Embrace, Extend, Eliminate?

Let's hope GPL v2 helps

I dislike Meta as much as anyone, but sometimes a cucumber is just a cucumber.

That is not how this works. EEE can be said about window's wsl, but here they are contributing directly to the kernel. That is why linux is that good, these big corporations profit billions by running linux, and getting it sligthly more memory efficient with current ram prices makes them profit even more. Fortunately the license forces them to contribute the code back and we profit from the same optimizations they implemented.

Fortunately the license forces them to contribute the code back

It doesn't. It would only compel them to share their changes if they distributed their modified kernel to others, rather than simply running it on their own servers. And even then, they wouldn't have to contribute their code back upstream.

They chose to contribute their changes upstream anyway, presumably so they aren't burdened with having to adapt them to every new kernel version in the future. Fortunately, we stand to benefit as a side effect of that decision.

Meta can CRAM this functionality into mark Zuckerbergs ass

Nope, never going to use this now. I don't trust Meta to walk a dog, certainly not with a core os component.

As a user of zram, I am excited

I got bad news for you if you use the modern web

Name a few things, I'm curious.

Meta has funded all sorts of open source infrastructure, for a long time. If you want to avoid their funded contributions… TBH, I wouldn’t even know where to begin.

If it is good and open, engineering is engineering. Good engineering came out of Meta before, that all of us use daily, like the zstd compression algorithm.

Save the moral outrage for all the other shady shit Meta imposes on humanity, god knows there is a intercontinental cargo ship load of it to choose from.

searches

They have a list.

https://opensource.fb.com/projects/

A few notable ones?

https://engineering.fb.com/2018/10/30/open-source/linux/

Btrfs

https://itsfoss.com/news/react-foundation-launch/

React

https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2022/09/meta-spins-off-pytorch-foundation-to-make-ai-framework-vendor-neutral/

PyTorch (if you're into the AI thing)

I suspect, without evidence, that you'd probably find some Meta engineers contributing to the Linux kernel to some degree, so you may have to rip that out of your system.

Ever heard of a tiny little thing called React? GraphQL and relay? Presto? Folly? Zstd? Hack? RocksDB? Btrfs?

PyTorch is crazy big in ML/AI and has been for a while now.

And specifically in Linux: https://engineering.fb.com/2015/10/05/open-source/improving-the-linux-kernel-with-upstream-contributions/

And that's not even mentioning things that aren't just their tech, like open compute and funding foss and the Linux foundations, crap ton of open source projects, testing, bug fixes, and miscellaneous contributions.... Let alone all the tech that tries to compete with their tech; all the alternatives to react et al that are 'next gen'

Like it or not, the facebooks and googles of the world have contributed significantly to things you probably interact with every day.

Cool, pervert ram, just what everyone asked for

If you genuinely realise (and care) that meta is shady, there is no merit in supporting the company.

Moral outrage is something that people with decent morality have. Apathy is something that zombies have.

Here is your cucumber:

People who dislike meta don't promote meta.

0 for 3, is that it?

Heard of btrfs, don't use it. Nor the rest.

0 out of 10.

As to the Linux kernel at this point everyone has contributed something. That would be like being mad at air for having been processed by Zuckerbergs human form cooling unit.

Now you're just not arguing in good faith here. You asked for contributions, there they are. I use Btrfs and it's great. (There's lots of actually valid reasons to hate meta, let's focus on those)

The criteria was "that all of us use daily" not "that you've heard of". Scroll up, it's right there.

You use btrfs, I don't, therefore the "all of us use" qualification fails, let alone "daily".

ZStandard is also developed by a Facebook. And its truly amazing. What's wrong with their CRAM development, if everyone benefits from it for free and is Open Source?

You mean like ZStandard from Facebook too?

If you're concerned about this coming from Meta, you haven't been paying attention. This is not to excuse Metas responsibility in the enshittification of the internet, but as a hyperscalar they of course have been pushing computing technology for a long time, and many of it openly available. CRAM will probably be upstreamed into Linux and I assume is therefore already licensed under the GPL. Meta Research seems to be operating in a much more open and useful way than the rest of the company.

I dislike Meta. But I like their work on ZStandard and use it myself. Best compression algorithm since 7zip. It's extremely fast and can be used in may applications for various use cases. If that is the standard we can expect, then I'm happy what they do on CRAM. We only benefit from this.

But why not? What is the fear here? It's not like Meta has any control if you install or enable the feature.

Zstd / ZStandard is pretty good.

I don't get this comment. You asked for examples, and they gave you.

Impressive, building your own kernel without Btrfs. I admit, you're better than me.

Do you not know what that company does?

I asked for examples that I use. I haven't seen one yet.

Looks good, can't wait for this to be adopted into fedora.

CONFIG_BTRFS_FS=n

Wow that was almost too difficult. 🙄

I know the company. But what is the fear about CRAM? What do you think Facebook / Meta will do to harm you, if you use CRAM? I ask this question honestly, as someone who hates Facebook and does not use any of their services, and never visit their pages. But I use ZStandard developed by Facebook. And I do not see any problem in doing so.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Facebook_software is comprehensive as far as I know. Even if you don't use React, a lot of developers use it and control the web. So you might wander around the web that is written with React. But its no longer part of Facebook / Meta, so I don't know if it still counts.

I don't want to have anything to do with facebook, that's why. It's fucking charity washing

If you can audit the code and it's clean and you built it yourself then probably nothing would happen. I don't trust them not to add something to access the memory though and don't have the time to audit code. Theyre not trustworthy enough to give the benefit of the doubt.

I feel like most of such work happens despite the company not because of it. True credit goes to the engineers who did it. I feel like meta would have just scraped them for more VR universe or whatever it was called lol

You actually don't, because this is in the Linux Kernel. Fine if you don't want to, just like I don't want to have anything to do with Epic Games. But this is a personal and emotional decision, and I do respect this!

However, charity washing? Is this conspiracy of something? I mean they develop an Open Source software, controlled by the standards of Linux. So from security and privacy standpoint there should be no issue. And I don't see any problem or issue. If someone could explain to me what the problem here is, I might change my opinion (and trust me, I do change my opinion). I just don't see an issue here.

I do not install anything from Facebook. Now talking about ZStandard as en example: Those libraries are part of the tools I use, such as the file compression tools. And even MAME emulator supports this and other applications, to have some fast decompression without long wait times. I even use it for my backups. I don't know how Facebook could do something in such cases. And for CRAM, this would be integrated into the Kernel with same standards as Linux.

I would understand the concerns if we speak about downloading and installing from Facebook directly. But that is not the case here.

I pulled a word out my ass because I can't be bothered with looking it up all the way for this ambiguous term.

Basically, like "sportswashing" they are trying to cover up/compensate for their horrible behaviour by releasing crumbs like this to gain goodwill. I'm not going to change my opinion on facebook being a piece of shit scourge on humanity just because they put some ram efficiencies in linux.

It's better for a company to do a good thing for the wrong reasons than it is for them to do another wrong thing. I'm not going to change my opinion of Facebook over this, but I also don't think we should avoid benefiting from one of the few good things they're doing with their money.

Imagine if they were donating money to the feed the poor, and someone was saying we should burn the money instead of buying food, just because Facebook wasn't sincere enough.

More ram for your ram is just objectively a good thing for computers to have, regardless of the pervert it came from.

Objectivity sounds like a really good thing, until it is just apathy.

Oh, but you do use them! Because the services you interact with use them. Even the ones that don't, frequently use alternatives that have been influenced by their existence.

This might be a surprise to you, my liege; but the world does not, in fact, revolve around you and your preferences. Shockingly, the world seems to exist wholly independent of your uninformed and shortsighted opinions.

This is like being mad that acetylene welding exists, and saying that it's pointless because you've never personally used it. Obviously if it was good or important, you would have used that technology directly yourself, riiiight? So the world and history would obviously be no different if it had never existed.

0 out of 10.

what i worry about is them having any control over it and thus in position to gain more control over everything that might depend on it should it become widely used.

I feel you man. Its irritating that even these evil fuckers charity is a fucking manipulation. Its the whole world right now. One giant cash grab & scam

In the case of CRAM as a part of Linux the ultimate control still lies with Linus Torvalds. Other Meta projects like for example zstd can be forked as soon as they do some fishy stuff with it. But I do agree, when Meta is in the role of maintainer, we should keep a close eye on how the projects develop.

It's foolish to fall for the false firewall these corporations try to put up between divisions. Meta is meta is meta. Do not think for a moment that they are not the same thing.

It seems like there are even idealistic employees of these places that have deluded themselves into believing that, simply because right at this moment, the person Meta has put in charge of their division isn't an absolute psychopath, that their positions aren't extremely unethical.