this post was submitted on 09 Oct 2025
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Well you can build Linux from scratch if you want to create your own. And RISC hardware is opensource, and gaining adoption.
But at least with Fairphone they have built it so that you don't need google android or derivatives, you can install Ubuntu Touch OS.
With Ubuntu you have access to the worlds store of Linux apps, you don't have to rely on apple or Google restrictions
Building a project is not creating your own.
RISC-V, and what's gaining adoption is not what's opensource.
I don't think you are getting my point. When you depend on one humongous project, open or not, you depend on what those having influence in it decide.
That's why they make autonomies, checks and balances, minority quotas, proportional systems and so on in democracies. Because deciding everything through a simple majority vote with no limitations and nuance, with winner taking all, doesn't make things good.
In this case it's a weight of work vote, not majority vote, but the results are not too much different. Similar to how Bitcoin turned out.
So-o - in Linux most of work is now being done by a set of the same big corporations. It's not the magic freedom tool someone would want it to be, sorry.
You can totally build your own. You don't have to rely on packages given.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RISC-V
Free and OpenCode
And there are so many Linuxes (some like Redhat that gets influence from Intel, and some like (insert name here) that are peoples own projects) that corporate control cannot dominate it all.
Like nixOS has controversy at the moment because a steering board member is linked to US military. He could compromise the project by steering it toward the fascist regimes agenda, so you load Gentoo or VOID.
Choices are freedom
The claim that most of the work is bring done by big corps , skips a step. Corps have money and dedicate people to add to projects to suit their own needs, their commits to kernel may be high, but its not neccessry for a running system...there is a world wide open source community building their own stuff out of passion alone.
Like Facebook contributed a lot to btrfs, if you feel that somehow has shady backend, just don't include it in your kernel modules.
Or if you are super paranoid run Haiku LOL
No, there's one Linux and its versions. And various ways you can use it, build it, package it.
What I meant is that the codebase is mostly one.
It's sort of like with Bible.
No, those people will still use code contributed by RedHat, and the OS whose development has been influenced by RedHat.
NixOS is a distribution. Somehow in this quote you admit that said compromise can come in various ways, so controversy arises from that board member themselves just being there.
But with enormous companies making the actual software you ignore it.
Also replacing nixOS with Gentoo or Void is not quite equal. I've been trying to move to GuixSD from Void (because Nix gives me anxiety, Guile doesn't, and the whole GNU spirit is nice), but I'm always too lazy to wait for actual Guix installation to finish, so I interrupt it and forget it for a while.
Too complex. When you need a more vague explanation than the obvious, cynical, common sense one, it's likely wrong.
People building stuff out of passion alone do much more idea-centered and specific things. Which are much smaller. They don't make consumer operating systems or web browsers or office suites or device drivers.
You can probably attribute things like Emacs and, ahem, Guix and a few other GNU projects permanently in alpha, like GNUNet, to this. And plenty of interesting obscure stuff.
But not things that make money. In that domain everything is done to in order make money by people paid for their work and in the way that doesn't hurt moneymaking.
No, that is probably fine, except btrfs still doesn't react well to power loss, probably cause Facebook and Oracle think more about servers with UPSes. And that's typical, other people make their own project goals, the results may work for you too, but you'd have something better if you paid for it directly.
Haiku is not about paranoia, but speaking about volunteers and passion - it's a system made that way.
If you want to get that deep into it even your tomato choices are controlled by a large company (hybrid seed, chemical starter, distribution, preestablished deals with vendors) but you can still grow your own.
Nothing stopping anyone from being the next Linus and deciding to start something new.
Nothing stopping anyone from forking an old kernel and doing something different with it and stripping out the big corp stuff you don't like.
Right.
Linus made a Unix clone. One can say, started with the wrong premise.
It's a lot of work. I honestly think what Emacs developers are doing - assume that the underlying OS won't ever be good enough, and just put all your ideology into particular environment you're making, - is the right approach. I'm not even sure if what I'd want to do requires anything but Emacs, I think I'll get busy with learning elisp.
Yeah, he created an OS from scratch to avoid corporate greed of what they charged for Unix.
It is a lot of work, and the TempleOS guy building his system is a huge accomplishment also...as quirky as it is.
I guess I don't see us being stuck with anything other than our own complacency.
To be honest nobody has given me a good view of what emacs actually does...so I'm all ears