Great, now find a project to apply it and collect your participation trophy. :-P

and produce tons of excellent, reviewed but useless code on the way.

Unironically Lynx and Elinks.

license is probably the reason they’re doing it. no way around that without infringing copyright law I guess.

you could check how other FOSS do it. e.g. you externally link it as a library and use another license the user has to agree on just for that.

world-renowned, enterprise-level antivirus software running

lol. better just use defender next time.

edit: or not use windows.

What are you trying to prevent? You can’t release anything (opensource or not) without risking someone stealing the idea without patenting.

No FOSS license will prevent that (quite the opposite, it encourages copying/modifications). Those licenses just prevent someone using your code commercially without releasing the source code again.

not sure why you think that. if it’s indistinguishable, it’s still prior art. If it’s something better or different than your code, it’s a new thing.

Patents protect technical principles, not actual sourcecode.

no, the patent office would find your publication, deem it Prior Art and not grant the patent. If it would miss it (some don’t research very well), anyone can notify them to void the patent afterwards anytime.

IANAL, there are lawyers specialized on patents who’ll reassure you for free/cheap (relatively, they are friggin expensive). It also depends on legislature. Countries that break/never agreed to the PCT will do what they please.

NAL but my understanding always was, that you can’t patent anything in your name, when it’s already published.

That would make any patent related clause void anyway.

They did it before and they’ll do it again.

on Android, the OS is the firmware. If you talk about peripheral firmware, I’d not call it “software based” anymore.

healthy eyesight was just a small price to pay back in those days :-P

installing your own OS and/or bootloader is a pain and most of the time unfeasable. And that’s the only way to safely kill software based backdoors.

it’s not profit driven, tho.

bricking a laptop with linux is incredibly unlikely.

Making the system unbootable so you need to boot from USB to fix it otoh… not so much.

it can get resource hungry but nothing even close to windows.

But as others said: Try another distro if you like to try new things - otherwise just use what works for you.

Windows

Exactly. Usually it’s uncleaned clutter accumulating and filling swap. Linux, BSD, IRIX etc. are not affected by this.

In some cases it’s hardware which would affect other OSs aswell.

Simply because software doesn’t degrade performancewise. It gets better on a new machine.

Unless someone goes like “Sure, users probably never need this heavy feature but let’s bundle it anyway because fuck them!”

nah. in my experience, even cheaper LED bulbs from discounters can nicely replace old bulbs.

It’s true that what “el-cheapo product” once was done by simply reducing lifetime is currently done with looks.