Apple makes the source code to all their core utilities available? Nobody cares but they do.

Why do they?

They are BSD licensed (very similar to MIT). According to the crowd here, Apple would never Open Source their changes. Yet, in the real world, they do.

Every Linux distro uses CUPS for printing. Apple wrote that and gave it away as free software.

How do we explain that?

There are many companies that use BSD as a base. None of them have take the BSD utils “commercial”.

Why not?

Most of the forks have been other BSD distros. Or Chimera Linux.

How about OpenSSH?

It is MiT licensed. Shouldn’t somebody have embraced, extended, and extinguished it by now?

Why haven’t they?

Some people might say that so many companies contributing free and open code to clang/llvm instead of GCC is real world evidence against the idea that companies only contribute to free software because the GPL makes them. Or even that permissive licenses can lead to greater corporate sharing than the GPL does. Why does Apple openly contribute to LLVM but refuse to ship GPL3 anything?

According to the web, Red Hat is the most evil company in Open Source. They are also the biggest contributor to Xorg and Wayland. Those are MIT licensed. Why don’t they just keep all their code to themselves? The license would allow it after all. Why did they license systemd as GPL? They did not have to.

The memory allocator used in my distro was written by Microsoft. I have not paid them a dime and I enjoy “the 4 freedoms” with the code they gave me because it is completely free software. Guess what license it uses?

How is actually writing and contributing free software not “actively helping the FOSS community”?

You could do that. MIT is a very free license.

Of course, that would only be a useful thing to do if you were also going to contribute to the code.

Since you seem so reasonable…

The restriction that some people object to is that the GPL restricts the freedom of the software developers (the people actually writing and contributing the code).

Most people would agree at first glance that developers should be able to license code that they write under whatever license they like. MIT is one option. Some prefer the GPL. Most see the right to choose a proprietary license for your own work as ok but some people describe this as unethical. I personally see all three as valid. I certainly think the GPL should be one of the options.

That said, if we are talking about code that already exists, the GPL restricts freedom without adding any that MIT does not also provide.

MIT licensed software is “free software” by definition. Once something has been MIT licensed, it is Open Source and cannot be taken away.

The MIT license provides all of the Free Software Foundations “4 freedoms”. It also provides freedoms that the GPL does not.

What the MIT license does not provide is guaranteed access to “future” code that has not yet been written. That is, in an MIT licensed code base, you can add new code that is not free. In a GPL code base, this is not possible.

So, the GPL removes rights from the developers in that it removes the right to license future code contributions as you want. Under the GPL, the right of users to get future code for free is greater than the right of the developer to license their future contributions. Some people do not see that as a freedom. Some even see it as quite the opposite (forced servitude). This “freedom” is not one of the “4 freedoms” touted by the FSF but it is the main feature of the GPL.

I believe that NTsync delivers better compatibility. I do not remember the details but Fsync can cause problems sometimes. So this is more like performance without compromise.

Now that it is in the kernel, I would expect Wine to move to it and for Proton to follow suit.

One less hack to maintain.

Somewhat ironic example.

X (Xorg) has been MT licensed for 40 years. So is Wayland. So is Mesa.

I think Xorg is a good example of the real world risks for something like core utils. If you did not know or care until now that X and Wayland were MIT licensed, you probably do not need to care too much about utils licensing either.

Text is better. Not perfect. Better.

I have a lifetime Plex account but have not used it in two years. I use Jellyfin. Obviously opinions vary.

At home, I have FireTV and Roku devices. I stream remotely to iPhones and tablets using Twingate.

You can import and export to CMYK but, internally, it is still sRGB.

Not even a fork. New code.

Most of it is historical momentum. Regardless of relative quality, far more people try Fedora and so far more people stick with it.

As for Tumbleweed specifically, many people do not like rolling distros. I do.

Whoosh

Wayland can never hope to achieve the level of HDR support that X11 enjoys.

I also use Chimera!

As everybody else is saying, Distrobox is the way to go and it is already in the repos (using Podman). It works amazingly. I setup an Arch Distrobox so now I have Chimera + the AUR which is just perfection for me. I still use native Chimera when possible and have created quite a few of my own packages. Sometimes I use Distrobox just to check something out and then create a native package later when I have time.

doas apk add distrobox

distrobox create —name arch —image docker.io/library/archlinux:latest

distrobox enter arch

That is all you have to do (though you have to add yay or paru inside Arch to use the AUR). You will be in an Arch console and have access to all Arch software.

Distrobox create seems a bit slow setting up overlayfs for some reason but it runs stellar after the first time.

If you really prefer Void…

dostrobox create —name void —image ghcr.io/void-linux/void-glibc-full:latest

Flatpak works as well if that is your thing (as you say). prefer Distrobox.

I realized just yesterday that Chimera comes with Broadcom WiFi drivers right in the kernel (no DKMS or CKMS required). Just download firmware with b43-cutter (also included). So I have dropped Chimera on a couple older MacBooks. I put it on an old 2009 MacBook Pro yesterday and 100% of the hardware is supported (Ethernet, WiFi, Camera, Audio, brightness and volume controls, sleep, everything ). I did a video meeting on it just for fun and nobody even noticed (the camera sucks in low light but that is hardware). Honestly, I cannot believe how well it runs. For basic office stuff, you would never know (unless you looked at CPU utilization—which will be high!).

Chimera Linux is still in beta but it already feels rock solid. I am so impressed with it as a distro. And the only downside is totally mitigated by Distrobox.

Enjoy!

[edit: I never answers “why” I guess. Distrobox uses Podman so it is amazingly light on resources. The app will run right on the Chimera kernel. What Distrobox adds is persistence and tight integration. By persistence I mean that changes you make in the Distrobox (like installing software) will be there the next time you enter. By integration, I mean that you see your normal /home and have direct access to hardware. It does not even feel like your app is in a container. GUI apps “just work” out-of-the-box. Type the name of a GUI app and it pops up in your native Wayland session. It is even possible to create desktop links so individual apps can be started point and click without having to go into the terminal. It is like magic.]

Manjaro because it is a bait and switch trap. Seems really polished and user friendly. You will find out eventually it is a system destroying time-bomb and a poorly managed project.

Ubuntu because snaps.

The rest are all pros and cons that are different strokes for different folks.