Yeah, this should definitely not be allowed. Google should not be allowed to dictate which operating systems people are allowed to use. And no doubt that this is harmful to many European companies and prevents competition in the space of mobile operating systems.
That said, it remains to be seen if anything will get done about it.
If you go back a few decades, you would see how companies would produce technological innovations with the mindset of, “If we design the best, most useful device possible, customers will come to us and buy our product”.
Today, that has flipped into a mindset of, “We will create this technology, force users into adoption, and exploit them as hard as possible once we have them under our control.”
The technology has become a means to control users, not to enable them.
At least it’s good to see that people are catching on though.
As a bit of an aside, I learned recently why Mozilla has the weird Corporate/Foundation structure that it does: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47701441
Basically the IRS is highly skeptical of the idea that free software development fits the legal definition of a 501©(3), and tends to reject such applications [1][2]. That is why Mozilla Foundation cannot use donations for Firefox development, and instead uses them for activism.
Someone claiming to be the CEO of one of these foundations appears to confirm it. Just thought people might be interested to know since this comes up in pretty much every thread about Mozilla.
I don’t know much about Sun, but they seemed like a cool company - Java, Solaris, Sparc. A lot of people sounded pretty upset when they got acquired.
So far! Don’t worry, Silicon Valley will think of another new, even bigger scam in no time!
The user is able to install new certificates.
That’s true today, but there’s no guarantee it will be true in the future. Google is already pushing for all software running on Android to be cryptographically verified and they (Google) are the only ones that control the signing keys. This means that they intend to kill off F-droid and all other software delivered outside the Google store.
If Google is able to pull it off on Android, everyone else will try to do it on desktop OSes too - Linux included.
I just don’t want see the garbage that is the Android Play Store where apps refuse to run because we run an OS that isn’t profitable to Google.
I think the possibility that this could happen is dangerously high.
Everything starts with good intentions. Everything ultimately leads to locking end users out of their personal freedoms.
I’ve made other comments before about how we used to cheer for Google back in the 00’s because they were the upstart that took on the entrenched competitors (Microsoft primarily). Look what Google has become today - the very thing we hoped they would destroy, and they are so much worse about it.
Red Hat/IBM ultimately owned by the same people as Google: shareholders. Nothing will ever stand in the way of their greed. If this technology is allowed to exist, there’s no reason to think that it too will be used against our interests.
He was there for a brief period. According to Wikipedia he was there from 2022-2026 and seems to have left to create his new company in early 2026.
Btw, i’m stealing your summary of browser monoculture, alright?
Of course! The EEE pattern is crystal clear at this point. The loss of the WWW to the current browser monoculture we’re experiencing is the biggest technological tragedy of our times. I would hate to see it happen with our open source revolution as well.
I’m so tired of reading this stupid argument. “People only dislike systemd because they’re afraid of change.” No, there are plenty of other concerning issues about it. I could probably write about a lot of problems with systemd (like the fact that my work laptop never fucking shuts down properly), but here’s the real issue:
Do you really think it’s a good idea for Red Hat to have total control over the most important component of every mainstream distro in existence?
Let’s consider an analogy: in 2008, Chrome was the shit. Everyone loved it, thought it was great and started using it, and adoption reached ~20-30% overnight. Alternatives started falling by the wayside. Then adoption accelerated thanks to shady tactics like bundling, silently changing users’ default browser, marketing it everywhere and downranking websites that didn’t conform to its “standards” in Google search. And next, Chrome adopted all kinds of absurdly complex standards forcing all other browser engines to shut down and adopt Chrome’s engine instead because nobody could keep up with the development effort. And once they achieved world domination, then we started facing things like adblockers being banned, browser-exclusive DRM, and hardware attestation.
That’s exactly what Red Hat is trying to pull in systemd. Same adoption story - started out as a nice product, definitely better than the original default (SysVInit). Then started pushing adoption aggressively by campaigning major distros to adopt it (Debian in particular). Then started absorbing other standard utilities like logind and udev. Leveraging Gnome to push systemd as a hard dependency.
Now systemd is at the world domination stage. Nobody knew what Chrome was going to do when it was at this point a decade ago, but now that we have the benefit of hindsight, we can clearly see that monoculture was clearly not a good idea. Are people so fucking stupid that they think that systemd/Red Hat will buck that trend and be benevolent curators of the open source Linux ecosystem in perpetuity? Who knows what nefarious things they could possibly do…
But there are hints, I suppose. By the way, check out Poettering’s new startup: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46784572
Dear Google: we wouldn’t have to do this if you weren’t such a shit company.
Oh, you weren’t aware that you’re a shit company? You legitimately believe you’re a positive force for the world? Well that’s your own damn fault.
What a great idea! Just claim your product is healthy to people that don’t care about their health!
Interesting. Were you using a Jenkinsfile? I’m not sure I completely understand your use case, but using a Jenkinsfile would mean that your entire pipeline would be defined in a file in source control, so you could roll it back if you made a change that didn’t work quite right. Seems to be what your looking for if I’m understanding what you’re looking for.
I looked at it for 5 seconds. The UI looked pretty hideous. Even new reddit looks better than it.
I’ve found the edit/test/debug loop in Jenkins to be much faster than Github Actions. It was quite a refreshing change when I made that transition.
The best way I found to do this is by commenting out the portions of the build that take the longest.
Which is stupid, but that’s what you get with Microsoft products.
(I get that there may be ways to test this locally, but I found this method to be the easiest.)
I thought they renamed their entire product line to “Copilot” by now, didn’t they?
Uninstalling it at this point would leave absolutely nothing left!
Cupertino has complied anyway, and said it introduced “Notarization for iOS apps, an authorization process for app marketplaces, and requirements that help protect children from inappropriate content and scams.”
Notarization requirements mean that they still maintain total control over the operating system and what software it can run. These kinds of onerous requirements keep the bar artificially high for competitors and are only possible because they are still enforcing their monopolistic control over the platform.
So no, they’re not complying at all actually. They’re just doing the same thing in a different way.
That won’t work. How are you supposed to draw the line between what is/isn’t spyware? Inevitably, MS would say, “we don’t consider this to be telemetry/spyware/etc.” and users will disagree, and MS will tell them to shove it.
Besides, Google has all of the shit that’s mentioned and gamers/developers don’t care, so I doubt it would make any difference at all. The fact is, Windows is a garbage system to develop for. Linux is the best system to use for deployments, Windows will never come close, and that’s ultimately what’s going to decide where developers go. And gamers are too niche for MS to care. The dominoes will really start falling when business customers start switching to Linux en masse.
And this is inevitable. When it comes to business use, open systems always win in the end.