@lukas
@lemmy.haigner.meI love the free software ideals, but I think we've got a different understanding about what constitutes a good and a bad license. What many people seem to forget about software licenses is that there are these other countries besides America. They couldn't care less about whatever judges rule over there. A good license is a dumb simple license that anyone can enforce in court with ease. A bad license is a convoluted license that crumbles like a house of cards in court. I read the GPL. It's convoluted. It's an opaque terms of service agreement riddled with legal boilerplate disguised as software license. A poor execution of the ideals I hold. I only use the GPL as a formality to say that I support the free software ideals, but I have zero confidence in enforcing the GPL.
Shame that we don't have a proper copyleft license tho? GPL, as nice as the intentions are, is a license so convoluted that I'm not sure whether it'd hold up in court in my country.
Let's use Ubuntu for comparison.
Zorin adds only the following value:
When people see Windows, they expect Windows. Installers, package managers, peripherals like printers, etc. are different from Windows. Pretending to be Windows makes people feel at ease for a moment at the expense of fundamentally misunderstanding what operating system their computer runs on, and it'll trip them up eventually, probably sooner rather than later.
See macOS: It looks and feels different. People don't mistake macOS for Windows. People who use Windows don't expect macOS to behave like Windows, and vice-versa. But hey, let's make macOS look and feel like Windows at first glance. Why can't I run that .exe? What do you mean, I must use an app store? What is HDCP, and why does it prevent me from connecting this laptop to the projector?
For iOS that'd be questions like: Where is the Play Store? Why can't I install that (Android-only) app? I think you get my point.
This is one of the reasons why branding exists. Yet many Linux distros would like to believe they can replicate the Windows experience through a miracle, and fool themselves into thinking that's a good thing for Linux newcomers. It's especially bad for people who don't know they use Linux, like when they use computers at the office, library, etc. with a distro like Zorin.
Like auto update and auto driver installation? They expired for sure, but especially the auto driver installation patent is hilarious. Like no shit sherlock: Check internet for driver with the device md5 hash and the version of the driver installer. Download driver if it's a newer version. Install driver if md5 hash matches. Repeat for all devices, and that's fucking it. Plus an irrelevant figure that shows a computer connected to a printer, scanner and the internet. 3 pages in total, of which 1 page is a copy of another page, so only 2 real pages in total.
They have computers, but only a privileged few know how to use them: https://youtu.be/IrCQh1usdzE?t=944
Yeah sure let's ignore out of print books that nobody will ever see again unless you pirate it.
Copyright doesn't encourage new works. If anything, copyright discourages new works by locking fair use and transformative behind an expensive legal process. Digitization in America is illegal by default except for books where a judge ruled it's transformative enough.
The proven method to encourage new works is to have no copyright. But alas, publishers back then didn't appreciate that others print "their" books. Higher quality cover? More durable paper? Book is out of print? Zero profits? Give me money or fuck off. Publishers sure didn't change.
Domain name ~$15/year
.com starts at $10.28/year
Offshore server providers usually start around $30/server/month and quickly raise to thousands
Proxy everything from cheap offshore servers to servers from legit hosting providers with fair pricing.
Corporate application techs are usually $2k-200k/month depending on size
Ops are a tech themselves, work with techs they split donations with or pay or nothing at all, or become a tech themselves as time goes on.
Anything that requires a GPU would be a custom build, dell power edge is a powerful machine you can lookup retail for
True, but a website like FitGirl Repacks needs no GPU.
Storage Amazon s3 is $0.022 per GB/month
Don't use Amazon S3 if pricing is a concern.
Keep in mind that providers [...] often provide multiple releases codexes, resolutions and providing a lot more than people are requesting
I'm not sure what to say about that? They sure can do that for images, but not for game repacks.
You often have to pay for networking as well which scales exponentially
Pirates don't build on-prem data centers, they rent servers or services.
Email accounts are usually $10/user/month any time would come from a senior developer ~120+k/year
No, they can re-use whatever server they use for email. Why pay a senior developer ~120+k/year for email?
But they are likely full stack developers so it might be closer to 200k in the US
If a developer works with a pirate, they don't get paid a wage. They're part of the operation, and get paid depending on the donations or nothing at all.
And servers to run development environments (double the costs above!!!)
The development environment can be on the server or even on the dev's laptop. They already paid for that, so $0.
And infrastructure like Jenkins/monitoring which can scale high as well, but likely <$20k/year
Put it on the server. Scalability isn't practical for pirates to begin with. If they lay all eggs in one basket for maximum scalability and cost savings, then the cloud provider can end their entire operation.