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Cake day: June 21st, 2023

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  • Linux’s own problems is that we have a culture of “tear everything down and make way for progress”, which I personally approve of. However, things keep getting left behind in the rebuilding process and that’s a very real cultural problem. We should have been rebuilding those accessibility tools with everything else and the reason we haven’t is that quite frankly the linux community itself hates disabled people.

    I see no other reason that disabled people would be relying on old and unmaintained code in the first place. That’s not a problem with the build and rebuild attitude, that’s a problem of who we accept into the community. Why is the only wheelchair accessible building 20 years old and full of rotting floorboards?

    Linux is built by the community and always does what it thinks is best for the community. The fact that “what’s best” does not include maintaining the accessibility features is fucking deplorable and that’s a legitimate thing to complain about. But a system shouldn’t need to support legacy junk just to provide accesibility features that should have been core parts of the system from the beginning. In that, no linux developer has the right to look a microslop developer in the eye.


  • No. Its not about driving away the capitalists. Its about forcing them to bend to the community. Its not “Linux has to lack a stable ABI to keep the capitalists away” its “Linux is not here to baby rich corporations and exempt them from rules that literally nobody including little timmy who’s 14 and just submitted his first PHP patch has a problem with”. This is developers who are used to living in houses trying to set up shop in an apartment complex and then finding out different rules apply and being colossal babies about it.

    The point of the GNU foundation was to destroy the concept of closed source software. Which is a completely justified response to Xerox incorporated telling you your printer is no longer supported and you just have to buy a new one. Capitalists are welcome. Anti right to repair people can fuck right off and if we had the right to repair their software we wouldn’t have this problem in the first place because someone else would have already fixed it.


  • The core principal of GNU from which every other principal is derived is “I shouldn’t need an ancient unmaintained printer driver that only works on windows 95 to use my god damned printer. I should have the source code so I can adapt it to work with my smart toaster”

    If an app is open source then I’ve almost never encountered a situation where I can’t build a working version. Its happened to me once that I remember. A synthesia clone called linthesia. Would not compile for love nor money and the provided binary was built for ubuntu 12 or something.

    Linux was probably ready for the 64-bit appocalypse even before Apple for this exact reason. Anything open source will just run, on anything, because some hobbiest has wanted to use it on their favourite platform at some point. And if not, you’d be surprised how not hard it is to checkout the sourcecode from github and make your own port. Difficult, but far from impossible.

    Steam games do not distribute source code, which means they break, and when they break the community can’t fix them. They can’t statically link glibc because that would put them in violation of the GPL (as far as I’m aware anyway). They are fundamentally second class citizens on linux because they refuse to embrace its culture. FOSS apps basically never die while there’s someone to maintain them.

    Its like when American companies come to Europe and realise the workers have rights and then get a reputation as scuzzballs for trying to rules lawyer those rights.