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From: The Natural Philosopher <tnp@invalid.invalid>
Newsgroups: comp.os.linux.misc
Subject: Re: Distros specifically designed for children
Date: Wed, 28 May 2025 09:03:50 +0100
Organization: A little, after lunch
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On 28/05/2025 04:42, c186282 wrote:
> On 5/27/25 7:37 AM, Borax Man wrote:
>> On 2025-05-27, Lawrence D'Oliveiro <ldo@nz.invalid> wrote:
>>> On Mon, 26 May 2025 11:11:37 -0000 (UTC), Borax Man wrote:
>>>
>>>> You see, they just assumed that Linux was free of politics, and
>>>> opinionated vendors, but that isn't necessarily the case.
>>>
>>> There is no getting away from “politics”. As someone once said, “the
>>> personal is the political”. When you choose to give money to a 
>>> proprietary
>>> company, you are giving them more power -- not just economic power, but
>>> also political power. Do they exercise that power wisely, for the 
>>> good of
>>> their customers and the rest of the world? Or do they use it to maximize
>>> their own short-term profits, and to hell with the long-term 
>>> consequences?
>>>
>>> You know the answer to that as well as I do.
>>>
>>> When a business chooses to use software that is made available under 
>>> Free
>>> Software licences, they may not think they are doing it for any
>>> “political” (by which they mean “ideological”) reasons: they may say 
>>> they
>>> do it just because it gives them more control to chart their own course
>>> and remain competitive in today’s unpredictable market. But such 
>>> decisions
>>> have “political” consequences anyway.
>>
>> That is a Left wing take, which often is used to justify injecting
>> politics where it is not appropriate, or asked for.  The idea is that
>> because everything is political, you better pre-empt and put your
>> politics in first.
>>
>> By "Getting away from politics", it means getting away from exactly
>> that, people who use the organisations they enter, to push their own
>> particular political and moral stances.  Some distro make very specific
>> political statements, some make none.  Many of us would prefer they made
>> none.
> 
> 
>    Interesting perspective.
> 
>    I don't think Linus meant to be so 'political', beyond
>    freeing a good idea from extreme corporate profiteering.
>    That's sort-of 'left', but there ARE subtle issues too.
> 
>    IF there was no Linux/BSD then the whole Unix paradigm
>    would have perished LONG ago - lost to history like so
>    many others. Oh woe VMS !
> 
>    So, for maybe arguable 'commie' intent, Linus wound up
>    doing a GOOD thing. He kept a great paradigm alive
>    which would have perished if purely capitalist/greed
>    was involved. When IBM bought RHEL ... a very 'karma'
>    thing indeed  :-)
> 

AFAICT Linus wanted an OS to play with and use for teaching and couldn't 
afford to pay for Unix, so he simply wrote his own.

Which is rather how Unix itself came to be created. It just so happened 
that Unix was written in company time.

No ideology involved. Simple pragmatism.


>    Lesson - do not be too quick to employ hard-line
>    ideology. Too many Good Ideas will perish.
> 
> 
In general if someone wants to charge you a lot of money for software 
you can easily write yourself, and you have the time, its a bit of a no 
brainer.


> 

-- 
“it should be clear by now to everyone that activist environmentalism 
(or environmental activism) is becoming a general ideology about humans, 
about their freedom, about the relationship between the individual and 
the state, and about the manipulation of people under the guise of a 
'noble' idea. It is not an honest pursuit of 'sustainable development,' 
a matter of elementary environmental protection, or a search for 
rational mechanisms designed to achieve a healthy environment. Yet 
things do occur that make you shake your head and remind yourself that 
you live neither in Joseph Stalin’s Communist era, nor in the Orwellian 
utopia of 1984.”

Vaclav Klaus