Oddbean

Nobody is funding Debian. Never have. It's all volunteers. And if you count the volunteer time, it dwarfs the paid time. So the biggest funder in real terms is the unpaid volunteer community. By far. In fiat terms, Red Hat has been the biggest corpo distro for decades, so they probably still spend the most dollars. But maybe you're only counting paid kernel development time, or donations to the Linux foundation, or money spent on some subset of Linux distros. All I know is that you are missing the majority of the contributions if you are only following the money.

ok, but maybe you might recall that through their abuse of their privileged position and incumbency in massive amounts of US and other government bureaucratic systems (just go walk into any government office and tell me what OS is on every PC?) have also made it really difficult for even LINUX hardware support to appear, due to all kinds of NDAs and non-compete agreements between Microsoft and the majority of the hardware manufacturing industry how long have you been working with linux? 10 years? I've been using it since 1995 i've struggled through network drivers, 3g modem drivers, serial drivers, graphic cards, all kinds of nonsense, and i know exactly who is behind why these companies aren't building broad support for their devices and so is it really doing anyone else any good that they are now funding huge amounts of the development of the linux kernel now when we still hardly even get a bleeding video card driver from the second major CPU and GPU manufacturer... that actually works? it took me almost a week to get my system working when I upgraded to an RX 7800XT, only Zorin linux, a linux distro that charges for value adds, not one that is sponsored by a bazilion shady intel funded gigacorps like Canonical, who are quite cosily in bed with Microsoft as well it's offensive to laud linux and to cast shade on BSD because pfsense has abandoned it pfsense has abandoned it because of abusive corporations with so much power they control the majority of the hardware industry, and they are doing it to pursue their genocidal agenda of AI killbots and feeding us all on bugs

So your issues with Linux is that: - Microsoft had a monopoly in the 90s - Drivers weren't very good in the 90s - Drivers have vastly improved in everything from wifi to GPUs to ethernet cards - you believe Canonical is "in bed with" their competitor, Microsoft and this is somehow an issue with all Linux distros You mistakenly believe that the pfsense either ditched or switch to Linux. They haven't. They have been and still are based on FreeBSD. You mistakenly think I'm casting shade on any BSD. I'm not sure why since I haven't mentioned it and the initial post was about Linux and Bitcoin, not about any of the BSDs. You seem to think that the number of years you used Linux makes you an expert on... checks notes... financial contributions to the Linux foundation? You ignore that everyone is fleeing from pfSense to OPNsense as quickly as possible, but it has nothing to do with FreeBSD or Linux and everything to do with licensing. So I'm having trouble seeing your point(s) in all this. Are you suggesting that Corporations fund a foundation that maintains Linux and corporations do not fund a foundation that maintains bitcoin? There are some things we seem to agree on: - Hardware support used to suck and now it doesn't (sans nvidia). This is because hardware companies realized they can sell more products if they pay their developers to write drivers and contribute them upstream. - We not keen on pfSense, though maybe for different reasons - The biggest financial donations to the Linux foundation come from the biggest companies who use Linux - We don't want to support Microsoft ✊ - BSD is a fine choice for an O/S (I'm partial to OpenBSD for their security decisions, but to each their own)

it's about the licensing! you surely must know that microsoft and bill gates were the biggest driving force behind the entire edifice of closed source right? open source is not some new thing, in the old days there was a vibrant community of PUBLIC DOMAIN software, i used to go to my local amiga store to buy copies of Fred Fish disks and bring them home and play with all kinds of cool things microsoft almost completely snuffed out open source coming into the late 90s and yes linux did help because it was a platform you could run GNU on and i can't help but feel that rage at this decades of corrupt manipulation of the tech industry by microsoft, their promotion of object oriented programming, for one thing, a legacy that is still a plague on programming, and the fact that it's almost impossible for me to find a kernel version that supports my AMD Radeon RX 7800 XT video card, when it has a fully open source driver!!!! oh but no problem intel garbage or nvidia we still have a long way to go to rooting out the pernicious influence of copyright on our industry