And if you want both piracy and the convenience of Steam, there are always key resellers.

I did post an exact description a bit higher above, but you focussed on the one detail that really doesn’t matter in this equation (ARM vs x86, even though it’s exactly the same in that regard, and there are also x86 Android devices) and neither read nor understood the rest of my answer.

And you used that missing knowledge on your side to invalidate my answer without even understanding what it was about.

And you could, very big revelation, also just google before posting nonsense.

u/EatYouWell responded exactly the right way.

Have you heard of Android running on x86?

I had an x86 Android tablet and that was exactly as locked-down as an ARM Android device.

But anyhow: I can lock down a x86 laptop or PC the way I was describing within a very short time.

So again:

• Put a password on the BIOS
• Set Secure Boot on
• Wipe all Secure Boot keys and put your own in there
• Encrypt the disk so that you can’t just plop the drive into another PC and modify its content
• Set the root user to “Can only login with private key” and don’t give the key to the customers
• Remove all users from sudoers
• Use chown root:root and chmod 700 on anything you don’t want the user to touch

And if a company was doing this to their products (e.g. the Steam Deck), they’d replace the first 3 steps with a custom BIOS which just doesn’t let you change anything in regards to Secure Boot and Secure Boot keys. That way, removing the BIOS battery won’t help.

There are countless embedded devices using an x86 PC at their core, where they did exactly that. (E.g. ATMs or medical devices)

Also Chromebooks are exactly that.

And the Playstation 5 does the same thing, only it’s based on FreeBSD.

Tieing down a Linux installation is actually pretty easy.

• Lock the BIOS down so that it can only boot a Valve-signed OS
• Remove root access on the OS
• chown root:root on anything you don’t want the users to touch

It’s pretty much the same as Android device vendors are doing.

Your actions do nothing. You complain on the internet about some guy that said something you don’t like. Nobody from FSF is gonna read it. And neither will Stallman or anyone that matters.

I don’t see you boycotting software related to FSF. And even if you do, it doesn’t even matter, since the overwhelming majority of FOSS users never donate any money at all.

You are no customer of the FSF, you just enjoy their stuff for free.

So your actions amount to angry screaming into a box.

Apparently, Stallman is a net positive for them, so they keep him.

Doesn’t mean that they in any way endorse pedophilia.

And the freedom of association also doesn’t mean that a bunch of enraged people online have the freedom to decide whom they associate with.

And apparently, in the USA there is a whole party devoted to child marriage and other ways to have sex with minors. That might be the better point to start, because they actually have a say regarding laws on that matter.

I’m pretty sure that most people are mature enough to differentiate between an organization that makes software and nothing at all to do with kids and/or sexuality and that old wierdo’s personal views.

We live in a world where huge corporations with a revenue higher than the GDP of many countries routinely exploit child labour and work their workers to death or suicide, burning whole countries and pushing climate change while at it. And yet we collectively shrug and still buy Nestle, Apple, Samsung or H&M.

A shitstorm towards such a niche and unknown organisation as the FSF really doesn’t matter. We all know the Stallman and the FSF, because we are into computers, software and/or open source. But ask any random person on the street, thew wouldn’t know who Stallman or the FSF is if you told them that it’s not Android but actually Chrome/Android SDK/Dalvik/Toybox/Linux that runs on their phone.

I totally disagree with Stallman’s views and personally I do find them pretty worrying.

But I also disagree with the concept that employers should be the executive of the court of public opinion.

We have real courts and real police, we don’t need to invent a secondary one where people lose their jobs due to shitstorms.

If you think he did something illegal, report him to the police or sue him. If not, then this is freedom of speech. Even though he uses the freedom to voice a pretty crappy opinion.

I mean, if everyone who said something that lots of people disagree with, I guess we would all be unemployed now.

Like, literally. That’s their job description.

That is true, but then you probably are in trouble ;)

Next time get high after doing the troubleshooting ;)

That’s definitely a healthy way of dealing with that.

But with this way, something like Linux, Distros, Firefox, Blender or LibreOffice would have never happened. There are those who want to build retail-level open source software, mostly out of idealism, and then you are stuck between a non-monetizable rock and a toxic hard place.

But I totally agree with you, unless you are super idealistic, your way of handling it is probably the most healthy one and the one that will cause you the least amount of trouble. And it’s also what I do, except when I sometimes do get idealistic.

That’s basically right. But it’s quite a difference what you have to do to scratch your itch, and what you need to do for it to be useful for others.

If you do it for yourself, there are no tests or documentation or even a GUI. It’s quick and dirty, all configuration is hardcoded. If you need a different config, you’ll just change the code.

All that doesn’t really fly if you expect someone else to use the project.

On the other side, especially if it’s too polished, idiots will perceive the project as being a commercial one and demand that you do what they want.

If you don’t know the stories, maybe read up on the maintainer of core-js or Marcel Bokhorst. These two people complained about how tough it is to make good open source software. Both talked specifically about their toxic audience. So in turn the audience ridiculed them and they even received death threats.

Titles are a bit inflated in small companies, so “head of software development” meant I was the team leader of a team of 7 developers including myself. But yeah, they really thought they knew so much more about open source and open source developers than me.

I did tell them. Multiple times and in very direct words. They told me I don’t understand nerds or open source.

Both marketing and CEO are jobs where Dunning-Kruger is considered an asset, not a problem.

I had an encounter pretty similar to the one in the article at a former job.

I was the head of software development at a 10 year old “startup” with ~50 employees.

The CEO and the marketing lady walk into my office and tell me about this great new hardware (basically an underpowered server with 15 SFP+ ports for network traffic manipulation) they found somewhere in China. They don’t have an use case for that yet, but they have a solution: They will sell it really cheap (€5000) so that, I quote, “some nerds will buy it like the Raspberry Pi and they will make software for free for us”.

I ask them why they would be doing that, to which the marketing lady says “Because they are nerds. They do stuff like that.”

Needless to say, not a single “nerd” bought that dirt cheap €5000 networking device with a huge amount of SFP+ network ports as a hobby device, let alone produce free software for it.

That device was a total flop.

But it also goes to show what they must be earning if they think that anyone would spend €5000 as an impulse buy with no further reason.

I did maintain an opensource project for a while and that taught me how to do it correctly:

• Don’t. Just don’t.
• If you really, really want to, just do what you need to fulfill your needs, never do something for someone else.
• If someone is really insistent, say you’ll do it if that person pays for the implementation of the feature, and use your day job’s hourly rate for it.
• Then don’t implement anything you don’t want to, because nobody is going to pay for it anyway.

Or to put it differently: Never see your project or contribution as anything more than a hobby. You will never see an return on investment.

but you are losing a significant amount of developer effort into things like working with the borrow checker or the infamously long compilation times that could instead go into implementing functionality.

And into learning the language. With Rust still being a very rare skill, you are losing out on many good developers who could help out but don’t, because they don’t know Rust. And many of those who do help out, don’t know Rust well and will just stumble trough it and write Rust code as if they were writing their main language.

It’s kinda like getting people from all over the world to contribute to the welsh Wikipedia. Most will just give up. Many will use a dictionary or Google translate. And only a tiny portion actually know Welsh.

Happy to help! If you need any advice or help, PM me!

Understandable.

Over here we got a really handy page to compare prices of online retailers. I couldn’t find anything similar for Ireland, but I found an EU version. It’s for some reason still in German, but I guess it should be easy enough to navigate regardless:

https://geizhals.eu/creality-3d-ender-3-v2-a2462014.html