atondwal

I'm totally going to say it your way from now on. But only for currency: "boku bucks", "watashi won", and "ore reals".

You just put together the clearest examples I've seen for illustrating this point. When it need to make it from now on, I'm linking to this comment :)

I don't think it's about not using the GPLv3 --- a lot of software is stuck in GPLv2 because the maintainers can't get everyone who contributed (or their estate) to sign off on a license upgrade to the better but incompatible GPLv3. Even the linux kernel is stuck!

But this isn't an "escape hatch" for breaking the GPL; there's a reason the FSF made the "cure clause" explicit in the GPLv3. The explicit language should make life easier and save on court costs not only for corporate lawyers, but even more so for the excellent folks at the Free Software Conservancy, the biggest defenders against GPL violations.

I don't think the "browser-only strawman" is condescending elitists dismissing users --- I'm a self-described GNU zealot on most days the only software I use on are apps like firefox, ssh, and vim and a few other bits like gnome/xmonad, liquid haskell, latex, and rustc.

I have no clue how the "average person" uses a computer, but for me it really is all web. Hell, if I had consistent LTE on my laptop, I could very just spend the whole day in a full-screen firefox with a web-ssh connection to my work server for development.

> It might eventually lead to one culture, but then that would be because we all learned from all the options and settled on the best combination.

Isn't that the whole point of the Borg?

This course of study seems to take just as much, if not more, time than a math ugrad+master's at a typical uni. The people who could really benefit from having a path of textbooks like this fall into two categories: those who don't have access a university (due to poverty, rural location, and/or being a shift worker, for example), and high school students.

And I think the latter category is more important than people realize. When I was a high school student, I benefitted greatly from t'Hooft's theorist.html (like this, but for physics, and put together by one of the Greats of the field). It's part of what got me really interested in physics, it was a whole lot of fun, and it actually did a pretty good job of preparing me for graduate-level coursework. Eventually I left physics and math for CS (I'm in PL, so this is even less drastic of career change than one might think), but I still have warm memories of working along t'Hooft's guide and checking off topics as I finished the problems in each textbook.