Are they just gonna squeeze us out of owning computers outright?
Looking at what's happening with RAM pricing and Crucial being shuttered, the doomer in me thinks they could just pull the same thing with every other PC component. It's not like some plucky band of upstarts can start 3D printing organic free-range FOSS processors, hard drives and motherboards in their garage- all of this shit comes out of a couple of giant plants in Asia. If porky strangles the supply, that's it. In the end all the average joe schmoe will be left with are cloud-based terminals that rely entirely on subscription services and that require strong identification to even use (and that will monitor and log every single fucking thing you do while drowning you in ads)
Wanna install Linux? Go ahead! What are you going to install it on though, your grandpa's old Pentium?
Wanna ditch subscription services and sail the seas? Oops, it looks like hard drives cost 5,000 dollars and are only sold to enterprise customers. I guess you're not storing that media anywhere
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It'd be way easier to make linux illegal. Capitalists want to sell you things, and computers and all the requisite components are things. If they made linux illegal then subscription services on the only allowed OS can still be a thing.
I think capitalists would rather wedge into Linux and enshittify it than outright make it illegal.
I get the feeling the moment Linux gets popular enough, some techbros are going to get their claws into it just like they do everything else. Valve making Linux popular through Steam Deck etc is good for now. But everything always goes the same way eventually once private companies get involved. Capitalists are experts at taking the hard work of passionate people and stripping the copper out of it for profit until it's just a shell.
Corps trying to get in on Linux and make a version you pay them for has already happened twice (RedHat, Canonical) and it's about to happen again with Valve. It's been fine, the GPL is mostly working at keeping them from stealing it all. You're even using stuff made by all three of those companies.
There's also Android where they made a whole layer of Not Linux on top of a Linux and that's kind of shitty, but it hasn't hurt mainline Linux at all, and despite their best efforts, the part where it's open source has let all sorts of projects use Android for things Google wouldn't like (like those emulator handhelds).
GPL stays winning, permissive licenses coping and/or seething. Imagine a different timeline where Apple or Sony had to put all of that back into FreeBSD.
People are being mad about the AGPL again.
I could see the EU getting pissy about Linux if they ever introduce a version of Chat Control for PCs, threatening distros that don't comply with whatever draconian horseshit they're cooking with ridiculous fines. France already thinks you're a drug-dealing terrorist pedophile if you use GrapheneOS on your phone
Oh absolutely. The age check crowd too are going to go after it right after VPNs because unlike MacOS, Android, iOS, and Windows it won't have baked in unavoidable age attestation that complies with and replies to websites with whether you're over 18/21 or not and thus is a hacker tool used to evade keeping the children from porn and other things (cough pro-Palestinian anti-empire narrative content cough). They may just make it so that you can use Linux but most of the web locks you out because you don't pass a valid age attestation check because your OS can't do that. So no more banking no more emails from Google, no more online shopping, no more social media, no more chat rooms, etc.
While that is a scary possibility, in practice it would be hard to pull off a blackout of that kind. Legislators can pass as many regulations as they want, and corporations will do the bare minimum because it’s not in their interest to shrink their customer base and ad views. There is a contradiction between the desires of the state and the desires of industry that I kinda doubt will end up in favor of the state very long, if ever. The economy always comes first even when it undermines geopolitical or propaganda goals.
The thing with the current shortage is that it's way more profitable to sell the chips used for RAM and SSDs to giant corporations building AI data centers than to bother with the consumer market at all. It's not a co-ordinated push to ban personal computing per se, just a side effect that happens to align with the push for cloud/subscription bullshit Microsoft and others have a huge hard-on for and will probably dovetail nicely also the West's even bigger hard-on for doing every single fucking authoritarian thing they have been accusing China of doing for the past 20 years
Why on Earth would they make Linux illegal? Linux is a kernel for servers, mobile devices, and embedded systems. A small number of lunatics thought it would be funny to run it on a personal computer, but those people create bug reports and PRs that help with the big corporate projects, so it all works out. 5% of people with a PC use Linux on it, and 13% of people don't have a PC at all. Besides, operating systems don't matter nearly as much as they used to (and will continue to matter less) as everything migrates to the web, where you can easily charge subscriptions to everyone for services.