RE: Tormenting my Wife via Open Source Software
Never trust anything Microsoft does .. ever. They got their start by thieving, they have a long history of screwing people/organizations .. the Gates foundation is involved in some extremely shady shit with their vaccines, and now that they cannot belittle and ignore Linux anymore, they are embracing it. But it is not for the benefit of anyone except Microsoft.
In the tech circles I like to follow, Gnome and KDE are not used, seen as bloated and insecure. Apache is eschewed in favor of nginx, or even the base httpd in OpenBSD (which is also an example of a project that did not have its roots in big money.) Although they get some funding today, they did not, for a long, long time.
I don't disagree with you: corps are definitely around and definitely contributing.. but they weren't always, and there are projects that are not unduly influenced by them. Going back to DOS and the Freeware/Shareware paradigm, there have always been developers who create their wares for free, and offer them for free, or at a small charge. Today, maybe you have to treat the path less traveled .. but it's out there.
I think it's also worth mentioning that, if you look at what these corps have TAKEN from the open source community, versus given, I think you'll find the are still owing! Minix, as an example, was secretly taken and deployed in almost all post-2007 Intel processors. OS X is re-hashed BSD. Playstations are also BSD based, the Switch.. etc.
What you say about the code they have taken is a big true, several "boxes" indeed runs linux, minix or bsd in a way, and the code is closed.
Apache http server may had it's better days a long time ago, but that foundation develop and support lots of high level projects besides their http server.
I think the limit is still in the hardware, but i can't see in the near future a way out to proprietary hardware. Peak oil will smash our way of life soon, we have no time to develop free and open hardware, we (the people) don't have the skills to make a simple usable transistor.
Hardware is definitely a tricky one. The Talos POWER9 stuff looks interesting, as does some of the RISC stuff.. but overall it is definitely not there yet.
Ahh well, we do the best with what we have, I guess.
That's true. We can't do much more. I enjoyed your post, we all lived (or still living) that process your wife is in, is an universal FOSS story.
Indeed. An oasis for the mind. It is so easy to fire up a web browser, think "what OSS rabbit hole shall I fall down today", and get started on something. Ansible was my latest foray into the unknown.. fun stuff.