this post was submitted on 07 Apr 2025

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Tariffs Spark Shift to Open Source (news.opensuse.org)

submitted 3 weeks ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

44 comments fedilink hide all child comments

The European Commission sees open-source software as more than an IT tool. Policy makers are encouraging open-source ecosystems to drive innovation, autonomy and collaboration in a world where global trade is being redrawn.

This trade dispute highlights something most open-source advocates have known for years: open source is freedom. It’s freedom from monopolies, freedom from arbitrary pricing, and freedom from foreign influence.

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[–] [email protected] 87 points 3 weeks ago

Good.

[–] [email protected] 63 points 3 weeks ago (3 children)

Here comes Europe, Fuck Yeah. Here to save the motherfucking day yeah.

[–] [email protected] 36 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

Several EU countries already have fascists or borderline fascists in the government (Italy, the Netherlands, Hungary) or have a raising fascist force grabbing for power (e.g. Germany, Sweden).

Don't expect too much from the EU. We might very well overtake you on the road to open fascist total control.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 2 weeks ago

As long as it's an OSI approved open fascist, then I'm on board

[–] [email protected] 12 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Freude, schöner Götterfunken!

(Joy, thou shining spark of God)

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago

Tochter aus Elyyyysium

[–] [email protected] 12 points 2 weeks ago

Meanwhile the EU probably pushes for the 100th time to backdoor all communication encryption backed by fascists and Spain trying to put down the Catalans...

And the UK doing the same thing and also a big surveillance state...

Sadly nowhere is great right now.

[–] Eezyville 49 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

SEE!!! Trump is doing some good! It's about time the power was taken from these arrogant, invasive, Silicon Valley companies.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Isn't that what the tariffs and general idiocracy of the Republicans are for?

I'm working for the government, and most projects that were about switching to MS Teams and other US-based software suites appear to have crashed to a complete halt (which I feel no remorse over).

[–] [email protected] 35 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

But... This is a good thing. I will take it. More FOSS awareness is great news. As long as it sticks.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 2 weeks ago

It's not going to, though. As soon as the tariffs disapper they'll be impersonating Dory, again.

[–] [email protected] 16 points 3 weeks ago

Can I say that the issue is much deeper than just tariffs, and that Europe should not be using anything cloud or AI based? Ideally not even from EU if not fully open-source or open-data.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 2 weeks ago (2 children)

This is what I'm excited about. My parents are in the market for new laptops, I'm going to see if they will take a framework running popOS and make the switch to Linux. It's incredible that this option is now so approachable.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 2 weeks ago

Mine are liking Mint quite a lot. They say they feel its easier to find stuff than windows.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Throw something like Mint on their old laptops and they may not need new ones at all!

Unless they don’t have current ones, then ignore me, lol.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago

Hey, that's a good point!

I think they're keen to buy something new, so my main excitement is hey look a shop where you can start with Linux in the first place.

But I could also end up showing them how to repurpose their current laptops as media servers or something, which would be cool!

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

If only every open source software didn’t lock enterprise features behind licenses….

Companies still have to fork 90% of useful Foss projects and not upstream changes because they need to reimplement HA features and SSO etc every time

[+] [email protected] -21 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

Lemmy seems to be anti-AI, at least from my impression, but I am hopeful that AI will help invigorate the open source software world. If people can code better, faster, cheaper, safer (more secure) that will surely apply to open source as well. AI coding tools could bring on the Linux mainstream revolution. Imagine thousands of autonomous agents refining software for Linux. There could be a glut of driver support, apps coming to Linux, and so much more. I am hopeful about it.

[–] [email protected] 44 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

I won't hold my breath on it.

Up until this minute, AI has produced plentiful examples of how it can produce anything but good code.

I'd rather have a developer writing software, slowly, because they have an intelectual itch and want to try and see the outcome of their idea than the proverbial army of monkeys furiously typing away.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

It's pretty useful replacing stack overflow that could also generate code specific to your project. It's also useful for testing. Like any tool, it has its use cases.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

I sometimes float the idea in my brain to learn how to code. If I ever come to it, I want to debate and discuss my work with another human. Not a machine.

Personal preference.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

That's a great way to do it, but human attention on your code is a scarce and valuable resource. LLMs are great for the sort of lazy stupid questions where you benefit from a quick answer, but also don't want to waste someone else's time on. When you are learning nearly all the questions you'll have will be like this, your progress is gated on finding the answers, and even if you are taking a class and it's someone's job to look at your code and help you understand what's wrong with it, you have to wait your turn for that and only get so much help.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

and there are so many cases in programming where you can save hours asking a really simple question that should be easy to figure out on your own but actually isn't.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@fubbernuckin Well yes, but those hours are called "learning". Learning must hurt, it's a change in the brain, that pain will change you, you want to be changed. You will not learn to figure things out if you just always reach for the robot at the sign of first trouble.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

No, learning is there part where you have to think. That's not when you use the robot. You use the robot when the documentation is trash and unusable and every answer you find is out of date. You use the robot when you know exactly what you want to do and how to do it and you don't have time to trawl through the docs for the next 2 hours. You use the robot when the only gimp 2.10 tutorial on earth for how to write plugins tells you to use this funny program called gimptool but you're new to gimp dev so you look online to see what that is only to find that there's no mention of it literally anywhere besides your current tutorial and a disjointed man page where you can't find the source anywhere, and the devs are all on irc and you don't want to bother them and you're worried that they're just going to tell you to read the tutorial you already came from and you'll leave empty handed. That's when you ask the robot. It has a use, you don't have to substitute your thinking to use it.

[–] [email protected] -1 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@fubbernuckin Right, so you only substitute "how to read documentation" and "how to talk to people on IRC", great...

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

Know what, that's stupid and reductive and not even accurate to what I said, but fuck it, yes. Yes actually. Because i value my time and sanity and other people's time and sanity. Just because i eat out every now and then doesn't mean I can't cook.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago (1 children)

@fubbernuckin Because you did spend that time to learn cooking somewhere in the past. Look, I teach IT students, and there is a very clear difference between those who use ChatGPT for everything, and those who try to figure things out. Even asking the right questions from people on IRC is a skill that needs to be learned and practiced. You don't see it, because you haven't grown up in a world with ChatGPT since the start, so you did already learn that. But can you ever stop learning?

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Alright, you do have a point there. Reading docs and asking questions is a skill too, and if you haven't learned them yet then chatgpt can stunt your growth there, i agree with that much.

I still think that chatgpt, if used correctly, can be a huge boon to your education. Knowing how to interact with those bots to avoid their shortcomings and not use them as a crutch I think is also a skill worth learning.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 weeks ago

The other problem is unlike stack overflow, a helpful answer by an AI isn't visible and indexed therefore someone else has to do another prompt for the potential answer.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 3 weeks ago

If people can code better, faster, cheaper, safer (more secure) that will surely apply to open source as well.

I'm not European, but I understand that there's an old European (German?) saying that basically goes: "If I had wheels, I'd be a trolley." I understand that it's been pretty well-established that AI coding tools routinely underperform compare to humans in terms of "better" and "safer", which indirectly would also lead to it failing at "cheaper" too.

On top of that, there is another major issue with using AI for open-source code: copyright. First, you don't know if the code that you're adding through AI may be copying license-incompatible code verbatim. Because everyone has access to open-source code, it would be trivial for anyone to search and find copyright-infringing code to attack projects with. Second, the code that AI produces is also not-copyrightable, so that is another line of attack that this would make open-source projects vulnerable to. These could be used in combination as a one-two punch combination to knock out an open-source project.

I think that using AI-generated code in open-source projects is a uniquely ill-advised idea.

[+] [email protected] -24 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (2 children)

As long as they switch to running BSD, it's all crap.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

The isc/bsd2 license does not protect the user

[+] [email protected] -13 points 3 weeks ago (2 children)

You're not a tech person, you're an ideologue, so you wouldn't understand the culture around ISC. If a company wants security, constancy, and longecity, BSD is the only thing to use.

Choosing between Windows and BSD, which would you prefer everybody use? There are companies that already banned GPL software from company computers, what should they use?

[–] [email protected] 11 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Look, im not even going to respond the first part. I love the bsd's as well, from a technical standpoint. From a licensing standpoint, not so much (i see the value in a short license, though).

Im not concerned by what these companies use or do not use. Im concerned about protecting my, and other 'common good' software with a license that strictly prohibits user exploatation. The GPL does this perfectly.

[+] [email protected] -21 points 3 weeks ago (4 children)

GPL is evil. GPL is poison. You're an ideologie. You are vapid of the original UNIX cultural mindset. It's all mushy feelings you care about, not best tools to accomplish the work. You have no experience how to setup a BSD desktop. If you had a job as network gateway admin for employee network services, your argument would sound very different. You might as well as well say GPL fills my heart with so much love, I wish I could make passionate love to the GPL"

[–] [email protected] 15 points 3 weeks ago

GPL is evil. GPL is poison. You’re an ideologie.

🤣 Do you hear yourself? No one’s going to say something as hyperbolic and emotional as “GPL is evil. GPL is poison.” except an anti-GPL ideologue. The “original UNIX cultural mindset” is itself an ideology. You are an ideologue. You might as well as well say, “BSD license fills my heart with so much love, I wish I could make passionate love to the BSD license.”

[–] [email protected] 13 points 3 weeks ago

My brother in christ, unix was all rights reserved. There was a non-compete agreement prohibiting at&t from selling their OS, hence why it was more or less given to universities. Later, the BSD's did a theseus ship, and at&t still tried to claim ownership through legal methods. For them, the license symbolizes this independence from at&t, which is why it doesnt lay claims on user protection.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 2 weeks ago

Saving this as a copypasta.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 2 weeks ago* (last edited 2 weeks ago)

Go lick the boot more. There's more to the world than some fucking computers. Go download yourself some grass and touch it.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 weeks ago* (last edited 3 weeks ago) (1 children)

https://m.slashdot.org/story/336593

https://www.hardenedbsd.org/~shawn/DEFCON-25-Ilja-van-Sprundel-BSD-Kern-Vulns.pdf

I doubt it changed much and it sounds logical too.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 weeks ago (1 children)

Which one?

[–] [email protected] -4 points 3 weeks ago

To make it easier and more flexible, I would suggest FreeBSD on desktop and servers. For routers or firewall, there's nothing else but OpenBSD.