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> Well, mainstream music is usually timeless, while less known genres just fade away when the generation that brought them up is gone. Hardly true. It's just t

> Well, mainstream music is usually timeless, while less known genres just fade away when the generation that brought them up is gone. Hardly true. It's just they don't have the massive marketing machine of radio mainstream behind them, so they tend to have their dedicated fanbase and that's that. > GNU/Linux had its opportunity with OpenMoko, Maemo, netbooks, Steam machines. > OpenMoko & Maemo were fine Linux phones and many still swear by them to this day, but you seem to discount the power of marketing. Is not that your casual users knew about Maemo and just didn't like it. They don't even know it exists. Technical merit only gets you so far. Also, given the above, there's nothing that is different about the current situation that is preventing the PinePhone/Librem 5 to claim that niche. I don't know why you have a hard cutoff for the opportunity there as being 'missed' and now nothing can be done. > Termux can provide a similar experience via Java/Kotlin, ISO C and ISO C++ implementations instead of relying in Linux specific calls. That's a metric ton of more work than I imagine the team has time for. Termux can do a lot of things. but with a hostile upstream venodor it's going to take a lot more effort than it would take to switch to a Linux phone for a better experience, at least in this regard.

pjmlp 6y ago
> I don't know why you have a hard cutoff for the opportunity there as being 'missed' and now nothing can be done. I guess, because after all these years GPL seems to have lost steam, with GCC and the Linux kernel being the only GPL relevant pieces that are still around. With efforts like Fuchsia, ARM mbed, Linux Foundation's own Zephyr OS, Amazon's RTOS, BSD adoption as basis for game console's OSes showing the direction where this will be going. So most efforts to have a pure GNU/Linux device are bound to not survive long enough to keep a sustainable business.
- AsyncAwait 6y ago
  > because after all these years GPL seems to have lost steam I don't see how. The non-GPL efforts you mention are all in places where it hardly was GPL before or if it was, it was packaged in such a way that it hardly mattered. Game consoles always used BSD because game companies are notoriously proprietary and don't care about free software, but they never did, so hardly any change there. Android's kernel is GPL which does help as there's an ongoing effort to mainline more and more Android patches, but from an end-user perspective, because the userland is not GNU and Google never actually cared about Android as FLOSS a kernel change for Android doesn't mean much unless Android's current patches are mainlined and hardware OEMs start producing mainline-linux HW, at which point a differnt kernel would indeed be a loss for Linux, but as of now, nothing would fundamentally change, because it never meant much to began with. > So most efforts to have a pure GNU/Linux device are bound to not survive long enough to keep a sustainable business. If so, this has nothing to do with the GPL. Say the Librem 5 ran a BSD kernel. How would it suddenly become mainstream without Samsung's marketing budget? If anything, the GPL is doing better than ever precisely because the issues around privacy are becoming more mainstream. I have family members asking about alternatives to iOS/Android that were not asking these in the OpenMonoko days, which gives me hope. On the desktop, we now have Microsoft contributing GPL'ed code, which is something. Companies like NVidia do too nowdays. I suspect what you may be perceiving is that unicorn SV startup libraries on GitHub tend to not be GPL and that's true, but I don't think they'd be releasing any code otherwise, since they don't care about free software in the first place, so in that sense it's at least a compromise.

pjmlp 6y ago

> I don't know why you have a hard cutoff for the opportunity there as being 'missed' and now nothing can be done. I guess, because after all these years GPL seems to have lost steam, with GCC and the Linux kernel being the only GPL relevant pieces that are still around. With efforts like Fuchsia, ARM mbed, Linux Foundation's own Zephyr OS, Amazon's RTOS, BSD adoption as basis for game console's OSes showing the direction where this will be going. So most efforts to have a pure GNU/Linux device are bound to not survive long enough to keep a sustainable business.

AsyncAwait 6y ago
> because after all these years GPL seems to have lost steam I don't see how. The non-GPL efforts you mention are all in places where it hardly was GPL before or if it was, it was packaged in such a way that it hardly mattered. Game consoles always used BSD because game companies are notoriously proprietary and don't care about free software, but they never did, so hardly any change there. Android's kernel is GPL which does help as there's an ongoing effort to mainline more and more Android patches, but from an end-user perspective, because the userland is not GNU and Google never actually cared about Android as FLOSS a kernel change for Android doesn't mean much unless Android's current patches are mainlined and hardware OEMs start producing mainline-linux HW, at which point a differnt kernel would indeed be a loss for Linux, but as of now, nothing would fundamentally change, because it never meant much to began with. > So most efforts to have a pure GNU/Linux device are bound to not survive long enough to keep a sustainable business. If so, this has nothing to do with the GPL. Say the Librem 5 ran a BSD kernel. How would it suddenly become mainstream without Samsung's marketing budget? If anything, the GPL is doing better than ever precisely because the issues around privacy are becoming more mainstream. I have family members asking about alternatives to iOS/Android that were not asking these in the OpenMonoko days, which gives me hope. On the desktop, we now have Microsoft contributing GPL'ed code, which is something. Companies like NVidia do too nowdays. I suspect what you may be perceiving is that unicorn SV startup libraries on GitHub tend to not be GPL and that's true, but I don't think they'd be releasing any code otherwise, since they don't care about free software in the first place, so in that sense it's at least a compromise.