[GTALUG] WSL, threat or boon? [was Re:Surveillance Capitalism [was another thread]]

[Russell Reiter]

On Sun, Apr 4, 2021 at 9:28 AM D. Hugh Redelmeier <hugh at mimosa.com> wrote:

> | From: Russell Reiter via talk <talk at gtalug.org>
>
> | I do have an interest in current events tho. What I see most recently is
> | that RMS called out canonical for surveillance capitalism and bashed WSL
> | for being a ploy to undermine free software.
>
> I missed or forgot that.  I guess he expressed this in 2017 (it seems like
> a lifetime ago).  I haven't found what he actually said (too lazy).
>
> Personally, I think that imitation is fair game.  GNU and LINUX
>

I believe that is the fact under copyright law. The closest contextual
description I can think of, given the current covid situation, is the
political debate on pharmacology during Toronto and elsewhere's sars issues
a few years ago.

The issue was copyright infringement by the government engaging and
manufacturing a licensed pharmaceutical, outside international supply chain
regulations as they stood.

I believe the outcome, at least what the government was going to do if
necessary, was to
state that it was only the process of manufacture that could be
copyrighted, the end molecular
product was not; it would manufacture its own supply and sort the details
out later.

Monsanto's RoundUp product court decisions may call this into question for
their own line of pesticide
protected organism's. However, it is direct human health, as opposed to
abstract human health, which is the government's top priority, at least I
would hope so in this case.

certainly copied UNIX (and killed it but propagated many of its ideas).
>
> Evan's talk this month will be another step down that road.
>
> Fair competition is health for everyone (but not every thing).
>
> I see, for example, the competition between Intel and AMD on the X86
> front as killing Itanium, the favoured path of Intel.
>

> On the other hand, enclosure is scary to me.  Linux has been enclosed
> in the appliance world.  And those folks have rarely upstreamed any of
> their work.
>
> Is WSL enclosure?  It doesn't seem to be.
>

How about an encroachment rather than an easement. An easement is hidden in
an
administrative record. An encroachment is a visibly apparent use of
property where
the owner of the property either ignores or is unaware of the situation at
the time of use.


> Is WSL somehow better than Linux?  If so, we have work to do to catch
> up.---
>

In that case, in the debate between GCC and clang LLVM, as someone who is
unable to write an operating system from scratch; who relies on
documentation
and the help of like minded people; my vote goes to GCC. It preserves
support for what
I see as program necessary artifacts. Plus I see python and other
interpretative hooks
into machine code a risk, which must be well balanced, from a SigInt
perspective.

In such a case of reconstructionism, I believe GCC is the better
philosophical option.

https://oregonstate.edu/instruct/ed416/PP3.html

 my .02¢

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-- 
Russell
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