Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

  • 12 Posts
  • 347 Comments
Joined 3 years ago
cake
Cake day: June 7th, 2023

help-circle








  • If the work is a “clean room” reverse engineering job, as in: you didn’t read the original source to produce your version but rather looked at the input and output and wrote new software that had the same behaviour, the this new software is not a derivative work and you can use whatever license you like.

    The easy option is public domain, which effectively is a “this belongs to everyone” thing. There’s not much of a practical difference between this or MIT in my understanding.

    Another option would be something that preserves the freedoms you attach to the software like the GPL or LGPL if youre feeling less aggressive. These licences compel would-be modifiers to share their changes with everyone else, preventing (for example) companies that want to build their business on top of your work and then charging you for it.

    But basically, if you wrote it without referencing the original, it’s your work and you can do as you like. If you were referencing the original source though, then that’s a derivative work and you may be in violation of the copyright holder’s rights.



  • I would be less concerned about the GPU driver and more about the entire distro. Like most distros, Ubuntu has a release cycle where versions of everything are deprecated over time in favour of newer ones, and to expect that the entire OS will be fully supported in 10 years may be asking a bit much (I’m not sure if even their LTS release goes that far).

    On top of that, Ubuntu could go bankrupt or get bought out, or simply enshittify (more than it already has) in that time. Expecting Ubuntu specifically to be supported on your laptop in ten years is anyone’s guess.

    However, what you can be reasonably sure of is that Linux will continue to support your system, GPU and all, for a very long time. I heard a kernel developer once say that due to the kernel’s modular design, there’s support in there for stuff just one or two people in the whole world use.

    As someone else has already pointed out, FOSS support for hardware generally gets better over time, and a GTX video card is ubiquitous. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of those floating around on laptops, servers, and homelabs for a lot more than ten years.

    You just might not be able to stick with Ubuntu. The older the hardware, the more you might have to lean toward the more technical distros that make it easy to customise the kernel or that favour old hardware. I like Gentoo for this job, but even Ubuntu or Debian have paths to do compile your own kernel for example.




  • Or… (and bare with me here) generations of establishment parties doing fuck all for the people while burning the world, backing a genocide, and insisting that everything was fine because “line goes up”.

    Support for Labour and the Conservatives fell apart when both parties decided that they didn’t care about the same things the electorate do. There’s no nuance missing. They gave up and expected us all to fall in line. We aren’t, and now they’re acting confused as to where their support went.



  • I’d say that it’s for a few reasons:

    1. In this country’s broken electoral system, “tactical” voting is quite common. Until now, Labour has been heavily relying on the idea that they’ll be elected by default: the not-Conservative choice. When Reform ate the Tories’ lunch, they continued to push that they were “the only party that can beat Reform”. This result suggests that this reasoning no longer applies and indicates that Labour’s dominance as an alternative to the right-wing forces in the UK is ending.
    2. By pushing the traditional parties into 3rd, 4th, and 5th place, this election may mark the end of these guys in favour of the new challenger parties that’re both advocating for more direct action to combat the problems we have.
    3. Reform took 2nd, consuming the Tory vote almost entirely indicating that they’re the force to beat. This makes the revelations of #1 all the more relevant for those of us who think that Reform are dangerous fanatics.
    4. The Greens are unabashedly socialists and this result indicates that their position is resonating with voters far more than Labour’s “Tory light” platform. When the “labour” party gets spanked by a party that’s advocating for wealth taxes, that’s a Big Deal™.