First off, I think you are being very rude. I didn’t call you names or make assumptions, so please treat this with more respect than a Twitter thread.
WhatsApp, by comparison, is trivially easy to replace.
Olvid, a French alternative to WhatsApp, was made in 2019. It took a law passing last month banning all ministers from using non in-house messaging services to stop people from using WhatsApp. I wouldn’t consider that “trivially easy”.
Also, your reasoning is kind of skewed, because in order to even use something like WhatsApp, you need other, already existing services. Namely internet access.
You didn’t mention Internet access and so neither did I. I’m happy we both agree it should be a utility.
I don’t know if you’re just speaking from a non-American context, or just don’t know how “freedom of speech” is codified into law in the United States.
I already said this is a “government problem”. I said this in reference to the US government, because this isn’t really an issue for most countries :/
When businesses ask you to contact their help-desk via WhatsApp, it’s a utility. When people call and message friends, family, and colleagues almost exclusively on WhatsApp or Messenger, it’s a utility.
It’s also putting the government in a position in which it functionally would have to provide a platform for everyone equally, Neo-Nazis […]
Godwin’s Law People preaching [insert terrible belief] on a government platform would be removed and charged for hate speech just as much as they would be if preaching these things in public spaces. If your government gives people with terrible_belief.jpg the chance to preach on public property, that’s not a public property issue, that’s a government issue.
Ultimately, saying social media should be a public utility is like saying casinos and strip clubs should be public utilities.
No, it isn’t. If anything, turning certain popular social media apps into public utilities would limit them from being pure dopamine hits. Let other websites exist to fill the cesspool void. Not the one my grandma uses.
I think flatpaks are good. The performance penalty for containerized software can be felt much more when you’re not using a good CPU. So containers do not “solve” my use case.
Mount options also only take effect on the first mount of the device. Since it looks like you only have 1 btrfs device - only / needs the options, really.
The fee could be really small but scale depending on factors like business size. Or there could be no fee outright for businesses smaller than a certain size.
they only use Linux because it’s free. Companies create hardware on Linux because it’s free
Companies use open source software because it’s the cheapest option. It’s all about margins.
Nearly all of FOSS is funded by corporations whether you like it or not
Yes, and FOSS can get a lot more funding if they charged companies even a little bit.
So as long as it’s cheaper to pay a fee to continue to use an open-source software than it is to hire a group of developers to produce and maintain the same thing, the idea is viable.
In my opinion, the issue is that a cell phone is such a free-software-hostile environment that arguably GPL software shouldn’t “be allowed to” come into contact with it in any capacity if the spirit of the GPL were being upheld.
How are phones free-software-hostile? I know IOS is, but Android not really. There’s a list of open source Android distributions. Although not very good, they are viable.
Actually, maybe making it a realistic possibility to drop in a recompiled replacement should be a part of the GPL. I remember people were talking about this decades ago
It does feel out of place how that isn’t in the GPL.
If current licenses have the problem that big companies just ignore the terms set out in the license, I wouldn’t imagine making a new sort of license with different terms like “big companies have to pay to get the benefit of using Pots-Open Source software” is really going to work.
It’s more that they avoid the spirit of the licensing, not the terms (except Red Hat of course).
I suppose you can split this into two separate arguments: