Im curious, can you really get by without MS, Google and Apple? No LLVM based products for you? No Webkit? No CUPS? No V8? If you do use some of these projects, where's the difference from an Open Sourced .NET?

I get by without MS and Apple just fine (as I wrote elsewhere, I do still have an elderly Mac here that is sometimes used for compatibility testing but I don't even remember when I started it up last and it currently isn't even plugged in).

As for Google, that's the hard one to avoid. Adsense/Adwords is easy, youtube is hard (plenty of video content is only available on youtube), google search is still better than duckduckgo (and I'm really sorry about that, but I'm rooting for Gabriel to achieve parity some day even if that's an uphill battle), and I use Google docs for a few spreadsheets that I need to be able to access remotely.

My mail is on my own server, web stuff is classical 'LAMP', I don't use webkit, don't use V8 and I don't think I have an instance of CUPS here that is actually configured to do real work but it's possible that I'm missing a machine clever enough to auto-configue.

Other hardware is Dell, Synology (which has CUPS on board but it's not in use) and a variety of smaller fry.

It's really not all that hard to keep the big companies out of your life, one of these days I'll find a way to get rid of google completely. The most frequently used closed source product I have is Varicad (but they have a nasty little gotcha that I recently found out about so they're on the way out) and another is adobe acrobat reader (the linux version). Oh, and the Nvidia binary drivers for the graphics card in this box.

> Oh, and the Nvidia binary drivers for the graphics card in this box.

With NVIDIA drivers you probably have at least some LLVM compiled components (or will have, once their transition has been completed in future generations), but I give you that one. As a GPGPU developer for example, you probably soon can't get around LLVM anymore and I expect its influence to grow in the Linux world, as it has become the default choice to build new OSS compiler / language projects around.

I'm using DDG myself btw. - Google is the main one I'd like to get away from, but as you wrote it's very hard. At least DDG with "g!" prefix makes me anonymous to them.

What I still find very hard to replace is Skype and/or Hangout - I'm not aware of an OSS solution that works on all platforms and that I can easily set up with all kinds of peers (including non computer literate). Even Hangout is way too complicated, even for aged computer scientists I've found. And I'm really using all of it - VoIP, video conferencing, Skype-Out, screen sharing, messaging. This is the main thing I'd like to replace since we're handing out so much control to this tool.

Isn't LLVM used in nvidia drivers for compiling shaders at runtime? GLSL needs compiling, and I thought everyone typically used LLVM for this?

I don't know much about OpenGL and can't confirm it from a quick google [1], but I could well imagine it if that JIT was either recently introduced by NVIDIA or ported over already - LLVM seems to be their company policy for anything compiler related now.

[1] http://http.developer.nvidia.com/Cg/cgc.html

Hmm, yes I can. Gcc, gecko, cups predates apple, spidermonkey...

While you can, it's not always that simple. Say you want to make a Qt application with a web frame - Qt-Webkit seems to be the most mature for that matter. Spidermonkey seems to be quite a bit behind V8 in terms of performance, tooling and framework support (Node.js ecosystem) as well, so I'm not sure it's a real alternative today. Do you use it for production level serverside-javascript systems?

Also, do you only use older CUPS versions because Apple pays its development for a while now?