Apple is selling to the whole of EU. Is it unreasonable to conclude that they should have known to follow the EU laws rather engaging in a tax scheme offered by Ireland?
I'm not entirely sure what to think myself about the fairness of this. But going forward I definitely prefer that corporations will have to be careful about engaging in unfair tax deals in the EU.
Otherwise those corporations would just be looking for the next country to take advantage of - risk free.
Amazon got away with it and so did Fiat, smaller sums and in Luxembourg and Netherlands, still, company specific tax deals based in country specific laws.
Apple clearly picked the wrong horse, but unless there’s actual reform (which will likely cause a whole slew of other issues) the tax setup of multinational companies will carry on, maybe not risk free, but it’s still a win for them long term no matter what.
I get where you are coming from, but from a user's perspective I really struggle to see the benefits of S0ix.
More parts are kept on, for the sake of updates and notifications. Notifications that you will get on your phone anyway (and that the laptop won't be able to get if it's not connected to a wifi anyway), and updates that will likely cause too much excess heat to be safe to perform inside of a bag.
If you see the benefits more clearly, perhaps you could elaborate on what they are?
Development of postgres is funded by the companies using it, for instance Amazon.
Elasticsearch and Redis are private companies that fund most of the development themselves.
When Amazon sell Elasticsearch and Redis, they are in direct competition with its creators.
Obviously such a situation isn't sustainable in the long run, and as such both Elasticsearch and Redis (and to my knowledge also mongodb) have changed their licenses to avoid that cloud providers sell their OSS product without paying a license or otherwise contributing back.
In the case of Elasticsearch and Amazon, Amazon even used the Elasticsearch brand to sell their own version.
As I see it it's a good thing that cloud providers are forced to take part in maintaining the OSS software (forked or not) that they are cashing in on.
FWIW, Redis was previously mostly developed by the community but the trademark was acquired by a VC funded tech company. AWS, and other cloud providers like Tencent, were contributing to Redis and they went ahead and changed the license anyways. You can read more about it here, https://lwn.net/Articles/966631/.
It’s the license type that matters, not how development is funded.
Postgres’ license is similar to BSD so even if Microsoft made and was the sole developer and sold it, anyone could distribute or sell it or whatever regardless of who contributes. Similar to Elastic’s old license and why Amazon was legal in what they did.
Amazon (and most all large companies these days) do a ton of OSS dev, but that doesn’t matter. The license of the various software counts.
I've used rootless podman for development for several months now.
I had a few issues in the beginning, but in the end the solutions were rather trivial. I had to:
- Delete config files from previous podman versions (pre 4)
- Enable the docker socket (for my user)
- Use docker compose 2 rather than "podman compose" or an older docker compose (shipped with the distro)
We mostly use docker-compose files for our dev setups, so I can't say if I'd run into issues with more elaborate setups. But I must say that it works extremely well for me.
It also lets you generate those manifests from existing containers or pods. No need to learn the compose spec, less friction dev and prod without stop-gap measures like Kompose
> I'm very excited to get one of these and install Linux on it.
If there ever was a time for Linux to really compete with Windows, that time would be now when Windows will break software compatibility to a large degree.
I'm aware that there is a compatibility layer in place that will runs most apps, and that some of the most common production apps will have native builds.
But from what I can read, the compatibility layer is not perfect, and for instance games cannot be expected to just run or run well enough to be playable.
If you are at the point where Windows apps cannot be expected to just work, then why not use wine (and proton for games) instead, on an ad-free system?
> If you are at the point where Windows apps cannot be expected to just work, then why not use wine (and proton for games) instead, on an ad-free system?
Because they don't have to learn a new OS. I love Linux but inertia is a powerful force. I don't think swapping one compatibility layer for another is enough to entice the average person.
The ads, maybe, but I don't think most people care that much. Linux is a hard sell to people that don't want to care about compatibility layers, don't mind advertising that much, and grew up on Windows.
It has some times been a political theme in Denmark that we have to attract highly skilled workers and how we can do that best. Often the talk has been about for instance giving foreign workers tax exemptions.
On those occasions I've often wondered how much of an impact the high trust and high social of safety has - for instance compared to salary. I'd imagine that it plays a big role in making people stay.
The tax exemptions definitely help at least getting people to move in the first place and they were a big part in my decision (I'm on the Forskerskatteordningen)
It's hard to put a value on a high trust high quality of life society without living in it first
It's important that Denmark continues to attract high quality employers (such as in tech, big tech companies with American levels of pay).
I think our work ethic here seems to help with that too (Danes seem to be 100% switched on all the time at work but will not touch it once the day is over). At least the impression I get, which is of course subjective and just my experience, is that US company owners consider us more or at least as productive as folks on the west coast.
This is generally an issue currently in the EU: Countries are stealing talent and letting residents pay. As such I myself exploited NHR in Portugal. But it is possible to both move to Hungary and Holland on tax reduction schemes.
Personally, I hold the belief that these should not exist. They are a race to the bottom only the well educated can participate in.
I don't think Sony are by any means "good guys". But I think some of your criticism lacks a bit of nuance.
> promising free upgrades and then walking back from it
When did they do this? As I remember they did not promise free upgrades, but was forced to provide them anyway for some games because of the backlash.
> forcing people to use the new controllers even if the PS4 ones are perfectly capable to play the new games
This is an interesting topic. The PS5 controller is one of the console's key selling points over competing consoles. I can definitely understand why they would want to ensure that game developers support that controller specifically. Otherwise its features would likely not be used as much by third party games, which would be a shame.
Obviously Sony factored the additional earnings from controller sales into their decision to enact this artificial limitation. But I think there's more to it than just consumer hostility.
> increasing prices of games and consoles
They were the first company to increase the price of their AAA games, which everyone has since done as well.
How did they raise the price of consoles?
> bullying companies so they don't support cross-platform play
Definitely consumer-hostile. Luckily things have changed for the better in this generation due to better competition I guess. I would just wish that more games would have "console only" crossplay.
> When did they do this? As I remember they did not promise free upgrades, but was forced to provide them anyway for some games because of the backlash.
It's been a while, but I think it was with Horizon Forbidden West
> PS4 controllers
I agree this one needed a bit more nuance. I understand they wanted to incentivize the new controller features, but it's the fact that the PS5 is technically capable of using those controllers (since you can use them for PS4 games) but Sony chooses to not allow it that's anti-consumer. Also since you can use PS4 controllers to play streamed PS5 games on PC or PS4 itself.
> How did they raise the price of consoles?
In August 2022 they increased the console price by ~10% pretty much all over the world except the US. Microsoft did the same in June 2023.
I'm not entirely sure what to think myself about the fairness of this. But going forward I definitely prefer that corporations will have to be careful about engaging in unfair tax deals in the EU.
Otherwise those corporations would just be looking for the next country to take advantage of - risk free.