That’s not really a common situation though. Sure, people might use the BSD license on something they did as a hobby, or just to learn things. But, the scenario described here is more like:

A group of people all have the same little problem, and they work together to come up with a solution for it. They solve the main problem, but their solution has a few rough edges and there are similar problems they didn’t solve, but they’re not motivated to keep working on it because what they have is good enough for their current needs. So, they put out some flyers describing how to do what they did, and inviting anybody who’s interested to keep working on improving their fix.

A company comes along, sees the info, and builds a tool that solves the problem but not quite as well, and for a small fee. They spend tons of money promoting their solution, drowning out the little pamphlet that the original guys did. They use as much IP protection as possible, patenting their designs, trademarking the look and feel, copyrighting the instructions, etc. Often they accidentally(?) issue legal threats or takedown notices to people who are merely hosting the original design or original pamphlets.

Maybe the original inventor didn’t get screwed in this scenario, but you could say that the public did.

Theoretically, this could hit Linux too. You could run a Linux kernel mod containing closed source stuff from a third party vendor which causes the system to kernel panic. The difference is really cultural. Linux admins would howl at that kind of setup, whereas for Windows it’s more standard.

Code review, QA team, hours of being baked on an internal test network, incremental exponential roll out to the world, starting slow so that any problems can be immediately rolled back. If they didn’t have those basics, they have no business being a tech company, let alone a security company who puts out windows drivers.

No they won’t, not if they’re in the slightest bit competent.

Blameless post-mortem culture is very common at big IT organizations. For a fuck-up this size, there are going to be dozens of problems identified, from bad QA processes, to bad code review processes, to bad documentation, to bad corner cases in tools.

There will probably be some guy (or gal) who pushed the button, but unless what that person did was utterly reckless (like pushing an update while high or drunk, or pushing a change then turning off her phone and going dark, or whatever) the person who pushed the button will probably be a legend to their peers. Even if they made a big mistake, if they followed standard procedures while doing it, almost everyone will recognize they’re not at fault, they just got to be the unlucky person who pushed the button this time.

The one freedom the GPL removes is the freedom to be a leech. If you’re linking to GPL code, you are agreeing to follow the same rules as everybody else who has contributed to that code. Nobody gets a pass

Work for hire is a completely different situation. You have to accept the terms of whoever’s paying you to do the work.

This comic is more about someone doing something as a hobby project, or writing their own software not under someone else’s direction, where they have full freedom to choose their own license.

Yes, the infamous “sarcastic” exception to copyright.

MacOS is still Unix under the hood, and has been since they adapted NeXTSTEP.

Maybe it’s just because I’m fundamentally more of a console user than a windowing-system user, but to me a Unix-based OS is always going to be a winner compared to Windows.

But, if you want to laugh at OSes, laugh at classic MacOS, where everything would grind to a halt if you clicked and held the mouse button.

What illusion are you alluding to?

Linus is the one who got a workable thing out in the public’s hands. He didn’t even want to name it Linux, but someone came up with that name and it stuck.

The GNU project did a lot of great things, but ultimately they weren’t able to get a full-fledged operating system out that people could use, so they lost the opportunity to name it. It really shouldn’t matter to them though. GNU is well known, its philosophies are critical to how the free software and open source communities work, it was basically a massive success in the way almost no other volunteer non-commercial projects ever are.

But tagging “GNU/” in front of Linux is dumb.

His eye makeup is pretty good, but it can’t disguise how much bigger one of his eyes is.

I think Windows is hot chocolate from an instant packet where you just add hot water.

It’s objectively pretty bad, it’s definitely not coffee, but it’s easy to make, and you get the same standard thing every time.

Nah, Starbucks is MacOS.

It’s more expensive than it needs to be, but it looks really pretty, and fundamentally it’s still coffee, just like MacOS is Unix-based under the hood.

A chromebook is more like a can of coke. It’s caffeinated, has mass-market appeal, but nobody’s going to be spending hours talking about just how great their can of coke is vs. someone else’s can of coke. A high-end chromebook is maybe a glass bottle of Mexican Coke.

Probably. Maybe Gentoo is the one where you get the furnace and various molds for various tools, but you have to cast the tools yourself.

But, good enough for just about anything most people need to do on a daily basis. For anything else there’s specialized tools.

And it’s popular, and it’s something non-Linux users might recognize.

Some iron ore, a ton of clay, and instructions on how to make a furnace.