The theoretical concern is that some nefarious company will start making improvements and not contribute them back so that it can have access to (and possibly even sell) its own premium version that takes advantage of the hard work of the community without giving back.
Personally, I am a bit skeptical of this for a couple of reasons. First, I have a really hard time seeing any company care enough about uutils to do this. Second, continually merging changes from an upstream project is a real pain, so there is a strong incentive to make contributions back out of self-interest.
But even to the extent that there is some grounds to be concerned, it is not enough for so many people to contribute so much noise to every single one of these posts whining, as if it is attack on them personally.
Hurd has always seemed cool from the purist viewpoint of, "Let's prove to the world that we can do everything using a microkernel!"-- and to be frank, as a Haskell lover, it would be hypocritical for me to fault anyone for this level of purity!--but development has been plodding along for decades, with the article claiming (unless I misread it) that they are still working on things like SMP and 64-bit support.
I mean, as long as the people tinkering with this are having fun then that is all that really matters, and more power to them! However, that really seems to be the entirety of its purpose at this point, which is a shame given the lofty ambitions with which the project was launched.
I think to some extent we have been talking past each other. Very roughly speaking, I think that am more worried about what happens in the middle of an experiment, where you are more worried about what happens at the end. I actually completely agree with you that when a conscious being performs a measurement, then, from the perspective of that being, both interpretations of what happened when it performed the observation are equivalent. That is, the being has no way of telling them apart, and asking which interpretation is true at that point is, in my opinion, roughly along the same lines as asking whether the objective world exists.
(Just to be clear, it's not my intent to get mystical here. I think of consciousness as essentially just being a way of processing information about the world, rather than positing the existence of souls.)
The analogy to Galilean relativity actually is too kind. Galilean relativity relies on Euclidean space as a background, allowing an external viewpoint fixed to empty coordinates. Hilbert space is not a background space at all; it is always defined in terms of physical systems, what is known as a constructed space. You can transform perspectives in spacetime, but there is no transformation to a background perspective in Hilbert space because no such background exists. The closest that exists is a statistical transformation to different perspectives within Liouville space, but this only works for objects within the space; you cannot transform to the perspective of the background itself as it is not a background space.
...which is why eventually you need to switch to the grown-up version of Quantum Mechanics, Quantum Field Theory, is defined in terms of relativistic fields with a single "universal" field for each flavor of particle.
The theoretical concern is that some nefarious company will start making improvements and not contribute them back so that it can have access to (and possibly even sell) its own premium version that takes advantage of the hard work of the community without giving back.
Personally, I am a bit skeptical of this for a couple of reasons. First, I have a really hard time seeing any company care enough about uutils to do this. Second, continually merging changes from an upstream project is a real pain, so there is a strong incentive to make contributions back out of self-interest.
But even to the extent that there is some grounds to be concerned, it is not enough for so many people to contribute so much noise to every single one of these posts whining, as if it is attack on them personally.