I’ve spent years championing Linux as the only escape from Big Tech, but I’m starting to get twitchy.
While we’re distracted by the Steam Deck making Linux “mainstream,” the corporate players and politicians are busy building a digital cage. Between California’s AB-1043 mandates and Microsoft’s “Face Check” infrastructure, I’m worried we’re heading for a hard schism: “Sanitised Linux” vs the “Free Rebel” distros.
If the compliant, age-gated version becomes the industry standard, where does that leave the rest of us? Digital exile?
I’ve put some thoughts together on why the “Golden Cage” is closing in and why education, not mandates, is the only real fix.
Ive been running Linux for close to a decade now and one thing that I’ve noticed is rarely brought up in Linux circles is that Linux Kernel Development is heavily funded by major big tech corpos. Examples include Microsoft, Google, Oracle, and IBM.
There is a vested corporate interest in keeping Linux well maintained as it is the OS that underpins the vast majority of corporate server architecture and infrastructure.
I’m not saying Linux development wouldn’t exist without them, but imho, Linux certainly wouldn’t be as ubiquitous as it is today without this corporate backing. Thusly, it is worth noting that in many ways, we Linux users have not escaped corporate influence simply from switching from Windows or MacOS to Linux.
We’ve maybe lessened it to some degree, but to think we are somehow immune to the misguided mandates from state governments, like the latest recent age verification laws, is misguided.
i think linux emphasizes the advantage of being able to fork code without the bad parts in this case.
the problem is they will probably target the infrastructure our linux machines connect through, or the services themselves as we’ve already started seeing.
i’ve been interested in those decentralized long range radio networks lately, for no particular reason.