Canadian software engineer living in Europe.

  • 32 Posts
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Joined 3 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • If the work is a “clean room” reverse engineering job, as in: you didn’t read the original source to produce your version but rather looked at the input and output and wrote new software that had the same behaviour, the this new software is not a derivative work and you can use whatever license you like.

    The easy option is public domain, which effectively is a “this belongs to everyone” thing. There’s not much of a practical difference between this or MIT in my understanding.

    Another option would be something that preserves the freedoms you attach to the software like the GPL or LGPL if youre feeling less aggressive. These licences compel would-be modifiers to share their changes with everyone else, preventing (for example) companies that want to build their business on top of your work and then charging you for it.

    But basically, if you wrote it without referencing the original, it’s your work and you can do as you like. If you were referencing the original source though, then that’s a derivative work and you may be in violation of the copyright holder’s rights.



  • I would be less concerned about the GPU driver and more about the entire distro. Like most distros, Ubuntu has a release cycle where versions of everything are deprecated over time in favour of newer ones, and to expect that the entire OS will be fully supported in 10 years may be asking a bit much (I’m not sure if even their LTS release goes that far).

    On top of that, Ubuntu could go bankrupt or get bought out, or simply enshittify (more than it already has) in that time. Expecting Ubuntu specifically to be supported on your laptop in ten years is anyone’s guess.

    However, what you can be reasonably sure of is that Linux will continue to support your system, GPU and all, for a very long time. I heard a kernel developer once say that due to the kernel’s modular design, there’s support in there for stuff just one or two people in the whole world use.

    As someone else has already pointed out, FOSS support for hardware generally gets better over time, and a GTX video card is ubiquitous. There’s going to be a hell of a lot of those floating around on laptops, servers, and homelabs for a lot more than ten years.

    You just might not be able to stick with Ubuntu. The older the hardware, the more you might have to lean toward the more technical distros that make it easy to customise the kernel or that favour old hardware. I like Gentoo for this job, but even Ubuntu or Debian have paths to do compile your own kernel for example.






  • Or… (and bare with me here) generations of establishment parties doing fuck all for the people while burning the world, backing a genocide, and insisting that everything was fine because “line goes up”.

    Support for Labour and the Conservatives fell apart when both parties decided that they didn’t care about the same things the electorate do. There’s no nuance missing. They gave up and expected us all to fall in line. We aren’t, and now they’re acting confused as to where their support went.







  • I caution against the enthusiasm here. As I understand it, the complaint wasn’t that Anthropic didn’t want to make autonomous weapons so much as that they wanted to retain control over the systems once they were sold to the government.

    No reasonable government should allow corporate control over their military assets, and frankly, I trust Anthropic with control over weapons even less than I trust the Trump administration.