very freedom
The Playdate console seems a lot friendlier to developers and end users alike, but that's precisely because they're a smaller player in the market and need that advantage. Same dynamic played out with drivers for SCSI controllers, and GPUs under Linux, where the biggest players were the last to provide quality open source support. Seems to have a lot more to do with market position than with licenses, to me.
That's the point: if they don't want to contribute their changes back, they should spend their own money writing their own software.
Right now, they'd take thousands of hours of effort from the community, add a few hundred of their own and then close off the product from the very community that they so willingly took this charity from. Yay BSD license!
If they had to use QNX or similar, they'd pay to do it. If they had to use GPL, they'd pay to close off their changes, which would be great for funding more free software.
> For better or worse, all the big console manufacturers see their ability to lock down their platform as vital to their development and business strategies. Vital to their ability to charge $60 for a few gigabytes of 1s and 0s.
Well that's why I divided the licenses into "pro-user" and "pro-corporate". The BSDs are pro-corporate.
Last I checked there were about a thousand open source OSes. Hundreds under BSD-like licenses. Here's a partial list: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_BSD_operating_systems
It sounds like you're advocating for wiping them all from history and outlawing everything but GPL licensed code, which just isn't possible, nor desirable. Sorry?
That's a strawman: Nothing I said implied any sort of genocide.
I'm pointing out that the pro-user license has more benefits than the pro-corporate licenses.
Would I prefer every computer be open to general purpose computing, and infinitely hackable by it's owner? Sure. But I also respect that they have reasons not to take that route. And as consoles and PCs converge, there are fewer and fewer reasons for me to be upset about one manufacturer's choices. I voted with my dollars and bought a Steam Deck. I think the preservation of culture is a much stronger argument for breaking console DRM and emulation.
