os.UserHomeDir is specified to read the HOME environment variable, so it doesn’t require CGo. os/user does, but only to support NSS and LDAP, which are provided by libc. That’s also why net requires CGo- for getaddrinfo using resolv.conf
Have a look at https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/ and tell me what you think. We don't have enough docs though. Tough being an open source thing that you want to keep open.
This is great work and good news, however if you want to guarantee a long-term public benefit, use copyleft without a CLA! A more well-funded company can fork this and make the new work proprietary, meaning you did all that initial development work for them for free.
Apple and Microsoft are the two most likely parties to do so here. This isn't a theoretical risk.
It's sad, people have really been shitting on copyleft licenses the past few years, when they are critical to ensuring our computing freedoms are preserved.
Copyleft protects the user. The friction is, like you said, by design. It ensures that something that started free, stays free, and can't be rug pulled out from under you.
Big monied interests have been trying, and succeeding, in changing the discourse around free software away from free and to simply just "open source" and moving toward permissive licenses, specifically so community effort can be extracted and monetized without contributing back.
On the other hand having a copyleft license without CLA makes rug pulls nearly impossible (once there are multiple contributors and copyright holders).
But you are right, from a (commercial) value perspective, permissive wins.
I truly respect this statement, and position. I always hope that the benefit I've provided through my software is felt, even if I don't directly benefit from it. It's about taking pride in your work, and what it has brought others. I think of it as a craft, like woodworking, brewing, art, music, etc. While there are far more rules, the love of it is what makes it viable.
I suspect that those who express concern over your work being ripped off are just showing that they are extremely happy with how you run things. Rather than being under the control of another entity, the actual value is in your personal involvement. That's just my two cents, I hope I'm not putting words in anyone's mouth.
EDIT: I realize that you aren't the creator of Ghostty, but my original statement seemed like I was stating this.
I recently heard the argument that the license-friction of copyleft sometimes is actually a good thing. Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)...
Keep in mind that Linux doesn’t use the GPL3 and stuck with the GPL2 since the maintainers and Linus Torvalds thought that it was overly restrictive [1]. So at some point the license friction becomes too large to be practical for organizations to use or contribute to.
I'd be really interested in hearing more about that argument.
I can take a guess with respect to Linux: that's the kind of software where forcing companies to submit code back to it is enormously beneficial due to the need for an operating system to have drivers for vast ranges of different hardware.
Yeah. Also things like filesystems. More generally, the history of BSD is full of proprietary forks that never got merged back in: Ultrix, SunOS, BSDI's BSD/386 (later BSD/OS), Winsock, and the Wollongong TCP/IP stack on UNICOS and, I think, also on VMS. The most famous fork is macOS Darwin, which I think is still in fact open source, but it's been many years since I saw someone successfully running the open-source Darwin.
Also, though, GCC got Objective-C support, and still has it, because the FSF told NeXT it would violate the GPL for them to attempt to make Objective-C a proprietary add-on to the GCC compiler, even if it wasn't literally linked with it. And a lot of GCC backends probably would have been kept proprietary by one or another hardware company if the license had allowed it.
> Think linux kernel that arguably is more successful than all the BSDs combined (citation needed)
I don't think there is any citation needed. Linux powers all the cloud providers, 80% of the mobile market, a ton of random devices. At this point Linux is the most important OS on the planet, ahead of Windows and Apple OSes. It's just not as visible.
BSD-0 is a public-domain-equivalent license. The guy who published it is one of the few people who has actually been involved in a lawsuit to try to assert a copyleft license. The whole thing was such a bad experience for him that he decided copyleft licenses are a false goal.
(He used to be a maintainer of busybox, a GNU clone for embedded devices. He then ended up writing toybox, a similar project under the more free MIT license.)
Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term proprietary fork won? Most of the recent variations of this that come to my mind are related to cloud infrastructure. Stuff where you have serious business customers.
And in some of those cases GPL wasn't enough to prevent it. Niche end user utilities, where original is available for free have little room for monetization. And in many cases existing users are already choosing the open source option despite the existence of commercial solutions, or where it's too niche for commercial solutions to exist.
Only thing that comes to my mind is VScode with all the AI craze. But that doesn't quite fit the pattern neither is the Microsoft underdog, nor it's clear that any of AI based editors derived from VScode will survive by themselves long term.
There are also occasional grifters trying to sell open source software with little long term impact.
> Does anyone have good examples of this actually happening for end user software (like Ghostty is) and where in the long term proprietary fork won?
VSCode is a proprietary fork of code-oss, the product located at https://github.com/microsoft/vscode. It might not be an example that you're looking for though.
Nobody is interested in proprietary editors. People only accepted vscode because most of it was open source. AIUI this is a fork of that, but seriously, push out the changes or pass.
The cool part of this adventure is that the author was able to write this DLL patch purely in rust! Good testament of how far it has come. Can't wait to see more C code ported to either Golang or Rust!
This is pretty amazing, and I'm surprised in a sense by how few workarounds you've had to implement. It makes me wonder what Windows would look like if we had Win2K or Win7 with today's system APIs (for high DPI, increased security etc.)
I know Windows has made great strides in security, but I deeply miss the old Windows and this really hits home about how _little_ has fundamentally changed, or rather, how much the continuance of these APIs means today's Windows could be like old Windows, if MS wanted.
I came across Windhawk a couple of days ago here on HN, a system to patch Windows to look and behave more old-style; wow.
They have the same problem the U.S. EV's have: sketchy spyware software. Make everyone honest and open up the code / let people write their own code, and then let the true market rule.
U.S. don't want the Chinese cars collecting data, but they're content with U.S. ones doing it.
I had heard something about some sort of counter being incremented in the passport when it's read, which was meant to dissuade you from messing with it, since the next check-in at a border crossing would report this information...
This article doesn't really give much useful information beyond what is mostly well-known.
i went through border control twice at an airport after going to the wrong gate and when i returned to the uk the e-gates immediately declined to process it (the camera etc. didn't move and e.g. reject the facial recognition, it just immediately said go to the desks). i've always wondered what that was about, how do they know i didn't just go to a third country?
It can be more secure, but it also feels like the kind of "improvement" that's ripe for exploitation. When you put in a step where you have to ask your service provider for permission to swap the SIM, buckle up for the inevitable development of them asking for a $5, $50 or $100 "service fee" so they consider allowing it.
Couldn't they do that with physical SIM cards? On their end, record the IMEI of the first device they see connecting with a specific SIM card and then disallow connections if that SIM is used with a different IMEI.
I'm not sure if that's legal, but even if they did it, it's a lot more opaque. If they started doing it, many people would assume it to be a technical fault by the provider or the phone manufacturer, and the ensuing support calls and drama would probably cost way too much for this to be worth it in the first place. However, with eSIM, they get to redefine all the rules, since the customer has to learn how to use them from scratch anyway. And they also get access to nice, digital, software-driven workflows that can make the need to pay up apparent, as opposed to just randomly cutting service to the user.
In particular we'll have a DAG and then add nodes and edges to it, and then remove some and so on... It would be nice to visualize these changes. We currently use graphviz, but it's not "stable" so a diagram jumps around a lot when we look at snapshot to snapshot...
If (1) we could guarantee some kind of stability and (2) if we could even animate the transitions, that would be incredibly useful for visualization.
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