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.

That’s not an uncommon thing, actually. One of the most famous mechanical keyboards, the Das Keyboard, was by default glyph-less.

It’s a great idea, but I’m very skeptical about how ready it is for ‘production’, looking through their repo.

Every time I try a vim alternative, I get frustrated and just end up back with vim.

built from the ground up in Rust with a GPU-accelerated renderer

I don’t want GPU-accelerated rendering, I want a renderer that has a solid 5 second lag, to make it look to anyone around like I type faster than 20 wpm.

Their reasoning for forking from the original Bosca Ceoil

It’s also using an outdated technology stack which makes it hard to impossible to run it on modern systems, namely macOS and web.

Ah yes, I forgot that Windows and Linux are “legacy” systems. And “web” isn’t an operating system, it’s just someone else’s Linux box.

We achieve this by reimplementing the entire application with a more modern set of tools, as a Godot engine project.

Okay, that’s pretty great. Always glad to see Godot getting used, especially in a cool new way.

I dream of a world where doing your homework when choosing software to learn is not so rare

But when it comes to most people out there, we’re not in that world right now, and popularity does matter, so boosting shitty devs’ products is harmful to the FOSS ecosystem. HTH

Which is unrelated to their point, which is that visible popularity of a piece of software (e.g. having many downloads in an app store) has a large impact on likelihood of people to trust it.

You feigning ignorance at this just discredits your own position. Their question was essentially rhetorical, and you chose to answer it incorrectly rather than concede their correct point:

If you encountered 2 identical pieces of software, you would trust the one that is more popular, thus proving that popularity is a meaningful benefit to a piece of software.

Given that what these people are being criticized for are not intrinsic traits, those people have the option to change their behavior in order to not be ostracized. I am certainty not under any obligation to give anyone my business.

“What if all the bad people lost their jobs?”

Well, that certainly might encourage them to rethink whether being bad is working out for them.

And yes, I’d say that route sounds to me like it will reduce harm in several ways.

Read it again…

Just because something is built out of love does not make it safe, and attestation is about safety. You wouldn’t trust an un-attested surgical device, just because there’s a really positive community around its design.

Signal is a life-or-death app for some people.

Yeah, it was frustrating because using Ubuntu for gaming on it was the main reason I got the laptop, but I couldn’t deal with changing launch options in steam every time I rebooted. Hasn’t soured me on Linux gaming, still hoping for that bright future. :)

I admin linux systems all day at work, and in my spare time on my home lab rackmount setup that lives in the spare bathroom, and I say that to make clear that I’m extremely comfortable with Linux. I got a gaming laptop recently and loaded Ubuntu onto it, and was very underwhelmed with the gaming performance on it. My SteamDeck ran many of the games better, and there were a bunch issues with the OS not being able to keep the integrated graphics card vs the discrete one straight (e.g. switching the load order on reboot, making games constantly try to run on the integrated card), that just made me eventually give up and put Win11 on it. At this point, I’d love for Valve to release a “SteamLap” gaming system, because clearly Linux needs that tight control over the hardware config to get games working well.

Lemmy is not enriching the data you put on it with data that Lemmy purchases from third parties, in order to create a user-product to sell to advertisers. Meta and Discord are (obviously Meta much moreso). That’s why advertisers buy from them instead of just scraping your posts themselves.

Thanks for this writeup! I’ve been interested in Graphene for a long time, but I don’t buy phones very often, and I’ve never owned a Pixel phone, so I have to enjoy it vicariously.

I’ve heard weird claims like the FSF and OSI don’t [have] a monopoly on the definition of what’s FS or OSS.

I’m part of that group. If OSI and FSF want to control the definition of something, they should make new and unique terms, not just attempt to take over a concept that predates both of them. (Interestingly, OSI’s website claims no one used “open source” to talk about software before 1998, and that’s patently not true; I remember seeing people use that in IRC channels back in the early 90s). If I came along tomorrow and said, “my org now controls the definition of ‘downloadable software’,” people would tell me to sod off. Even worse “Open Source” and “Free” are both terms with plain-English meanings (which most people naturally assume to be what people are calling “source available”, in OSS’s case). Trying to impose centralized control over a simple phrase isn’t really in line with the collaborative, community-led spirit of the FOSS community, imho

Call it OSI-Approved Zero-Restriction Licensing or something.

Any project… should compete on their own merit, rather than riding and exploiting the world’s preference for FOSS.

Funny, that’s how I feel about OSI stepping in to claim control of that term.

Just want to reiterate - it’s ok as long as it starts as such, instead of doing a bait and switch.

I agree with this for existing projects, absolutely.

I felt like I was going crazy sometimes with how often people in the FOSS community insist that nothing is wrong when large companies are massively profiting off of unpaid labor that is meant to help people, by turning it into part of their closed-source product, so it’s nice to see that well-known figures in the community are starting to wake up to this being a problem.

I think that non-commercial-use clauses are a good way forward for certain projects, and commercial licenses for others. I wish that the upstream contrib requirements had taken off, but clearly Capitalism and the FOSS mindset aren’t compatible, and capitalism is more widespread.

If you let corporations have something for free, they’ll find some way to ruin it.

your landlord (the provider) takes care of all the maintenance

this is a dirty lie :P

How has CDDA not been mentioned?

Yes, the old “hebephilia is not pedophilia, and is normal” shtick.

Obviously yes, there is a very big (biological) difference between sexual attraction to pubescent vs pre-pubescent persons.

That has nothing to do with the Age of Consent, which is a legal standard set in order to account for social dynamics (power dynamics, education differences, etc) that also factor into consent, which is most of the situations he’s talking about, e.g. Roy Moore.

If Stallman wants to do the whole, “there’s no difference between being attracted to a 17-and-364-days year-old and an 18 year-old” bit, I don’t think anyone would care outside of the fact that being hung up on that when you’re not yourself in that dating range just makes you seem creepy. When you’re 18, that discussion is much more relevant. Not so much at Stallman’s age.

But him clearly talking more about the 13-14 year old range, where even someone going through puberty is much closer to pre-pubescent than post-pubescent, just makes him seem like he’s actually a pedophile who wants a loophole.