LeFantome

Not according to the Free Software Foundation.

Also, Red Hat contributes more GPL code than Debian does.

There are closed source apps in Flathub today. Spotify comes to mind.

I use closed source apps. BurpSuite, Microsoft Teams, and some of the JetBrains tools for example.

I would like to see FlatHub become an App Store suitable for distributing paid software as well. That is, I can pay for the software in the App Store. If FlatHub was making money, they could fund the development of Flatpak.

I do not want FlatHub or GNOME to be writing commercial software. They can distribute it though and then use those profits to support the ecosystem.

I use LibreOffice but more people would use Linux if they could use Microsoft Office. I use GIMP but many professional users cite Photoshop as the reason that they cannot migrate to Linux.

Let’s get the Adobe Creative Suite into a Linux Apo Store so Linux users can get their software and Adobe can make money. Then let’s try to make better Open Source alternatives to put them out of business. I would rather compete with them head-to-head on Linux than to keep people trapped on commercial desktops like we do today.

We already have a successful paid software App Store on Linux. It is called Steam. And it is bringing many new users to Linux. We need to do the same for paid applications that are not games.

I do not really want either FlatHub or GNOME to fall into the Mozilla trap though where they become focussed on creating revenue. FlatHub already has a natural way to make money. They should use it to first fund development of their platform. If they have excess cash (guaranteed if an App Store takes off), they can give it away to other projects. Something like a FlatHub Summer of Code would be amazing.

I do not want Flatpak to replace distro packages.

I use both pacman and apk and they are both far better package managers than Flatpak is. Apk 3 is awesome. And I do not want sandboxes for native packages.

The role of Flatpak is as a distribution method for app developers to target Linux as a platform with a single build. It is a place to get things that may not be in my distro repos. It can be a method for commercial distribution. It is the cure for the “fragmentation” problem that makes it difficult to develop software for Linux.

I hate snaps but snaps could actually be used to replace packages. You could distribute GCC as a snap. In its current form, Flatpak is only targeting GUI applications

It is not personal.

Alma creates a distro that is ABI compatible with RHEL. They start with what is publicly available in CentOS Stream. They can contribute and innovate. They do the work (however much that is).

Rocky finds a way to get a copy of the RHEL source packages and recompiles them into a distro. They can then claim “bug for bug” compatibility with RHEL. They cannot change anything (cannot contribute) because that would weaken their compatibility promise.

I respect Alma.

Rocky is a free rider for money that wears the shield of “community” when it suits them.

Too personal?

Big O

Can Open Source defend against copyright claims for AI contributions?

If I submit code to ReactOS that was trained on leaked Microsoft Windows code, what are the legal implications?

That is WINE.

It does run WINE.

Again, it is because it is part of a series.

They already had WoW (Windows on Windows) which was Win16 on Win32. The new one is Win32 on Win64.

And if say “Windows on Windows 64” it makes sense. It is Windows emulation on top of Windows 64 (64 bit Windows). When they named it, all Windows was 32 bit Windows and 64 bit Windows was the future thing. So “emulating current Windows on Win64” was what WoW64 was doing.

It did not age well though. I agree.

I am not defending Microsoft but I have a different take.

Microsoft has already lost a the enterprise to Linux. They know it but no longer care that much. This is because the real money is in Azure (the Cloud and “the agentic web”). Microsoft makes a tonne of money off Linux and Kubernetes in the cloud. They hope to make even more money off AI. They are ok that this stuff is all Linux based. They get plenty of lock-in from volume contracts and Azure only APIs and services (especially AI sandboxes ).

However, Microsoft knows the importance of developer mindshare and influence. It is still “developers, developers, developers”. They know they cannot really stop devs from using containers and Linux but they want devs using MS software. So, they are building Linux into the Windows desktop.

They hope, I believe, that the devs will prefer the “best of both worlds” Windows experience over the “all in on Linux only” Linux one.

In some ways, they are competing more with macOS. Devs using Linux on the server had been flocking to macOS on the desktop because it is “also UNIX” but with commercial software support and a nice UX. If Linux had won on the server, Microsoft is defending the Pro desktop.

I totally agree it is wrong. It is historical.

When Windows NT was new, they had this idea that it would be compatible with many different application ecosystems via “sub-systems”. So there were going to be many different “Windows sub-systems” for various things.

There was the “Windows sub-system for OS/2” for example. And the “Windows sub-system for POSIX”. The names still sound backwards to me but I guess it makes sense if you think “This is a Windows sub-system, which one is it?”. And if you have 50 Windows sub-systems, saying “for Windows” at the end of all of them also seems a little weird.

So that naming convention was already in place when they added support for Linux. Hence the “Windows Subsystem for Linux”.

Yes.

There are two downsides if Microsoft takes it proprietary again in the future.

1. we would have to fork it and maintain the fork. Honestly, what kind of “community” are we if this is what we are complaining about?

2. Microsoft could include out contributions in their future commercial product.

Again, Microsoft cannot take away access to our own code. They just get to use it. That “freedom” really pisses some people off.