This isn't something special with taxes.

https://phillipslytle.com/a-review-of-new-yorks-response-to-...

Until 2023, some (many?) would sell off your house and pocket the difference, even if it exceeded the tax liability!

> You don't want draconian laws randomly enforced.

This depends entirely on what the goal of the law is.

Not every target is on the ground.

Do you have corroborating sources? I (and others) would be keenly interested in them!

"The new version of TECO quickly became popular at the AI Lab and soon accumulated a large collection of custom macros whose names often ended in MAC or MACS, which stood for macro. Two years later, Guy Steele took on the project of unifying the diverse macros into a single set.[21] Steele and Stallman's finished implementation included facilities for extending and documenting the new macro set.[3] The resulting system was called EMACS, which stood for Editing MACroS or, alternatively, Emacs with MACroS."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs

Maybe kid could accidentally get a hold of it, or other adults that didn't buy it. However, from the article (as far as I could get before the ads locked me out) there is a type that tends to have this happen to them (middle aged men IIRC). So it seems to be intentional.

Instead, buy hardware from vendors that ship hardware with the operating system you want to use preinstalled, and with support you can contact to get help if something breaks.

These are not fully trained scientists, but rather trainees. As such, they don't get paid the same as a fully trained scientist. Like how a journeyman is paid more than an apprentice electrician.

Of course, they are also underpaid, too. Ask any grad student union.

> It's hard to replace this dynamic. Or in other words, the dollar value of the intangibles is so high that if you were to put a price on it, it would make your business unviable.

Yes, it's very hard to pay your workers a liveable wage if everyone else is exploiting their workers by underpaying them.

All you're saying is that we've built exploiting labor (foreigners, interns, trainees) into our economy.

https://opensource.com/article/17/11/open-source-or-free-sof...

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/open-source-misses-the-point....

Thanks for the explanation. I'll have to find a more accurate term for what I was trying to articulate, once I've dug into things more.

OSI vs FSF has nothing to do with the point at hand.

The BSD license permits making proprietary forks. The GPL does not. Those are examples of the distinction between "open source" and "free software."

> people who got in FOSS as a religion

Oh no! Not religion!

This is a ad-hominem argument based on anti-religious bigotry.

> don't really understand the licensing.

Again ad-hominem.

Quoth Wikipedia [1]

> Free software, libre software, libreware sometimes known as freedom-respecting software is computer software distributed under open-source licenses that allow users to run the software for any purpose as well as to study, change, and distribute it and any adapted versions.

> [...] Computer programs are deemed "free" if they give end-users (not just the developer) ultimate control over the software and, subsequently, over their devices.

> The right to study and modify a computer program entails that the source code—the preferred format for making changes—be made available to users of that program.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software

The requirement that those distributing the software give to their users the same rights given to themselves is the defining distinction between open source & free software.

Nothing at all. This is not stealing. The term is "forking." It's how GCC got un-stagnated (see egcs), and how we got the ecosystem of alternate wifi firmware (two examples that come readily to mind.)

This is also where Free and Open source diverge: Open Source lets someone block others from forking their fork, whereas Free Software requires that forks remain free to be forked themselves.