Did any distro give concrete reasons for why they have actively chosen not to package it, or perhaps they just haven’t given it much thought yet?

This is not what I would consider a “political reason”. A political reason would be something like refusing to package it because of what political party Howard supports.

There is plenty of software you’ll find in these repositories that aren’t under the GPL. CMake uses BSD, the Apache web server uses the eponymous Apache license, LibreOffice and Firefox use MPL, Godot and Bitcoin Core use the MIT license, and I’m sure there are plenty of other software licenses that I haven’t thought of yet.

Yeah, and what the fuck else might I be referring to, hmmmm?

Rule 0 of warfare: don’t start a war if you don’t want the consequences of war.

It’s not really like they were evil about it though. Google attracted customers through its huge (at the time) 1 GB email storage space, which at the time, was unbelievably generous and also impressive in that it was offered for free. Outlook (Hotmail at the time) also drew in customers by offering the service for free, anywhere in the world, without needing to sign up for Internet service. Remember, at the time, e-mail was a service that was bundled with your Internet service provider.

Into the mid-2000s and 2010s, the way that Gmail and Outlook kept customers was through bundle deals for enterprise customers and improvements to their webmail offerings. Gmail had (and arguably, still has) one of the best webmail clients available anywhere. Outlook was not far behind, and it was also usually bundled with enterprise Microsoft Office subscriptions, so most companies just decided, “eh, why not”. The price (free) and simplicity is difficult to beat. It was at that point that Microsoft Outlook (the mail client, not the e-mail service) was the “gold standard” for desktop mail clients, at least according to middle-aged office workers who barely knew anything about e-mail to begin with. Today, the G-Suite, as it is called, is one of the most popular enterprise software suites, perhaps second only to Microsoft Office. Most people learned how to use e-mail and the Internet in the 2000s and 2010s through school or work.

You have to compare the offerings of Google and Microsoft with their competitors. AOL mail was popular but the Internet service provided by the same company was not. When people quit AOL Internet service, many switched e-mail providers as well, thinking that if they did not maintain their AOL subscription, they would lose access to their mailbox as well.

Google and Microsoft didn’t “kill” the decentralised e-mail of yesteryear. They beat it fair and square by offering a superior product. If you’re trying to pick an e-mail service today, Gmail and Outlook are still by far the best options in terms of ease of use, free storage, and the quality of their webmail clients. I would even go so far as to say that the Gmail web client was so good that it single-handedly killed the desktop mail client for casual users. I think that today, there are really only three legitimate players left if you’re a rational consumer who is self-interested in picking the best e-mail service for yourself: Proton Mail if you care a lot about privacy, and Gmail or Outlook if you don’t.

Explosives don’t seem smart. Why didn’t they poison the chocolate instead? The enemy opens the chocolate, sees nothing wrong with it, shares it with their mates, and then now you’ve got five casualties who are none the wiser. Is that against the rules of war or something?

The term I used is an official term used by the Taiwanese government.

That’s actually their head, but I can understand why you thought it looked like a dick.

Don’t you mean the “Communist-occupied unfree area of the Republic of China”?

Well, nobody ever said Wolf Warrior diplomacy is successful in achieving one’s geopolitical objectives. But it does make the person doing it feel powerful.

Chinese nationalists don’t try to persuade people. Their goal is to overpower you (physically or verbally) because they think it will force submission out of you.

It’s called “Wolf Warrior diplomacy”, named after a popular Chinese military film franchise.

I’m pretty sure Russia has already accumulated a huge stockpile of CNY. But Chinese banks are even refusing payments denominated in CNY between Russia and China.

Strange how not even China wants to deal with the hot mess that is Russian money right now.

Keep in mind that this is not necessarily a good thing. China’s economy is still mostly driven by Government spending and exports rather than consumer demands. The Chinese government would usually prefer the yuan to be weaker as this makes Chinese exports cheaper when denominated in foreign currencies and makes imports more expensive, discouraging domestic consumers from buying foreign goods.

The article does mention this as well, but the yuan’s exchange rate isn’t a great indicator of the Chinese economy as a whole because the central bank spends a great deal of time manipulating it.

It is a war crime to intentionally attack non-combatants.

I am prepared to be downvoted for this, but I believe in Occam’s razor here: do not attribute to malice what is adequately explained by stupidity

I think it is much more likely that nobody bothered to check their background until it was too late.

To be franc (or to be billion francs), France has enough money, guns, and United Nations Security Council seats to give Haiti the middle finger

If they nuke Ukraine into oblivion, they’re not spending a single kopeck building it back. They’ll engineer a second Holodomor to “get their money’s worth” before that.

Interestingly, this law also paid the newly freedmen $100 to fuck off to Haiti

It’s easy when you only pay workers five dollars a day, work them like mules for twelve hours a day, are building in the open desert, don’t need to do environmental impact surveys, and use cheap building materials and workmanship that starts to fall apart after ten years