That’s why you should never put people on a pedestal. There are a lot of people I admire, but I always try to imagine them being stupid assholes most of the time to balance things out in my head.

This is far from the first (or last) time he wrote something like this. This was just a regular thing in the kernel world for a long time (until Linus matured a little).

Whether or not it was a good thing is up for debate I think. Yeah, it’s very rude and unprofessional (and discourages new contributors who don’t want to risk getting chewed out), but considering the importance of the Linux kernel, it’s good to know the lead maintainer is doing too much of the right thing than not enough (i.e. being lax with bad code in order to be respectful). I’m fine knowing that a few tech workers got their egos smashed if it gives me confidence that the code powering civilization is high quality.

and KDE users didn’t even get anything new at all.

This is misinformation.

KDE users got a broken Nvidia driver.

It’s kind of romantic. Thinking of all the hoops they had to jump through to get this intimate setup just right brings a tear to my eye.

And since it’s GPL that any additions are compatible with the GPL, which the ad / tracking stuff they’re likely to add likely isn’t.

That’s a good point, although I wonder if there are any ad SDKs that are GPL compatible? There’s no reason that couldn’t exist AFAIK.

However, there’s also the much simpler scenario where they straight up replace the apps with something completely different. This company buys apps all the time, so I’m sure they have at least a few calendar, gallery, file browser, etc apps lying around that they can reuse.

All single board computers have driver problems because they require custom kernel forks that can’t or don’t get mainlined for whatever reason (usually laziness), but Raspberry PI is actually the best when it comes to that stuff.

So when you buy an SBC, you need to ask yourself: will the company continue to develop/update/patch their custom kernel fork now that they shipped? Or will they just abandon it and move on to the next product? 9 times out of 9.01, it’s the latter.

Tell me you haven’t used Linux in the past ~20 years without telling me you haven’t used Linux in the past ~20 years

I’m not a lawyer either, but the GPL doesn’t say anything about commercial use. Zipo can sell the code in the apps without having to ask permission from contributors. The only restriction is that they have to keep their modifications open source (which that Github response says).

But the main point is that the Zipo people bought out the Google Play listing, giving them access to the millions of users who have those apps installed on their phones. They likely don’t give a shit about features/keeping the apps closed source. It’s just a purchase of the userbase, likely for shady reasons.

This also means that forking the Simple Mobile repos isn’t even likely to accomplish much. Sure, it’ll put control of the repo in the hands of a more trusted party (which is significant), but since it’s open source anyways, it’d be easy to catch any attempts to sneak malware into the apps. And if all development effort moves to the fork, Zipo can still take that fork and redistribute it under the “Simple Mobile Tools” name.

Ultimately, the fucked up thing here is that the original developer, Tibor Kaputa, sold out millions of users. Forking isn’t going fix that. Fuck him. The only thing that will fix this situation is if Google takes down their store listing, but that’s not going to happen. Hopefully F-droid does.