So that's the point; don't bake features into my browser that point me to one company when the whole purpose of a browser in the first place is to be able to visit web pages... like https://protonvpn.com/.
This is about only one thing: money (affiliate sales).
The company had bought Ellington, a Django based CMS, but the team basically rewrote the entire thing using multi table inheritance (unintentionally), so everything in the database had two copies, and we had over 70 tables, hundreds of gigabytes, disasters every week and tons of bugs... I discovered this more than a year later and nobody was even aware. Even the DBA wasn’t aware the tables were duplicates.
Right... it’s not that power corrupts; it’s that power is good and corruption is just something that coincidentally keeps popping up everywhere where there is power.
Also, what conversation? The one-sided echo-chamber where dissenting opinions are immediately met with hostility and censorship?
That’s not a valid comparison. If Microsoft was licensing their patents under GNU (if that was possible), we’d be talking about something different entirely, but they’re not actually open sourcing them in any way at all... they’re entering into a contract to trade them like Pokemon cards with a consortium that will actually, eventually become a monopoly. Once they become a monopoly with enough leverage, they will inevitably agree to change their terms to be more hostile to the rest of the world.
Open source software offers usage under some kind of license for essentially nothing in return, not “you can use our software if you make all of your software open sores as well”.
I’m gonna leave this comment here so that I can come back and reference it in an article that all right 10 years from now when everybody is talking about how this consortium effectively took over the world of IP and how it’s too bad nobody could see that snowball when it was near the top of the hill still.
Here’s another thing to consider: given the right terms, which the constituents of this consortium could agree to, this IP monopoly (read: mafia) could even use their IP to collectively sue basically everyone (the cross section of that many patents will overlap with much more IP in the world, creating an economy of scale nobody can compete with).
If Microsoft is doing this selflessly, then why aren’t they simply putting their patents into the public domain?
Consider the open innovation network as a kind of club, with good intentions.
When a company like Microsoft joins it might seem like the pinnacle of success, but with it really means is that the club has become a mafia.
It won’t be long before OIN uses its patent leverage to affect control over the behavior if its members.
Think about it for a minute… Why wouldn’t such a group or simply convince corporations, like Microsoft, to put their patents into the public domain? If you have to join a club to gain access to something, but it’s not really open source and it’s not really some kind of charitable contribution.
Another way of looking at this is, Microsoft has just one goal, being a publicly traded company, which is to increase the share price of its stock… Why are people so stupid always constantly fall for the same tricks, believing that such companies do anything that is actually charitable?
"Our code is self-documenting. If you need documentation then the code isn't written well enough"
-Assholes who don't know what it is like to work with mature code bases.
So that's the point; don't bake features into my browser that point me to one company when the whole purpose of a browser in the first place is to be able to visit web pages... like https://protonvpn.com/.
This is about only one thing: money (affiliate sales).