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Was open-sourcing Linux a cynical, offensive move to devalue commercial Unix (a scheme hatched by duplicitous Finns)?

But more seriously, DeepSeek is a massive boon for AI consumers. It's price/performance cannot be beat, and the model is open source so if you're inclined to run and train your own you now have access to a world-class model and don't have to settle for LLaMA.



> Was open-sourcing Linux a cynical, offensive move to devalue commercial Unix (a scheme hatched by duplicitous Finns)?

No, but the same sort of people certainly told us that we were :-)

Cf. the whole "the GPL is viral and will kill the industry" spiel we got to hear for years.


At the end of the day, some people think like Linus Torvalds and others think like Bill Gates.


Linus is not too different from Bill, actually.

He has also spoken about world domination ;)

https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Linus_Torvalds


I'll find the quote eventually, but this caught my eye:

>If you need more than 3 levels of indentation, you're screwed anyway, and should fix your program.

Got me thinking. I might heighten up to 4 or 5 simply because modern code needs 2 indents just to start writing a function in a struct. But the quote wasn't as crazy as I thought, even 30 years later.


In code reviews I call them sideways christmas trees and mark it as a bug.


And most people "choose" which of the two they will use depending on which best serves them under the given circumstances.


> Was open-sourcing Linux a cynical, offensive move to devalue commercial Unix

No, because as Stallman had pointed out Linux isn't GNU. One of the differences between the "open source" crowd and the "free software" crowd is that the latter actually does have an explicit goal of denying proprietary software the ability to exist.


You jest, but honestly, if open source accelerated during the peak Cold War and the Soviets leveraged them to own capitalists American software industry, you bet that the US Govt would be hostile to the open source movement.


The Soviet Union did exactly that during the cold war - hell it lifted entire semiconductors - but it ultimately amounted to bupkis.


My father taught HnD computing in the 70s and 80s at Trent Poly. One of his industry contacts did time for shipping DEC Vax VMS kit to Bulgaria in crates marked "tractor parts"...


hahaha that would be funny

you could be a communist if you open source your project

so maybe in that alternative universe, there would be something like close-source-statement instead of open source license, to avoid be accused as a communist


> duplicitous Seattleites




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