I was about to reply to the same thing to another comment about 300 tabs, LOL

You literally cannot mess with your emissions system legally…

First of all, that’s a Clean Air Act thing with limited purpose and scope, not a blanket restriction on owners’ right to modify their property. Moreover, it is certainly not a restriction imposed and enforced by manufacturers that somehow justifies making the software closed-source and DRM’d. I want to make it clear here that, by supporting closed-source vehicle software, what you are really supporting is private enforcement of laws instead of government enforcement of laws, which is incredibly fucked up.

Second, it is not true that the act of messing with the emissions system is itself illegal. What’s illegal is the act of using the vehicle on public roads afterwards. You can use your emissions-system-modified car off-road or on private property (e.g. farms or racetracks) all you want.

Third, the way that law is implemented is, frankly, bad and wrong anyway. Instead of saying that parts need to be EPA-certified (or, in practice, CARB-certified) to be legal to use and that the ECU has to report “ready,” what it should do is say you can modify it however you want but that it has to pass a real “stick-a-probe-in-the-tailpipe-and-actually-fucking-measure” emissions test instead of a bullshit “visually inspect and plug a computer into the OBD2 port” test.

…nor can you disable or modify certain safety systems (seat belts, etc).

No, that’s a lie. It is perfectly legal to swap your factory seat belts for a DOT-approved and properly-installed four-point racing harness, for instance.

I don’t need your massive multiple ton machine bluescreening down the highway or locking up the breaks randomly because you installed the wrong module.

That sort of thing could already happen for decades due to people fucking up their mechanical modification of the brakes, yet that’s always been allowed. In practice, it isn’t actually a widespread problem because people aren’t actually as suicidally moronic as you seem to think they are, and that isn’t going to magically change just because a computer is involved. Your argument is nothing but exactly the kind of fearmongering that I’m calling bullshit on.

As someone who’s been a fan of Free Software since I first heard of it in the late '90s, I used and recommended Macs in the early 2000s because (at time, at least) Apple was leaning into the Unix-nature and BSD underpinnings of the thing and coming out with stuff like XServe and Automator.

Not so much these days, though. Apple’s pivot in ideology towards locked-down consumer crap like iOS and the App Store – even going so far as to ditch bash for zsh just because they hated GPLv3 – ruined it.

Not gonna lie, the extent to which the motor, controller, etc. are proprietary is an important consideration for me when buying an e-bike. For example, I would rather have one that can’t connect to my phone etc. at all than one that can but requires a proprietary app.

(I also care about things like weird proprietary headset and bottom bracket hardware, on e-bikes and regular bikes alike.)

for the eight years I owned it

I think I bought my Flex at 83,000 miles and sold it at under 100,000. Maybe the starting mileage was 73,000, but somewhere in that vicinity. That included using it as my primary transport vehicle when moving across several hundred miles

Whether it was <17,000 miles or <27,000 miles, if you put that little mileage on a car in eight years IMO you should reconsider whether you need to own one at all.

Yeah, just like how DIYing car repairs and modifications has been illegal for decades now.

…oh wait.

Back in reality, yet again “X but on a computer” is not somehow magically different from “X”, and pretending it is as an excuse to curtail property rights is nothing but authoritarian fearmongering.

Linux is not a real-time OS*. For a car ECU, something like Speeduino would be a more appropriate choice.

(* Or wasn’t until a week or so ago, at least. https://www.zdnet.com/article/20-years-later-real-time-linux-makes-it-to-the-kernel-really/)

Ironically, my cars don’t run Linux for the same reason my computers do: I’m militant about protecting my property rights and privacy, so I refuse to have any car new enough to have “infotainment” because it’s all closed-source and Tivoized. It’s effectively hostile, despite the Linux kernel at the bottom of it.

I’ll buy a car made after the mid-2000s when I can re-flash the whole thing with non-DRM’d community-supported software, and not a minute before.

In the long run, shit like this is theft from the Public Domain.

Gimp 3 is amazing.

Found the time traveler!

(The stable version of Gimp is 2.10.38, and even the latest dev snapshot – which is what I assume he means by “Gimp 3” – is technically “only” 2.99.18.)

It’s never unethical to pirate Adobe, but it’s always more ethical to use Free Software instead and deny Adobe the mindshare.

Exactly; fuck BSD too.

It’s worth noting that Apple has (for example) gone so far as to replace bash with zsh just because the GPL v3 was too copyleft for them to handle. In other words, fuck Apple.

It’s too “easy” for all the kiddos who tie their self-worth to their ability to follow installation instructions.

If the pronoun choice is “xe/xey” instead of “per/pers” do they even GNU?

An object lesson in bus factor.

When Knuth dies, the version number of TeX will become π (and the version number of METAFONT, currently 2.71828182, will become e) and all remaining bugs will become features.

They’re both really good (considerably better at what they do than FreeCAD is, to be honest), but they don’t do what FreeCAD does. Blender is for art, so that’s a different thing entirely. OpenSCAD does mechanical part design, but it only does mechanical part design. FreeCAD can do architectural CAD, BIM (Building Information Modeling), civil engineering stuff (e.g. working with survey data/site elevation), FEA (Finite Element Analysis), 2D drafting, stuff with NURBS and point clouds, texturing/lighting/rendering, CAM and CNC (i.e. toolpaths for a mill or 3D printer), etc.

Man, we as a community really ought to put more effort and resources helping out FreeCAD.

Agreed, but I also feel like such a thing should be included with Flatpak by default instead of leaving it to the users to solve.