Yeah, this should definitely not be allowed. Google should not be allowed to dictate which operating systems people are allowed to use. And no doubt that this is harmful to many European companies and prevents competition in the space of mobile operating systems.

That said, it remains to be seen if anything will get done about it.

We live in a system where costs are only realized at the manufacture of a product and not at its disposal. The inevitable outcome is cheap production wins, leading to throwaway societies, and ignoring the cost of disposal, which is also an important, even critical cost of associated with the product. Society is left to foot the bill, while the manufacturers prance away without having to cover the costs of the problems they created.

The solution is simple - if a company manufactures and sells a product, then that company should be responsible for its disposal as well. This will encourage longer lasting products and reduced environmental damage as well. Plastics are not as cheap as they seem when you factor in the full lifecycle of the costs associated with them.

It would be difficult to implement in practice, but pales in comparison to the massive damage we’re doing to the environment.

If you go back a few decades, you would see how companies would produce technological innovations with the mindset of, “If we design the best, most useful device possible, customers will come to us and buy our product”.

Today, that has flipped into a mindset of, “We will create this technology, force users into adoption, and exploit them as hard as possible once we have them under our control.”

The technology has become a means to control users, not to enable them.

At least it’s good to see that people are catching on though.

I wholeheartedly agree, especially as someone with close friends and living in Bengal. I don’t even know how hot it gets there these days, but there’s a (very regrettably) good chance some of them may perish due to the heat.

But with that said, my concern is that individual action, or even collective actions by governments, on a planet with 8 billion people on it, simply isn’t enough in the grand scale of things. I believe that we have made enough technological advances to withstand an oil crisis, but what we need these days is a forcing event to push governments to adopt them and individuals to accept the transition. I am… cautiously hopeful that this could be that forcing moment.

And by the way, thanks for sharing those verses. I understand very little German, but even I can appreciate how beautiful those lines are.

Any chance that the American far right might have accidentally solved the global warming problem?

As a bit of an aside, I learned recently why Mozilla has the weird Corporate/Foundation structure that it does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47701441

Basically the IRS is highly skeptical of the idea that free software development fits the legal definition of a 501©(3), and tends to reject such applications [1][2]. That is why Mozilla Foundation cannot use donations for Firefox development, and instead uses them for activism.

Someone claiming to be the CEO of one of these foundations appears to confirm it. Just thought people might be interested to know since this comes up in pretty much every thread about Mozilla.

It has been obvious for far too long that ICEs will go extinct and be replaced by EVs.

The people who have been holding out have no excuses at this point. They should have started the transition a long time ago.

Even the early internet didn’t have content of this high quality

It’s hard to be a contrarian in these kinds of positions (I’ve been there, and it didn’t end well), so I wouldn’t be too outspoken, but at the same time, try to innocently point out the issues with approaches like this. I would just try to point out the flaws in this approach, the same that we would for any other kind of programming fad - without making it seem like it’s an agenda, of course.

For example, any time teams are looking for feedback - code review, retrospectives, etc. - just point out the flaws on why vibe coding is a bad idea and bring it up casually when the time comes. It doesn’t hurt to be honest as long as you don’t come off as being an ass about it.

“I don’t have time to read through that much bullshit.”

Maybe phrase it a little more kindly, but that’s what I’d try at the very least. “I have other priorities at the moment” could work too.

I don’t know much about Sun, but they seemed like a cool company - Java, Solaris, Sparc. A lot of people sounded pretty upset when they got acquired.

So far! Don’t worry, Silicon Valley will think of another new, even bigger scam in no time!

Why are root privileges needed to move and search for files in the home directory?

Yes, of course the codemopolitan directory could be owned by root, but why??

Yes, breaking the dependency on cloud providers is already extremely hard. But breaking the dependency on mobile OSes is going to be dramatically harder. What good is digital sovereignty if all users are still tied to American products to access those systems?

The user is able to install new certificates.

That’s true today, but there’s no guarantee it will be true in the future. Google is already pushing for all software running on Android to be cryptographically verified and they (Google) are the only ones that control the signing keys. This means that they intend to kill off F-droid and all other software delivered outside the Google store.

If Google is able to pull it off on Android, everyone else will try to do it on desktop OSes too - Linux included.

I just don’t want see the garbage that is the Android Play Store where apps refuse to run because we run an OS that isn’t profitable to Google.

I think the possibility that this could happen is dangerously high.

Everything starts with good intentions. Everything ultimately leads to locking end users out of their personal freedoms.

I’ve made other comments before about how we used to cheer for Google back in the 00’s because they were the upstart that took on the entrenched competitors (Microsoft primarily). Look what Google has become today - the very thing we hoped they would destroy, and they are so much worse about it.

Red Hat/IBM ultimately owned by the same people as Google: shareholders. Nothing will ever stand in the way of their greed. If this technology is allowed to exist, there’s no reason to think that it too will be used against our interests.

He was there for a brief period. According to Wikipedia he was there from 2022-2026 and seems to have left to create his new company in early 2026.

Btw, i’m stealing your summary of browser monoculture, alright?

Of course! The EEE pattern is crystal clear at this point. The loss of the WWW to the current browser monoculture we’re experiencing is the biggest technological tragedy of our times. I would hate to see it happen with our open source revolution as well.

I’m so tired of reading this stupid argument. “People only dislike systemd because they’re afraid of change.” No, there are plenty of other concerning issues about it. I could probably write about a lot of problems with systemd (like the fact that my work laptop never fucking shuts down properly), but here’s the real issue:

Do you really think it’s a good idea for Red Hat to have total control over the most important component of every mainstream distro in existence?

Let’s consider an analogy: in 2008, Chrome was the shit. Everyone loved it, thought it was great and started using it, and adoption reached ~20-30% overnight. Alternatives started falling by the wayside. Then adoption accelerated thanks to shady tactics like bundling, silently changing users’ default browser, marketing it everywhere and downranking websites that didn’t conform to its “standards” in Google search. And next, Chrome adopted all kinds of absurdly complex standards forcing all other browser engines to shut down and adopt Chrome’s engine instead because nobody could keep up with the development effort. And once they achieved world domination, then we started facing things like adblockers being banned, browser-exclusive DRM, and hardware attestation.

That’s exactly what Red Hat is trying to pull in systemd. Same adoption story - started out as a nice product, definitely better than the original default (SysVInit). Then started pushing adoption aggressively by campaigning major distros to adopt it (Debian in particular). Then started absorbing other standard utilities like logind and udev. Leveraging Gnome to push systemd as a hard dependency.

Now systemd is at the world domination stage. Nobody knew what Chrome was going to do when it was at this point a decade ago, but now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can clearly see that monoculture was clearly not a good idea. Are people so fucking stupid that they think that systemd/Red Hat will buck that trend and be benevolent curators of the open source Linux ecosystem in perpetuity? Who knows what nefarious things they could possibly do…

But there are hints, I suppose. By the way, check out Poettering’s new startup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572