Why not rent the license via Netflix and then torrent the video? So long as you delete it when your Netflix expires I believe you are compliant with current copyright laws. This is also the "purest" way in that you don't need any DRM or opaque software running on your machine.
Not in the Netherlands (and probably the rest of the EU too). Make sure you verify with your local laws.
Really? How do these laws decipher between unencrypted video in memory and raw video on disk?
It's the (torrented) download that's illegal. It's even illegal if nothing is stored locally (streaming from illegal sources is also prohibited by law).
Dutch (and by extension EU) law is fairly arcane too. Although there does seem to be some movement toward more modern copyright laws being discussed in the EU. But so far they seem to favor the production companies, not the customers.
ec.europa.eu
What if I don't care if people use it? As the universe of people who use operating systems grows, the number of people using Freebsd increases even if the relative proportion stays constant or even falls.
Eiffel was also not free, and not by a long shot. This absolutely kills adoption among the population you want to attract the most: students and people early in their career. This was certainly the case for me. I could download a full Java compiler and a rich set of runtime libraries for free. I didn't have however many thousands of dollars Eiffel Software wanted for their tools.
You do understand that there are large (server) FreeBSD users who donate 1/4 million or 1 million $ per year to the foundation?
For FreeBSD to develop, it needs a community of developers. Growing the community of FreeBSD users doesn't help. It might even hurt, as more developer time will have to be spent doing tech support and dealing with complaints.
Sorry, nonsense. I've worked for some of the largest computer companies in the world (largest by the number of software engineers they employ) in the last 25 years. Every day I use hundreds or thousands of computers, and I write software that is run by those hundreds or thousands, and once it is deployed, by millions more. The last time I actually compiled and ran production-level code on my own desktop/laptop machine was ... let me think back ... 1999 or 2000. Another example: At the companies I work for, nearly all servers use Linux (a few run AIX or HP-UX or Solaris). Yet, the desktop/laptop machines that people use are hardly ever Linux, they are typically Mac, Chromebook, and Windows. Yes, I sometimes keep some small experimental coding projects on the laptop; that's useful when I'm in an airplane, or sitting in the waiting room at the doctor's office, and want to get a few hours of work done. But mainstream development happens via remote login to data centers.
Are you seriously telling me that Lenovo and Dell give money to RedHat and Suse to certify? You know who owns RedHat, right? And you know what Suse's income is from? It's from selling service contracts.
Sorry, that statement is also nonsense. The market share of Linux among desktop/laptop users is in the small single digit percent. About 97% of all desktops are Windows and Mac and Chromebook. It might be that of the 3% that run Linux, some are looking for ... something else. But given that this is a tiny group to begin with, it is not relevant.
The fraction of desktop/laptop users who use FreeBSD is minuscule. I don't know whether it is 10^-3 or 10^-4 of the market, but it is no longer sensible to even measure it in percent. Asking companies (such as Netflix or Microsoft) to invest significantly into a nearly non-existing user base is just silly.
Microsoft, Netflix, Facebook, IBM, Google, Oracle, ... are all using massive quantities of open source software. A very large fraction of all servers in the world run Linux, and most of the servers in the world are owned by the Internet giants. That's why they have been supporting it, not only with donations to the various foundations, but much more importantly with developers. I don't remember how many Linux developers worked at IBM (before they acquired RedHat), but the number is at least many hundred, perhaps low thousands. The situation is not significantly different at other big companies. FreeBSD is much more of a niche product, but the way it is used by a variety of companies (such as Netflix, Jupiter, NetApp) is as a server OS or embeddable component. Asking them to waste their time and money on desktop usage of FreeBSD is just unrealistic.
Plenty of people use FreeBSD. Who are these 0.95% of BSD users? I'm betting 80% of the rest are Mom, Pop and kids who, if it weren't for games, wouldn't even own a computer. In fact, Google is now favoring mobile devices over desktop for search results because that's where the most usage is.
In your honest opinion, do you really think that the "cloud", Docker and distractions like that truly are the future of computers and that FreeBSD will be lost without it?
So what? Is FreeBSD a commercial operation that has promised to their shareholders to make money for them, no matter what the crap?
Not according to foundation donors list https://freebsdfoundation.org/our-donors/donors/ and foundation finances https://freebsdfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/11/2020-Q1-Q3-Profit-Loss.pdf . Highest was in 2019 with total donation of 2.2M (you can check 5 years). It doesn't seem like large users donating 1M p/y like you claim. But im sure you know better.
I was referring to most of regular developers not experienced software engineers like yourself. Also i hope you realize production-level is very subjective term. 50 lines of c code can be production level and find its way to a OS base or become a important piece of software by itself but doesn't require data center to compile. I hope you dont need me to provide you with examples for this.
Yes lenovo, dell and insurgo paying to ubuntu, fedora and qubesos for Linux Hardware Certification.
We can agree to disagree
So what you are saying is Linux was used on most of the servers (magically installed itself) so eventually giant companies were forced to support it but not the other way around. Good call!!
You completely missed the point, I would suggest reading my post again.
I doubt that one also.
Tom Watson (CEO of IBM) had has staff calculate how many computers one could sell. They thought the total demand was 7 world-wide, so it wasn't worth building them. The real money was in unit record equipment, which IBM continued to build, and dominate the market. Within a few years, they decided that making computers might be valuable after all. Remember, a few years after that calculation (which was correct at the time, just not a good forecast), IBM built the first "personal" computer: the 1401, the first computer that was so cheap that ten thousand could be sold, it was small and cheap enough that medium-sized companies could have one of their own. Today we laugh at the idea that a 1401 might be "personal" (it takes up a medium-sized room, like a large living room), but at the time it was revolutionary that something that was not on the Fortune 500 could do their data processing in-house. Its effect was exactly like the Ford Model T: Before that, to buy a car you had to be rich, you had one custom-made for you to your specifications. With the Model T, they weren't exactly dirt cheap, but a middle-class person could go to a store and simply pick one up.
The statistics I hear is: Today, over 90% (perhaps 98%) of all server class disk drives are sold to either 5 (perhaps 8) customers. Tom Watson was right, the world only needs 7 computers.
No, I very much disagree. To nearly all users of computers (which is what both an iPhone and and Android is), it is simply a machine to get at data: your data, and free data. You can read your personal e-mail with them, you can write e-mail, you can text or IM your friends, you can do your taxes with them (they run tax preparation software), you can use them as a camera, if you are a grandparent you can watch little movies of your grandkids that your kids just sent you, if you are young you can take indecent pictures of yourself and send them to your lover, you can read the news on the web, you can watch cute cat videos on youtube. Plus you can make phone calls with them, but today that's probably less than 1% of their use.
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Unfortunately not according to IBM:
Most mobile devices use custom OSes or, if it's Linux, those are highly customized versions that don't resemble anything else or anything you can use. See Android. See iOS. None of them are using any version of Linux or macOS and they command almost all the mobile devices. If Linux died tomorrow, little of the mobile world would notice.
Yes, and on that line there is another point that appears even more significant to me: what is also very difficult or impossible with these things is: run them as a server.
Not so. Take an android phone, install a terminal emulator app (I use ConnectBot, there must be others), and when it starts, ask it to create a local shell (the default is to create a shell over ssh protocol). Log in, and you are in a normal Unix file system, running a normal shell, and the standard POSIX-style commands (ls, cat, more, mount, df) are all there. I know it is possible to install python (and the graphical toolkit kivy) on it, and program using that. A former colleague likes doing that. I would say that the user environment resembles standard Unix, with a very limited file system (duh) and a rather simple shell (seems to be an old-fashioned ksh).
Also not correct. In the basement of my house is an Android machine that runs an ssh server (you can log in to it) and an http/https server. It is sold as a sprinkler controller, but it is simply a small 32-bit ARM microcontroller, running full Android, with all the servers (and a dozen small relays or transistors to turn garden watering off and on, but that's not important). You can also download and install ssh servers for generic Android and run that on phones, and log into your phone (honestly, why the heck you'd want to do that is beyond me, but whatever).
It's mksh — the MirBSD Korn Shell. I've just adopted it as my main shell. I got tired of tcsh(1). Mksh is...ok. I haven't warmed up to it, but I haven't kicked it to the curb yet.
Whilst I certainly agree this is what our overlords are striving towards, there is a fair many years between that. I also don't believe that smaller shops being bought up by larger shops can ever truly dominate the industry. For example if a company needs a specific program to measure something, the cloud will not help with this and it is too niche for the behemoth companies to deal with. They would probably dust off an old DOS PC and write it themselves in this case.
Well yeah, like they did many years ago when central mainframes were cool. But once a more distributed approach becomes cool again (like it did around the IBM PC era), they will be straight back out again. Large companies are wasteful with their monetization trends; in many ways it does give open-source a fighting chance (but only if we ignore them and don't play along). For example if Microsoft wasn't frigging around for the last 20 years focusing on monetization (and little else), it should have been many more miles ahead of Linux by this point.
