True, but unless that new group is willing to step up and invest in physical device production to directly compete, I don’t think it’s going to be the same. The type of people buying a dedicated NAS with a custom OS are looking for as close to a plug and play solution ad they can get. They’re less inclined to reinstall the OS on their new NAS, and the market is probably going to favor the now proprietary version TrueNAS sells, especially if they take steps to make it difficult to replace the OS on their devices.

Yeah, no, they couldn’t do it to the kernel. But that’s not really the interesting part of their product. It’s all the software that they as a company hold the copyright to. If they solely hold copyright on all their own code or if they have permission to relicense from their contributors, they can take any or all of their products closed source, and when I say “their products” I specifically mean the things they as a company produce, which they built on top of open source projects that they don’t control.

This probably doesn’t apply to TrueNAS, but technically, it’s possible to close a GPL project. You’d need the permission of every last contributor to relicense their code, or they’d have to rewrite all the code they can’t get relicensed (e.g., someone said no or already died), or they could do it if they never accepted any pull requests because they would then be the sole copyright holder and have the freedom to relicense at their whim.

I can’t vouch for TrueNAS, but most open source projects accept pull requests because free labor, whether they’re corporate projects or not, so I’d assume they can’t freely relicense without a hell of a headache, so yeah, it’s probably staying open for the foreseeable future.

From my understanding, the biggest issue is that just about every smartphone is closed hardware with no real info on how to make drivers, so it’s extremely difficult to get hardware support.

Pretty sure the UI and some basic apps like calculator and clock are closed source, too. From my understanding, SailfishOS isn’t an open OS with closed components; it’s a closed OS built on open components. Sure, it’s built on open Linux, but a ton of what you directly interact with is not open.

Not the person who drew the short straw and had to implement it.

That’s the whole point, though, they don’t have to implement it. They’re under no obligation at all to do so. Try to rule Linux is illegal in California and watch Silicon Valley lobbyists damn near riot. They’re just giving in, but even just procrastination would be a ridiculously effective tactic.

It’s a whole lot more than just firmware, though. The UI is proprietary. A bunch of the basic system apps are proprietary. The Android compatibility layer is proprietary. You’re not really buying into an open OS that happens to have proprietary components; you’re getting a proprietary OS built in open components.

A lot of people who are eager to install Linux on their phones this early are out off by the proprietary parts of SailfishOS. I personally want a Linux phone in large part due to distrust of proprietary software for a device with such capacity to invade my privacy.

You don’t need it to be unanimous, but if it’s not unanimous, you have to rewrite the parts from people who refused or can’t be contacted. If their sum contributions aren’t too big, it can be feasible but a lot of work. If too many or if key contributors refuse, the work can scale exponentially.

GPL is especially popular with people who don’t want their labor of love to become a source of free labor for corporations who will tweak it, close the source, directly profit off it, and never donate or contribute patches. For them, it’s an antiparasitic license.

Pretty sure I’ve repeatedly heard about the crawlers completely ignoring robots.txt, so does Cloudflare really do that much?

NixOS is great. I love just how extensively you can configure a system by simply dropping in a config file. If I have to set up a new system, I usually work it out in a VM, then just copy the config files onto the system’s fresh NixOS install and have it almost entirely set up in minutes.

If I remember correctly, you don’t really need Prowlarr. It’s useful if you’re using multiple *arr services, but Prowlarr manages your indexers, the place *arr services look for content, and syncs them to your other *arr services so THEY can do the search. I don’t think Prowlarr itself ever looks for content automatically, only if you manually search through Prowlarr.

Maybe kinda, but it’s also a third party whose certificates are almost if not entirely universally trusted. Self-signed certs cause software to complain unless you also spread a root certificate to be trusted to any machine that might use one of your self-signed certs.

In a sense, you are hosting the content. You’re retaining a copy (so long as the window is open) and constantly attempting to spread it. It’s literally built on bittorrent protocols if I remember correctly, and it’s already very well established that you can be held responsible for seeding copyright infringing material, so I see no reason at all they’d give you a pass for CP instead. You may not intend to, but remember, my example was someone who looks of age but is not.

Using something like PeerTube is potentially even worse because let’s say you unknowingly open a video where someone in it looks of age but technically isn’t. You as a user help propagate that content while you have it open. You’re not just downloading illegal content at that point. You’re actively sharing it to new people.

I don’t think they’re saying they know better. Seems more like they’re tired of pouring hundreds of hours of free labor specifically into accessibility only to hear people bitch about how they’re not doing enough when the people bitching probably don’t even genuinely care beyond using it as a way to bash GNOME.

To which your response is to take the opportunity to talk shit about GNOME and disregard his meaning, which kinda illustrates his point.

Having learned Nix recently and still not being great at it, writing your personal config is relatively easy. The website has a search feature for options you can use by default, so it’s pretty straightforward. Just search for relevant keywords and set the options you like.

If you want to package software for nixpkgs, define custom options, or anything else that’s going to require custom Nix, it’s… Better than you make it sound but not great. I only read one guide, and it wasn’t great, but it covered the basics well enough. From there, I managed to figure out what I’ve needed so far just from the official documentation for the Nix language. It’s not everything it could be, but it’s not too bad.

If you wanna really get into the thick of it and extensively write Nix for some detailed purpose, you might run into some more problems. I still don’t think it’d be as bad as you make it sound, but you probably won’t be thrilled, either.

They wouldn’t be able to track the printer to you from the fingerprint in that case, but if you ever end up on their radar, that printer is damning evidence even if all the memory on it is pristine clean.

They don’t follow a standard protocol because the industry is dominated by just a few players, and it isn’t in their interests to do that since they want to make customers dependent on them. The industry is dominated in part because the fingerprint tracking creates extra overhead that’s harder for smaller or starting businesses to deal with.

They don’t just have to maintain a database. They have to handle all of the logistics of accurately collecting and entering the data for it. They need legal counsel to get it right. They need to work with distributors and/or retailers to get an idea where they’re going so a fingerprint can be linked to a retail purchase. They have to deal with the inevitable subpoenas at a minimum, but I wouldn’t be surprised if they fulfilled requests without a legal order. It becomes a lot of extra labor beyond just making and selling printers.