GPL unambiguous, that every end user is fully empowered and you may not do anything to curtail that, I don't see how they get away with it except the simple fact that no one has been willing to take on the legal fight.

If you're a pre-"stream" Centos user, you don't have the money for that. If you're a paying RHEL user, you don't want to be on bad terms with RedHat or maybe IBM either, and neither the licence costs nor the rules bothers you at all anyway.

So it's plainly illegal in my opinion, but will stand, illegal and yet in effect and unchallenged probably indefinitely.

But really that just explains and excuses my mom, who does not work in any proximity to any flavor of IT.

(1) mac too just slightly less so, and I'm no fan just to be clear, I just think mac started out the worst in this way, then didn't get much worse over time while windows & gnome both got insanely worse

Every time I have to do something on someone's bog standard machine, I just think "how do you people live like this?"

Not that many years ago a flat unadorned description of win11 today would be taken as completely unbelievable hyperbole movie gag that could never get that crazy for real obviously. Funny because of recognizable elements of truth but too stupid to be realistic.

The frog has simply been boiled exactly slow enough I guess.

(I had a bunch of descriptions of actual absurd and perverse things to show examples but the comment was a wall of text!)

"My emergency response plan is there will always be a trained employee." is exactly as stupid as "My emergency response plan is there will never be an emergency."

Everyone else around me blazes at the simple act of typing. And far fewer but some have powerful vim setups where they can do inarguably useful things fast.

You would be agonized to watch me type code.

But for 30+ years it never mattered. I spend 10x more time thinking than typing, or jumping around refactoring 300 things all over the place every 5 minutes, and propduce results that work, are efficient, and fail far more gracefully than everyone else.

(I'm not claiming to trade iteration for get-it-right-the-first-time, I obviously iterate and I'd even say the correctness of the final result is mostly the result of iteration).

Maybe it doesn't conflict with your point because even so I wouldn't exactly say I'm no more functional than your grandma, so maybe typing and vim/ide-ricing are just a couple of exceptions that I can afford to get wrong as long as everything else is good.

Though I don't know what else there even is to be "fast" at. I don't think I really even understand how one can be good or bad at mere window management. ssh-ing? What is there to that? knowing how to manage keys?

However, all in all, I like this. Even if it means I'd currently fall on the wrong side of this idea, I think I agree with this idea to have an expectation of basic competency with the tools in any field one would presume to get paid for. Maybe even now I should just suck it up and learn to type and develop a powerful vim setup.

In other words, as you say, exactly.

I have no idea if it's a good or bad or I'd like it or not. I never even considered trying. I don't mind that it exists. I don't think kagi are doing anything bad with it. But I also just have no interest in even trying it. Presumably it's good for soneone but for me (a paying kagi customer linux user) it's almost like it's invisible. A probably benign, utterly uninteresting thing.

I don't use any of their AI features either. I hope they cost extra seperately so that I'm not paying for that stuff I'm not using but I suspect I probably am.

Making all the allowances for wheelchairs and the blind costs way more, yet you don't charge them more.

That is even if it were true enough to matter, which it's probably not, and there were no other ways to address it, which there absolutely are.

It's not the real reason but it probably is given as part of the excuse, while the real reason is either simple thoughtlessness, lack of consideration, developers doing whatever is easiest, and/or all the same reasons that cash is being gradually more and more disfavored across the board in all things. You can track and control people sooooo much better without anonymous offline cash.

Probably both. Some people involved are doing it for the first reason, and others are allowing it for the second reason. It's just super convenient synergy for everyone except the consumers.

It's not magic and it's not even better or even as good as a mid human, but it's something like infinite man-hours of that drudge work per hour per user.

That will find a lot in old code, and make it a lot easier to keep on finding every little thing right as it's created in new code.

But as time goes on and software tools become more powerful, there is just not much moat. I don't even mean AI, I just mean the ordinary power annordinary computer and the gobs of highblevel languages and frameworks and automation that just grows and grows all the time. It's not that hard to port an app to a new platform, or a new distribution mechanism, or a new clone source for an existing platform and distribution mechanism.

Big universal things with 100% capture get replaced overnight all the time. Everyone switched from MySpace to Facebook in like an hour one day. Other things like my Steam example took longer but they became at least an equal player, a real alternative that normal people could and did choose in numbers that Sony and MS couldn't ignore, pretty quickly.

Everyone switched from Palm to Android pretty quickly.

Google has a few extra levers which is agreements with all the phone manufacturers who in turn have to deal with the carriers, and google are doing the bulk of the ongoing os developement and security work so the manufacturers don't have to.

But they could just start doing that same work, or spin up a new 3rd party who's work they all share, easily, any time. They all actually already maintain half-assed backup plans they can switch to and go whole-assed if google gets that 1% too annoying one day.

There are really no easy robust moats any more. Even the biggest are precarious and have to be actively maintained through constant shenanigans. No matter how big the capture, it's never actually very strong.

So that means very infrequently. Depends how many and what kinds of parties I found myself at that year.

I totally like it, will not hesitate if conditions are right, and the only reason I stayed away not doing any more than that was it wasn't worth the risk.

Even today I don't risk it because sometimes I drive across many state lines and I don't want to worry about keeping track of where I might possibly get in trouble if I piss off a cop at a traffic stop, which I am likely to do.

I don't think it's so crazy that there are pot smokers that can take it or leave it. Merely, you would probably never have realized I was a pot smoker, because I don't talk about it all the time for no reason, or even think about it. We'd have to be not merely aquaintances, but we'd have to sometime be at the same party at the same time with the other conditions met. You can't count these people that you have no way to know to count.

And yet trivial little alternatives like idk maybe you ever heard of Steam did actually happen, or the entire Android ecosystem itself when there was already an immense Palm app ecosystem that was like desktop apps where you got apps all manner of ways from physical sd cards to web sites to various curated stores. Or idk Epic, over a single app. They are back on the traditional stores now only because they called everyone's bluff and were suceeding, so the old stores caved rather than be seen to lose to someone so much smaller and newer, even in a small way that was more appearance than material.

There is no such thing as unthinkable. It's all not only thinkable, it has all actually already happened before and multiple times.

If something seems unimaginable, that only says something about your imagination not the reality.

But they have just become shortsighted over time and, perhaps correctly, don't think they need to keep investing that way to get the payoff any more, they can just go 100% payoff now.