I thought of a good metaphor even though this thread is basically dead.

I used to smoke cigarettes. In the State I lived in at the time, Oregon, they taxed cigarettes, but not tobacco. So I learned to roll my own & would make around 80 cigarettes for the equivalent price of a single pack of prefabs.

Now, because lawmakers aren’t generally smokers, this flew under their radar for years. Until it didn’t. Then they sewed that loophole up tight pretty quickly.

Right now Linux is vital to our infrastructure, but I don’t think Lawmakers (& Oligarchs) really know that. I guess I’m a little concerned about what happens if they find out.

That’s true.

But Android getting more & more locked down as time goes on is a good example of what I’m afraid of might start happening once there are too many cooks in the kitchen.

I’m just speculating out of nowhere.

I’m not sure. I envision a lot of regulatory stuff happening around the kernel as it becomes more popular & vital to infrastructure. As that happens, the direction of it becomes more controlled and eventually maybe becomes unrecognizable.

But maybe the fact it’s open source flat out prevents that?

I really don’t know, I’m not a futurists, I was just internet speculating.

Would it even be a good thing if Linux became super main stream? Maybe we should be careful what we wish for.

Pretty sure the success of Linux will not ride or die on the Charisma stat of its users.

Because it’s a maze. And lab rats run in mazes. But they don’t deliver pizzas!

Oh New Yorker, you’ve done it again!

What people have to watch out for now is unlocking their bootloader if they want to test Linux on a USB drive or dual boot, for example, it will trip Bitlocker (conveniently installed on every Windows computer via update without notification or consent), and that will irreversibly encrypt their Windows hard drive without warning.

Ask me how I know.