Please can we destroy Bill Gates’s open source legacy before he dies. I want him to see it die. I want him to be lying on his deathbed, reading an article in Ars Technica about gamers switching to Linux.
And by “please can we” obviously I mean “please can you,” I’m just a lowly full stack dev (aka a lamprey) who wears a Red Hat sweatshirt I got from a friend
My journey was Windows-> Ubuntu -> Mint -> Fedora -> Arch.
(Infuriatingly i still use windows for gaming, but nothing else.)
Did i mention that i use arch?
More importantly:
fucked up all my data with no backup.
One time i messed up a script and accidentally copied 40,000 mp3s to the same filename. 20 years of music collecting, literally going back to Napster, all gone.
Well, not completely gone. I’ve got everything uploaded to iBroadcast, and I’m pretty sure i can download my library. But I’m not sure i deserve to.
Me: Oh, I get it, this “Lemmy” website – it’s like The Onion but for nerds?
My fellow lemmings: No, they’re serious. run0 is real.
Me: Hah. The Onion, but for nerds! I love it.
Yeah I was thinking more of a paid service, I guess more like Nebula then Netflix, since Netflix just shows TV shows and movies made by big companies. I don’t mind paying for things if they’re good things, and I know the right people are getting the money for it.
So you’re saying you want a federated wiki that uses a blockchain??? Genius.
Kidding aside, you’re absolutely right. Wikipedia is one of the very few if not ONLY examples of centralized tech that ISN’T absolute toxic garbage. Is it perfect? No. From what I understand, humans are involved in it, so, no, it’s not perfect.
If you want to federate some big ol toxic shit hole, Amazon, Netflix, any of Google’s many spywares – there’s loads of way more shitty things we would benefit from ditching.
Edit: the “federated Netflix” – I know it sounds weird, but I actually think it would be really cool. Think of it more like Nebula+YouTube: “anyone” (anyone federated with other instances) can “upload” videos, and subcription fees go mostly to the creator with a little going to The Federation. Idk the payment details, that would be hard, but no one said beating Netflix would be easy.
And federated Amazon – that seems like fish in a barrel, or low hanging fruit, whichever you prefer. Complicated and probably a lot more overhead, but not conceptually challenging.
Bill Gates has made anti-knowledge sharing his lifelong legacy, from crushing OpenGL by bribing game developers not to build in it, to pushing the US gov’t to give away COVID vaccines to poor countries rather than making the data available so they could make their own. His influence in the industry towards proprietary and closed source code is unmatched. Like, we all love the nerd jumping over the computer with the goofy smile but that dude is a piece of shit.
My point was that if we (you!) were able to level the windows/Linux gaming playing field before he died, that would make him mad, and make me happy.