This doesn’t reflect how that works right now, though, nor how AGPL would affect most corporations.

You listed 2 companies (Cisco and Google) that maintain their own forked Linux versions (IOS and Android). Neither of those OSes are server OSes already. They’re router and mobile phone OSes.

The other hundreds of thousands of companies don’t even touch the kernel, and would not be affected. It would not change the landscape at all to move it to AGPL.

No, their derivatives are not running on top of another person’s OS, they are themselves the OS. Hardware doesn’t make itself compatible with Linux, Linux makes itself compatible with hardware (by using or creating drivers). Those other companies do as well (or own the hardware stack as well, like Cisco).

I’ve considered that if Torvalds changes the license to AGPLv3, meaning servers have to publish their source code, it would an extremely quick collapse and abandonment of Linux.

AGPL evolved out of people saying, “my SaaS application isn’t being distributed at all, it’s just living on my server, so I can use your copy-left software without releasing my source alterations, and not violate the (GPLv2) license, because the license is based on distribution”. If the Linux kernel itself went AGPL (which isn’t what AGPL is even for), it would mean that modifications of the kernel would have to be published by whoever is doing the modifications, even if that kernel was only being used in a SaaS capacity, but most companies aren’t modifying the kernel and then offering that modified software over the network, they’re just running software on top of the upstream kernel, and AGPL higher up in the chain doesn’t touch that software, just like the current Linux kernel GPL doesn’t automatically apply to some python code you run on your Linux server.

Android, Amazon Linux, and IOS (the Cisco one) would just not move to the AGPL kernel (since you can’t retroactively apply it to already-released kernels), and probably continue their own forks as totally separate as they already do.

But the 99% of companies who are just using stock Linux distros e.g. stock Ubuntu to run their SaaS applications wouldn’t be affected. It definitely would not see the use collapse overnight.

There is a very real discussion of the way that we have conflated “minor” (a legal status) and “child” (a developmental state), and used that to infantilize adolescents who are very much not children…

but that discussion is not about sex, it’s about the way that people abuse that legal status in order to deny adolescents normal choices that they are developed enough to make, such as what books to read, medical decisions, what they do with their property (or even the ability to own property), etc.

Stallman is using that very legitimate discussion as cover to argue about whether children (i.e. pre-adolescents) should be able to have sex with adults.

He is, at best, the worst kind of provocateur, doing this because he knows it riles people up, so that he can feign some position of superiority about not being upset about his very intellectual ^/s take, and at worst, desiring to enable or normalize pedophilia and hebephilia.

That depends on the license.

I have to keep track of our FOSS licenses at my job, and we have to avoid certain tools that feature licenses that do actually require upstream contribs. They usually only specify this as a req for commercial use of the tool, as a way to prevent someone taking the FOSS tool, adding new functions, profiting off the free work, and giving nothing back.

The Reciprocal Public License is one example.