 Linux denialism. This is a new one. Actually, I've been seeing this more and more often. I apparently woke up from this crazy dream, and in this dream, I was, I had a YouTube channel. And on this YouTube channel, sometimes I would talk about this operating system called Linux. Okay, it's a funny name. And Linux is supposedly, in this crazy imagination of mine, a free software operating system that is all of the source code you could take and change and distribute. But thankfully, some comments cleared this up for me. Free software is actually an impossibility. Okay, Linux is an impossibility. That can't actually happen. Thank you for waking me from my dogmatic slumber. Let me read some of these comments, because they're funny. And I'm getting more and more of these. Okay? How programmers will get paid if everyone will use free software? Someone responds, that's a very good point. Why people don't care about what OS is installed? Windows just works. It's simple. And has all the tools needed for daily life? Pure free software is a fundamentalist claim. Wow. Here's another one. So many layers of confusion here. I will try to shed a light on some of it. You know what you can't do with free software? You can't make money. I'm looking at you, Linux. Oh, he's looking at Linux. Looking at Linux, an operating system that has existed for a quarter of a century, and that's the kernel, an entire operating system of all free software. And I don't know. Is Linus Torvald starving? Are his children starving? Are the other people who work in Linux starving? Wow. Linux exists as an operating system that many of us use and nothing but Linux. Yet somehow, I don't know, that's a logical impossibility. You have to have non-free software. You have to be selling licenses. Otherwise, no one is ever going to write it. This is the dumbest idea I've ever seen in my life. Now, if you said this kind of stuff back in the 80s. Here's, if you were in the 80s, you said something like this, oh, what a free software operating system. I don't think people will ever be motivated to write something like that. It's too big of a project. It's too much work. Unless people are getting paid for licenses, they're never going to write that. If you said that in the 80s, maybe you could get away with that. There were some free operating systems, depending on your definition of it. But that is something so retarded to say in the current year. We literally live in a world not just where there are Linux. There's Linux distributions everywhere, all of which use all free software. Or, you know, some put some proprietary stuff in there. But we live on a world that runs on free software. The internet is basically all free software, some exceptions. But every web server you connect to is running Linux. Every website you go to, wow, it's running in GeneXer Apache. Every email service, wow, it's running PostFix. Wow, they're all running free software. They're all running on Linux. When your cell phone connects to the internet, it's connecting to public NTP servers to sync with time and stuff like that. Literally, the world runs on free software. In fact, when I did a video last week talking about this, you know, really proprietary software is just this legacy thing that exists in some user interface devices, right? So there are some devices that run Windows and macOS. And people talk about, oh, well, Windows is still like the biggest market share and stuff like that. And that's true in terms of user interface devices. But what are those devices connecting to? They're connecting to an internet that runs on 100% Linux and BSD and free software. And of course, there's proprietary stuff that runs on these servers, but it is fundamentally a free environment. So this weird idea that, I mean, the weird thing is all software that matters is free. All software out there that is actually widely used and is developed consistently, that's free software. It's the niche stuff that is proprietary software. And it's only proprietary as an issue of history. So I know there are a lot of these people who want to make up reasons that free software can't exist. I don't know. It's just theoretical reasons for things right in front of their face not existing. Weirdest thing ever, it's like someone saying, oh, well, you know, it's physically impossible for a bike to balance when you ride it. I've logically deduced that that is impossible. There have been people in history who have said that. But then, oh, look, there's someone on their bike. So obviously you've done something wrong in your derivation. So here are two things to think about when it comes to developing free software. First off, developing software is not as hard as people like to pretend that it is. Because I know this. I mean, look, behind us, we have a saw, a miter saw. Wow, I'm glad I filmed this here. If you have a hobby like carpentry, that requires startup costs. You might need a saw. You need wood. You need lots of tools. Those come with risks. You might cut off a finger or something. You might shoot a nail gun into your finger or something like that. So there are many hobbies where you have lots of startup costs. Well, you know what kids do as a hobby? If they have nothing else to do and no money and nothing else, they start running software. That's a thing that everyone does nowadays. If you are at all interested in computers or stuff like that, that is just a natural interest that people have. And a lot of Linux and a lot of even proprietary software comes from people just tinkering around. So software development is a hobby that people do for free. So the idea that you have to pay people obs and gobs of money, not just in general, but specifically for licenses, is obviously stupid. So there are hobbyist operating systems out there. It's not just Linux out there. There are other operating systems as well that have specific purposes, like OpenBSD. I don't know. It's just a weird thing for people to say. And the second thing is you can make money on free software. Because guess what? All these people who write it, they make money. Not 100% of the people who want to make money do. But what do you think the people who write Linux, do you think they beg for money on the streets or something like that? There are more ways of making money off of software than having people pay for licenses. If anything, over the long term, that's a pretty naive thing because it harms the distribution of your software. It's not going to be made standard. It's not going to be used outside of it. You're going to rip a couple people off and you're by you. But one of the reasons that Linux has spread so well and became such a big thing is because anyone could use it and change it and design it for their own purposes. So it became a standard that is usable by so many other people. So if you look at the big foundations, at least, like Mozilla and Linux, they make a lot of money from doing software support or interacting with other big companies. But that is sort of a mean thing. I mean, there are also, if you look at individual people who write software, first off, again, most of them do it as a hobby and hobbyist software. I mean, most of us who watch this channel are using window managers that are written as hobbyist things. Like our user, most of the stuff that we're running are things that are not big monolithic programs. They're just minor things that people have written for their own purposes and distribute them and they work fine. But anyway, you can use, you can write free software platforms where people can exchange money. You can make money off of them. This idea that license fees are the only thing that's real. It's just fake. And they're based only on the historical development of software within the United States, frankly, because without American intellectual property law, none of this, I mean, there would be no such thing as proprietary software. I mean, if you go to, you know, there are a lot of other, I mean, it's not to say that everyone would be sharing their source code, but, you know, in many other countries the idea that, oh, you can't copy software for some reason. Like there's something that's stealing in some way. You can't replicate something that, you know, requires no cost of replication and doesn't steal it away from the original person. There's some legal reason you can't do that. That's an idea that only exists in the United States and, you know, related countries, I guess. So, you know, if you look, I mean, here's an example, right? So in the U.S., there's this stupid, most of the DRM software we use only uses, we only use them for legal reasons, like things like Netflix or things like Steam, okay? If you look at Steam, what does Steam do? Steam sells you licenses to games and then it is this environment that installs the game within the Steam environment and you have to connect to the internet to play it usually. Whereas if you look in other countries, so there's an equivalent, a sort of boomer tier equivalent to Steam that came out of Eastern Russia called Good Old Games, GOG, right? And they basically allow you to buy the game, but then you can, it's not DRM. You could install it on whatever computer. You have the right to do that. There's no restriction on that. And, you know, that company, of course, it has big titles nowadays. It's mostly old boomer games. But this whole notion that, I don't know, we have to have this multi-billion-dollar industry to protect alleged rights, like somehow, I don't know, it's just a bunch of ethereal nonsense, this idea. Like when I release my scripts or when I release programs that benefit people, like on one side, there's a self-interested portion on one side it just strikes me as really cringe to release something and try and ask for money. But on the other side, if I really want to get something widely used, it makes no sense to charge for it, right? I guess that's my mindset. But there are a bunch of people who, I guess, I don't know, I'm going to continue. Actually, this last comment, it was actually TLDR, but let me continue reading it. We are not in the 1990s anymore. We are over this free software lunacy. Open source is good, meaning to have source code available. But of course, when it is to be used on Windows to make software that will actually have a user base, okay, again, that's a stupid idea because there's no, like, Linux has a 100% user base. Every human that uses a computer uses Linux. You know how I know because they connect to the internet. There's no, every 100% of computers that matter run Linux. There are a couple user interface devices that do not that run iOS, that run Windows. And guess why those devices are useful? Because they connect to Linux servers. That's why they're useful, okay? The so-called free, the so-called free software we all know is Communist Crap. And I wouldn't touch a GPL license with a 10-foot Paul Communist Crap. See, that's the weirdest thing for me because when I see this, I see that intellectual property is a, I guess, an invention of American law that has no, mind you, this is a world where people will develop software as a hobby. People develop free software. People develop free software operating systems just as a thing. So the idea that the government needs to come in and have this entire edifice of law to prosecute people who easily copyable software is just so absurd. That strikes me as very communist. The idea that the government needs to say, oh, well, this protected class of software developers, we need to make sure that they are getting paid for licenses, for the one-off licenses they have. That just strikes me as so absurd. I mean that, I don't know. That's just so, I don't know. When you really think about it, it's nutty. Anyway, free software exists. Linux exists. No device that matters that does not run Linux. It's dumb to pretend. It's dumb to make up reasons why it can't exist because it does. I don't know why people do this. It's dumb. Alright.