Part of our business-critical financial analytics software was running on VAX/VMS, then AlphaVMS decades ago. Written in DEC Pascal (let's just say - not really compatible with any other Pascal dialects I am aware of). We managed to port the whole system to Linux (before Linux became fashionable) by a godawful contraption made of Scheme, Perl, shell and elisp - it "translated" the Pascal code into a dialect understood by p2c, which in turn translated it to C. That was mucho fun!
Interestingly, I recall [from several years ago] that during the account creation, when Google asked for phone number to send the verification code to, it specifically stated that the phone would not be "linked" to the account and used "just" for verification. I guess, there was some fine print attached to that...
They did this to me recently after booting me out of gmail\yt etc on my desktop that has been logged in for years
I have specifically avoided giving them my phone number - even when they tried to scare me into it recently
Just absolutely no respect for consent - do I have to record my screens wile using my computer and save the video forever to prove this stuff and would it change a thing
Am I the only one who feels that Gnome, somewhat hilariously, is unable to get basic consistent UI over 2.5 decades - something that KDE nailed down at ... what was it? ... KDE 1.1?
I mean it is kind of sad, but educational - you get the project without clear goal, with zero consistency, without any regard to backward compatibility - and after 25 years you end up effectively with a mediocre window manager and a bunch of programs with wildly inconsistent UIs (which predictably break next time your UI toolkit goes from 2.4.8 to 2.4.9 making a migration to the new minor release a multi-year saga which invariably loses features that worked before)...
Say what you want about rms but he indeed has a talent of ruining a successful (and free) software project with his religious views (Gnome vs KDE, Guile vs Tcl, the list goes on)...
> Say what you want about rms but he indeed has a talent of ruining a successful (and free) software project with his religious views (Gnome vs KDE, Guile vs Tcl, the list goes on)...
To blame rms of all people for what you've described demonstrates a lack of understanding his scope of influence and participation in gnome especially in this era.
I can get behind blaming rms for gcc's missed opportunities, ultimately ceding its dominant position to clang/llvm. He clearly overplayed his hand there.
But when it comes to gnome I recall little more than mailing list bickering over gnome being a GNU project or not and what the G in GNOME stands for. Perhaps my memory is failing here, but it feels crediting rms with anything more than wasting a bit of gnome devs time and frustration would be overstating it. Not that any FOSS devs need more of that with how entitled and obnoxious users already can be, but they tend to have developed thick enough skin to ignore rms's aspy silliness.
My memory might be failing me but the whole raison d'être for GNOME project was the call by RMS. The premise was as follows: Qt was not truly free (despite promises by TrollTech at the time to address) and thus KDE could not be considered free desktop software.
rms wasn't alone in this view that a non-gpl DE was unacceptable at the time.
Also don't forget we're talking about an era where C++ was still largely despised for being a terrible and poorly supported language. The folks working on gtk/gnome were going to be living in C regardless of what fell out of rms.
After they had bumped up the price for the second year in a row (without any meaningful justification), I moved to 1Password and never looked back.
I would love a good comeback story and I wish them all the luck but it is yet to be seen how it will pan out (a similar move done by Quicken effectively did nothing, resulting in the same bored, stagnant product holding users hostage). The article suggests that they might be aiming toward enterprise product (which has a very different dynamics compared to a consumer one).
