High five, brother :) I think the XP crowd was just the generation of "one step more tolerant towards privacy intrusions" / not quite computer knowledgeable enough to understand the implications of letting your operating system phone home. In terms of user interface, it was indeed tolerable - you could still configure it to look and behave like Win2K mostly, which is what I had to do for work for quite a long time.

Compared to Win2k, it would just be a resource-hog. :/

Ich lehne Gewalt ab, aber ein paar Backpfeifen könnten dem Lindner nur gut tun.

Ist das nicht der Arsch, der den Rückkauf unseres Stromnetzes sabotiert hat?

Scandinavia has always been very left side

Maybe from a hard neo nazi perspective. Denmark and Sweden especially have right-wing extremist parties (Denmark Democrats + New Right + Danish People's Party together ~= 14.3%, Sweden Democrats 17.5%) with a voter base that has been established over a longer time. The German right wing populists have risen to that level only in recent elections, which is frightening. Geert Wilders is not "the new guy" from the Netherlands, he's been a populist rightwing piece of shit for decades. Unfortunately, the average Dutch person over 40 / outside university towns is also quite racist under the surface - I lived there for 4 years, speak fluent Dutch with a German accent and since they felt "safe" with their bigotry around me, I have heard enough racist and sexist bullshit from "average middle class" Dutch people that I didn't feel comfortable in that country anymore. The young people in urban centres are okay, but unfortunately those are not a large enough demographic.

As for comparing with the US - maybe not a good idea: Even young US americans see the democrats for the corporate shills they are, and know that they have to vote for them just to prevent a Handmaid's Tale Season 6 becoming a documentary.

The US are the scary example for Western Europe as "this will happen here if you don't pay attention". No one in Europe will be able to say "I didn't know" when we slip into a totalitarian regime filled with hate and controlled by corporations, because it might be happening in front of our eyes with a ~10 year headstart in the US. I just hope that's not what is going to happen in the end, but things have progressed far too much into the worst dystopian future thinkable for this century.

I'm a big fan of any country voting against the populist trend, so I may ask for asylum in Finland eventually. Although, despite my motivation to learn new languages, that might be a challenge :)

Agreed, XP was the turning point - I decided I will never let such an intrusive software on my private computers, so I switched from Win2k to Linux.

I liked Win2K, yes - then Linux :)

we're our own kind of fucked up over here :( Except the Finns, the Finns are cool.

My trivial (non legal ;) answer is: If you are working for a corporation that is looking to patent something / make something closed license: the moment you ever looked at a single line of my code relevant to what you are doing, you are forbidden from releasing under any more restrictive license. If you are a private person working on open source? Then you be the judge whether you copied enough of my code that you believe it is more than just "inspired by".

again, I don't have a problem with copying code - but I as a developer know whether I took enough of someone else's algorithm so that I should mention the original authorship :) My only problem with circumventing licenses is when people put more restrictive licenses on plagiarized code.

And - I guess - in conclusion, if someone makes a license too free, so that putting a restrictive (commercial) license or patent on plagiarized / derived work, that is also something I don't want to see.

“Why does no one say murder is bad unless China is murdering”

I can not fathom how you absolutely nailed the essence of my comment, yet misunderstood it (and - arguably - your own example) so fundamentally.

Let me try to help, once:

"Why do most people not complain about murder when Microsoft is doing it, but when China is doing it, the very justified outrage can be heard?"

With the obligatory "fuck everyone who disregards open source licenses", I am still slightly amused at this raising eyebrows while nearly no one is complaining about MS using github to train their copilot LLM, which will help circumvent licenses & copyrights by the bazillion.