If you buy hardware for personal use, buy what has upstream support instead. If it works out of the box in a Linux desktop today, it will work in ten years time just the same.

Please excuse me for being unnecessarily harsh for a moment, but web servers are a dime a dozen. Quite literally. The reason nginx is successful is because it is maintained. Unless you plan on maintaining your nginx-clone as well as nginx itself, it will not be useful.

Perhaps you do, in which case I am more than happy to be wrong, but sometimes people think the act of writing software itself is useful and that other people will happily swarm over it and maintain it in their absence, but that is usually not the case.

The world has tens of thousands of http daemons, increasing that number by one is not useful in itself. The act of maintaining software over time and keeping it useful for many people however, absolutely can be.

The BSDs had a head start, and were superior in almost every way for the better part of a decade at least, but have remained niche compared to Linux. It's not even close. Now, there may be many other reasons to this, including the personalities and culture of the Linux developers, but you simply can't ignore the impact of the license which have kept all the commercial Linux products inside the fold.

Go on, make a derivative of Mickey Mouse and sell it. See how it goes. Similar enough to be "compatible" (whatever that would mean in the animated cartoon space) but distinct enough not to run afoul of Disney lawyers. Then come back and tell us.

Ever since the early 2010s when companies were started with the business idea "unlicensed hotels" and "unlicensed taxis" and made the owners really, really rich, this is said pretty much out loud. Look for words like "regulatory risks" and similar.

Maybe it started with the unlicensed gambling fad before that? That also made a lot of people filthy rich. Every time you have something under special license, or insuance requirements, then of course there is a margin for you if you can skimp on the license and hire gig workers instead.

The LLM situation with copyright and derived works in the 2020s is similar. Someone is likely to be rich, but there is a clear regulatory risk to it.

Should the US wish to sanction the Hague, somewhat famous for its international court of justice, they would absolutely go after ISRG and it would not be enough for them to sever the ties of the hypothetical Let's Encrypt Europe. That would not be legal or last least highly questionable in most other democratic countries.

Let's not create a world wide PKI based on a political ideology.

> country-issued certificates [...] every government will absolutely double-issue certificates

This is such a strange argument. If you register a .ru domain, do you really think you are safe should the Russian intelligence services ask for a valid certificate? Controlling the actual domain, they could issue ask many domain validated certificates as they wish.

The problem with our current SSL PKI, as so very many people have pointed out over the years, is that any CA is allowed to issue valid certificates for any domain name. There have been proposals to use X.509 extensions to remedy this, but they have seen lesser real world usage than the various certificate revocation schemes, which is very close to zero already.

If there was no way for a Russian CA to issue certificates for .us domains, real world security would improve. A lot. And the other way around, of course.

Feel free to s/Russian/Chinese/ in the above argument or whatever tickles your geopolitical fancies. The argument still stands.

Domain registries decide who owns what domain. That is their literal role. You would think that asserting this ownership cryptographically would be a no-brainer in 2026. Yet we have this discussion over and over again. There are many people whose income quite literally depend on the status quo of our global SSL PKI, which coincidentally also offers no end of possibilities for the various intelligence services around the world.

The next time someone tries to scare you with that governments or intelligence services control DNS and therefore it would be crazy to limit issuance of certificates to them, take a look where they have contracts.

You only use line numbers in BASIC when typing in complete programs. If you type in commands interactively, the are without line numbers and executed immediately. How would you otherwise use commands like LIST to list the current program? BASIC only had one active program at a time.

So on BASIC machines with file systems you could list, load and store programs this way. Of course file systems only made sense once you had random access storage. Floppy disks were a lurury item in this space for a long time, and on tape you would manually position the tape before reading and writing. Most home computers at the time also didn't have the concept of folders, because storage was so small anyway, so file access wasn't that complicated.

The commit message is writen in retrospect and is written for someone with the code in front of them to explain why this change was made, and why it was done in this particular way.

If your commit message is too short then than is your problem right there. The easy fix is you taking five seconds out of your busy day to save an hour for you readers.

Have you seen how commit messages are written for git itself, or for the Linux kernel? Let me help you by linking the currently latest commit in the github mirror of git, it is not chosen to be particularly good or bad but is pretty representative of how git developers write commit messages: https://github.com/git/git/commit/b809304101

As you can see, without knowing much of the specifics of the code, we can get an idea why this change was made the way it was. There is a certain art to writing short and concise commit messages, but the same is true for code itself. Some, but comparably very little, practice is required.

> maintaining a secure browser that isn't a fork of konqueror is a tall ask these days

FTFY

Still, imagine how hard other skills are to acquire. How much civil engineering can you learn in two weeks? How much violin playing? But you could absolutely get basic grasps on a general purpose programming language. With something specialized like Unity or Excel you would get tons of useful output.

The hurdle around assignment operator is as old as symbolic languages. That's why legends such as Niklaus Wirth wanted to use another operator, ":=", a notation that is still being used.

Anyway, it can be a hurdle, but one I find that most people get over pretty quickly.

No one in the green movement ever spoke about "ESG" as if that was a thing. It is an investor thing. Invented by bank economists, to sell financial products. It's not like your local environmentally concious hippie type figure would suddenly start investing in Shell, just because they improved their ESG score.

Does it work as a predictor for company valuation? It seems so. But it would probably have worked better if you separated E and G, because they have nothing to do with one another. Will it work in the future? No one knows. Once you start gaming these things, all initial bets are off by a lot.

Just don't say "valuation, not ESG". It does not make sense. If you mean "short term valuation, not long term", then just say so.

Yet every time a GPL licensed product competes against a BSD licensed product in an open market, even when inferior the GPL product wins in the long run.

That's because the GPL ecosystem leapfrogs the BSD one every time one of those pro-business businesses sells proprietary add-ons while the former stands on one another's shoulders.

It's almost like free markets composed of multi vendor ecosystems are business friendly?

(Sarcasm aside, the weasel word here is "business". Customers and vendors are both businesses. Monopolies are very business-friendly for the vendor, just not for anyone else.)

It's a rule that's mostly only true for self-contained products though, it hasn't been true for things like codecs and SSL stacks, and components used by proprietary and free products alike.

Previous discussion with plenty of background and links to similar software: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44541662

In fact, I've never known an industry so keen on levelling its own moats as the software industry. We regularly invent things like 4GL, graphical programming and frameworks and engines such as Unity just to enable more people to do programming. People will happily teach programming for free in outreach programs (I am just one example). No other profession does this. Perhaps with the exception of mathematicians and other fields that are very close to programming.

I could teach an economist enough programming in a weeks that they could write an ERP module, but I could not learn enough economics in a week to write one. If the language was the barrier, we could invent a more effective one. We invent new languages weekly anyway. Having seen how quickly beginners can make things with Unity or Godot, I seriously doubt an LLM agent could improve much on this. Of course, if the job is writing yet another CRUD React app with a Java or Python backend, then sure, the LLM will be very effective. But compared to doing same app in something like Excel or MS Access? Not that much.

As the saying goes: It's good to keep an open mind, just not so open your brains fall out.

We really can't have it both ways, that every failure of the child is blamed on the parent for lapsing in their almost totalitarian oversight, while also idealizing the idea that children must make their own mistakes and gradually growing into responsibilities and self-governance. Except having access to the Internet, apparently.

Taking a step back, this all smells like madeleines and a yearning for the good old days when everyone rode bikes and nobody owned smartphones. That's not really a productive stance on anything.

(If you would ask me, and I'm sure nobody would, I would think that there is a sort of trade-off here but with a clear answer: Make clear restrictions about buying cigarettes, alcohol, abusive content and extreme porn. But these restrictions aren't meant to be technically perfect. It's ok that some kids will learn to lift the limits and explore what is forbidden. At least then they would know that there is some reason society collectively considers these things off-limits, and that they soon will be in a mistake of their own making.)