@rskrg I mean, you clearly have no curiosity about this at all but if it helps you to understand the analogy, here's the wikipedia article about child labor in the diamond industry: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Child_la

@rskrg that’s like saying a blood diamond is just a rock. Where things come from and what it costs to make them, externalities and all, that matters.

Getting back to this thread - I've edited some posts upstream to make my point a little more clear - but two things. One, the idea that contributing to free and open software should require so much as contact with, much less a subscription service to, a wildly unprofitable, unethical and proprietary software service is a noxious, irresponsible and nonsensical position. But two: god, kid wherever you are I hope you're doing amazingly well. I hope you made it. You deserved at least that.

In conclusion, saying that open source participation requires monthly fees to private companies that run stochastic code generators means you’ve forgotten why anyone is doing this at all. Fuck this whole idea and fuck Linus in particular for pushing it.

There's nothing I can do for this person. But the enormity of it. They've cobbled up a machine out of nothing but trash and their own tenacity, and they want to help us build Firefox? There's lots of ways to do that, but building it, compiling it, that can't happen. Not on this machine. There's always been a financial barrier to participation in open source. Always. And we have to make it as low as we possibly can. But a wealth minimum bar, to contributing? That's vile. It's disgusting.

And I'm sitting there, reading this on the screen of a five thousand dollar Macbook Pro in an office where the snacks are free, feeling humbled and deeply ashamed.

This kid is getting error message that nobody has ever seen because they've got a machine nobody else has, set up like nobody else does that nobody would ever choose. And you might ask how, but the first question is why?And the answer is: this kid has nothing. And they've built their own computer out parts they've scavenged from the computers other people have put to the curb, got a Linux ISO and somehow made it work. There are no computers like this. And... they want to help us?

So, they're running one of those weird dual-slot Pentium III boards with two physical CPUs. Running Linux - somehow - on a hard drive that's almost full, a userspace partition on NTFS and more, and the more I hear about this system the more confused I get.For the non nerds following this thread, this is like finding out somebody's daily driver is built out of the parts of a sports car, a semi and a train, and it's running on vegetable oil. You might ask why, but the first question is ... how?

So, after going back and forth a bit with person, who it turns out is in their early teens, we asking about their hardware, what setup they've got that's doing this. Maybe this person's got some new system we've never seen, maybe they're running in some novel context we need to know about. Is this an edge case, or is this a leading-edge case? Outliers are always interesting. I've seen some Pretty Far Out There systems, I run a few myself, and this kid's system is Out There.