Basically the title

      • nilloc@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        27·
        2 years ago

        Browser too, and the whole activeX, and DirectX api system to practically force windows only development.

          • Mactan@lemmy.ml
            222·
            2 years ago

            for the millionth time they get to stand on the shoulders on all the wine development that came before it. and now we have to reckon with the bullshit of proton patches that never go upstream to make wine better for all

              • Mactan@lemmy.ml
                2·
                2 years ago

                Coincidently one of the things they list (named pipes) as an improvement is something I’ve had a nuisance with for years. there’s multiple things that I would love wine to have that it does not but proton does

            • Soluna@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
              11·
              2 years ago

              Tbf if wine were released under regular GNU instead of LGPL, Valve wouldn’t have been able to make Proton proprietary, and so their contributions would also be open source. It is unfortunate that this is the situation, but by using the LGPL license WINE basically permitted this, no?

                • Soluna@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
                  4·
                  2 years ago

                  Okay my bad, I think I just misunderstand BSD-3 and read somewhere that Proton is Valve’s proprietary software. In terms of open source software, the only licenses I’m really familiar with are GNU, Apache, and MIT. So I read one thing online saying Proton was proprietary and assumed BSD-3 was a proprietary license without looking into it further.

            • IceFoxX@lemm.ee
              12·
              2 years ago

              Criticism may be justified, but without Proton, how far would wine have come? Without Steamdeck + proton, gaming would still be a no-go for linux and absolutely not worth mentioning. So fewer users would have switched to linux.

              OK let go back and bring wine forward … Maybe it will be something in 10-20 years ( well for released titles and not future Titels.)

  • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
    61·
    2 years ago

    The 90’s? Locked bootloaders would’ve meant people woukdve simply bought different machines without a locked bootloader.

    See the IBM/Phoenix BIOS war - it’s essentially the same thing. IBM didn’t want to license their BIOS to everyone, so Phoenix reverse engineered it. If I remember right, IBM was trying to lock everyone to using their OS.

    • Rekhyt@lemmy.world
      23·
      2 years ago

      This! Manufacturers were trying to lock people into their systems, just by different means. Reverse engineering a piece of low-level software (BIOS) so that you could run high-level software written for that machine architecture on different hardware was the main battle of the day.

    • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      1·
      2 years ago

      IBM built the original PC from off the shelf components and for some reason negotiated a non-exclusive license for MS-DOS with Microsoft. The only thing in the PC they held a copyright on was the BIOS ROM. A few companies tried making clones, IIRC Eagle Computer just brazenly dumped the IBM BIOS and used that and got sued out of existence. I believe it was Compaq that developed their own MS-DOS compatible BIOS from scratch that did not infringe so IBM had no case to sue. IBM got a competitor they didn’t want, and the PC became a 40 year platform.

  • _edge@discuss.tchncs.de
    231·
    2 years ago

    Valid question. You can ask this about many things:

    Would the Internet as we know it exist if Facebook, AOL, and Yahoo had united to create a walled garden?

    Would Macbooks as we know them today exist without an open source ecosystem? Would the company Appke exist? Would there be an iPhone?

    Would the web exist without Linux? Both developed at the same time, 1991 till now, and most stuff runs on Linux servers.

    Would the people who build all the hardware and software even be interested in computers had they not played with (build) computers in the 90ies? What if we had given them an iPad aith CandyCrush that just works; and not BIOS codes, cables, extension cards and drivers?

    • data1701d (He/Him)@startrek.websiteEnglish
      16·
      2 years ago

      On the “web without Linux”, I imagine it probably would have been scattered across a few proprietary Nixes until FreeBSD emerged from the AT&T lawsuit, upon which FreeBSD would have become the dominant web server.

  • UnfortunateShort@lemmy.world
    17·
    2 years ago

    I think you’re forgetting where Linux was the most successful by far: Servers and Android. Server guys do what they want, if you tell them they can only use software you allow them to, they will laugh at you and buy their data center elsewhere. Android has had locked bootloaders forever (I actually think even my very first phone had one).

    So maybe development would have been harder? I mean, we don’t have looked bootloaders on desktop even today, not really locked at least, so it’s hard to tell. Linux’s main audience would not have cared I think.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
      17·
      2 years ago

      Early Android (circa 2009) didn’t have locked bootloaders.

      Google wanted people to experiment, which was basically free research for them. Pixel’s today are unlocked when purchased from Google.

      Even my earliest Verizon phones weren’t bootloader locked - they didn’t start doing that for a few years (my last Verizon phone in 2012 wasn’t bootloader locked). And Verizon is arguably the worst vendor when it comes to bootloader locked phones.

  • solrize@lemmy.world
    173·
    2 years ago

    Things just weren’t like that then. Otherwise all PC peripherals would be locked down too, so no device drivers. That was already a problem with cheap windows crap. But the better stuff was documented.

    Maybe there would be no Linux but that isn’t as bad as it sounds, since BSD Unix was being pried loose at the time, plus there were other kernels that had potential. And the consumer PCs we use now weren’t really foreseen. We expected to run on workstation class hardware that was more serious (though more expensive) than PCs were at the time. They would have stayed less locked down.

    Asded: PCs were an interesting target because there was a de facto open hardware standard, making the “PC compatible” industry possible. So again, without that, we would have used different hardware.