Adrian Kuschelyagi Malacoda, free software enthusiast and GNU respector
Pronouns: any
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The “Freedom Phone” seems to me like either an elaborate joke or a grift.
I feel inclined to point out that ACRA, the crash reporter he mentioned, is a libre crash reporter that is commonly used in libre Android applications including the F-Droid client itself, generally in an opt-in manner and using a local email client instead of making a call to an external http server. Its presence isn’t necessarily an indicator of evil although since they do not publish the source code for this Signal fork, it isn’t clear (pun intended) how ACRA is being used here. Note that they aren’t obligated to publish the source code to the public, but they are required to provide attribution and a written offer for the source code to anyone who obtains the binary. None of that is present in the download page or in the screenshots provided although it may be hidden somewhere in the app itself, but I don’t feel inclined to look for it personally.
It’s a safe, friendly, and diverse place.
We’re a collective of individuals upset with the way social media has been traditionally governed. A severe lack of moderation has led to major platforms like Facebook to turn into political machinery focused on disinformation campaigns as a way to make profit off of users. Websites with ineffective moderation allow hate speech to proliferate and contribute to the erosion of minority rights and safe spaces. Our goal with Beehaw is to demonstrate and promote a healthier environment.
I guess if you had to categorize it you could say it’s a general purpose instance, but one with a governing philosophy different than conventional social media.
Unfortunately this is an uphill battle, even here people are just going to call the system “Linux” because of brand loyalty or just because that’s what they’re used to.
Keep in mind also, “Linux” is not strictly speaking incorrect as long as you keep in mind, it technically refers to just the kernel, or more broadly to the family of systems that use said kernel (the definition Wikipedia gives it, which is repeated in the sidebar here). GNU/Linux systems are a subset of Linux systems, but Linux systems also include Android and Alpine variants as well as things like OpenWRT and other embedded applications. Linux is a very versatile tool.
Just keep in mind, Linux is not an operating system or platform in and of itself, none of the userland libraries or applications are “part of Linux,” you can’t really make apps for it (nor should you really want to), you can’t treat different Linux systems as interchangable (especially if one or both aren’t GNU/Linux) and just because a particular Linux system isn’t your preferred type of Linux system does not make it “not real Linux” (looking at you !linuxphones@lemmy.ml )
This argument makes sense for natural language (where one can argue that a word “is a real word” or that a word means something simply because it is commonly used in that manner), not so much for proper nouns in my opinion. Linux is a specific thing, created by a specific person (who named it after himself), developed by a specific team for specific purposes. Whether or not people mistakenly believe other unrelated things are also Linux doesn’t change the truth of what Linux actually is.
If “the vast majority of people” mistakenly believed the Earth was flat or that the sun revolved around it, that does not suddenly make it so. “The vast majority of people” being ignorant should be taken as an opportunity to address that ignorance, not perpetuate it.
Guix updated this package on February 17 according to the commit log.
commit f47125d2868315acc40379c8e859fb60d6942dad
Author: Leo Famulari <leo@famulari.name>
Date: Thu Feb 17 21:08:45 2022 -0500
gnu: WebKitGTK: Update to 2.34.6 [Fixes CVE-2022-22620].
* gnu/packages/webkit.scm (webkitgtk): Update to 2.34.6.
Reminder that flatpak is not “platform independent” it is a platform (well, more accurately, a meta-platform I guess). I’ll stick with Guix.
I think bots have the potential to be useful but reddit is absolutely overwhelmed with (IMHO) wasteful bots like “shakespeare bot” and “dad joke bot.” I think a good baseline policy could be that bots should not make unsolicited comments, although I could imagine some cases where that might be welcome (e.g. a reverse image search bot pulling up the original version of an image).
It is refreshing that Drew knows the correct way to indent code.
Also, it’s extremely likely he is aware people know about this language already. He would not have put up this website on a public facing domain name if he hadn’t considered the possibility.
I would suppose so. The free/libre software movement (I don’t care about open source or FOSS) is at its core the abolishment of artificial scarcity and the empowerment of technology users to control their own computing, whereas NFT’s seem to be a convoluted scheme for creating scarcity in digital goods.
Why do you recommend the non-free Magic Earth here?
bizarre pseudo-libre license
It’s not okay to pretend your software is open source (Drew DeVault, 2018)
Free Software is, and has been for the last 40 years, about the “four freedoms.” Those four freedoms are no less important today then they were back then. Copyleft was about ensuring every user had those four freedoms. It wasn’t really about “forcing companies to give back” and it certainly wasn’t supposed to provide an exclusive right to monetize “your product.”
I think the author of this article has a few legitimate points (it is horrid how open source maintainers are treated by proprietary software developers who feel entitled to free labor, not just the log4j maintainers but e.g. the core-js maintainer) and some shaky arguments (if anything, Audacity being free software was a good thing because it allowed Tenacity to happen; and while it’s obviously bad that TikTok infringed on OBS’s copyrights and violated the GPL, it doesn’t really negate the good that OBS does for the free software community). I also would not refer to copyright infringement as stealing, even when it involves free software; this is the sort of language that intellectual property advocates use to suggest that making a copy of something is equivalent to actually stealing a thing (e.g. “You wouldn’t steal a car”).
He’s also right about one other thing: I, and some others, would definitely refuse to use his product if it’s proprietary; but I’m not sure I would have used it regardless.
Perceptive readers might have noticed that most of these arguments can be generalized. This article is much the same if we replace “Discord” with “GitHub”, for instance, or “Twitter” or “YouTube”. If your project depends on proprietary infrastructure, I want you to have a serious discussion with your collaborators about why. What do your choices mean for the long-term success of your project and the ecosystem in which it resides? Are you making smart investments, or just using tools which are popular or that you’re already used to?
It seems to be working out well for the “Linux gaming” people. Like I said, though, I’m not really concerned with the support of proprietary software on “Linux” or with the idea of the “universal platform” of “Linux.” The farther we move away from the idea of “Linux” being a “platform” the better.
See also Let distributions do their job (Drew DeVault); note that the package manager I am using (GNU Guix) aims to make it easy to package different types of libre software projects using “importers” and it’s also possible to build packages directly from a specific git commit or reference.
Fragmentation isn’t real. The best way for developers to “support Linux” is to publish their source code and make it easy for users and distributions to build it. If it’s proprietary then that’s their problem, I’m not concerned with proprietary software.
ed: For proprietary software, as silly as it may sound, the best approach to supporting “Linux” seems to be supporting Windows and then waiting for Valve/the community to support it using Wine/Proton.
Linux isn’t “about” anything. It’s just a kernel that some people build operating systems on top of. There’s nothing deep or mystical about it.
Linus himself said he only cares about code.
Personally, I only care about the code. When I say maybe there are people who worry about walled gardens and cloud providers who take ownership of your data, I am not one of those people.
(source)
I imagine a world beyond proprietary software, and GNU/Linux is the most promising implementation of that.
I don’t agree with reducing software-freedom to an issue of mere privacy-friendliness. I’m willing to be realistic about the security shortcomings of Libre software but not if the alternative is locked down silos and walled gardens.
In the mobile space, Linux is already pre-installed on what I believe to be the majority of devices. Those users are for the large part unaware they are even using Linux, and Linux fans often don’t consider it to be a “real form of Linux.” I’m talking about Android, of course.
I think SteamOS could be the equivalent to Android for desktops, in that sense. It won’t be branded as Linux and it won’t be marketed towards Linux nerds, but it will be Linux (and far closer to Libre community GNU/Linux OS’s than Android is, thankfully) and any improvements made for it could also benefit the Libre software community.
I’m not terribly excited for SteamOS itself or “Linux gaming” and I’m not really a “year of the Linux desktop” person, but I think this can benefit the Libre software ecosystem directly or indirectly.
(ed: ChromeOS is also a thing, but I think considering it a desktop is sort of a stretch)
Making it more difficult to actually break the system is a good thing, insofar as it does not actually restrict the freedoms of the users who know what they are doing. I think the fix introduced by PopOS:
To prevent such incidents in the future, Pop!_OS patched the APT package manager. Now, POP!_OS won’t be able to enter “Yes, do as I Say”. Instead, they will have to add a special a file to enable it (if someone really wants to remove the packages).
is reasonable, because the user can override the protection if they really feel they need to (and know what they are doing, of course).
My favorite part was when he tried to right-click save-as a shell script from a GitHub repository. I know intuitively that wouldn’t work, but I can understand why it might be unintuitive. Then again, I have save-as or wget’d a “download” link that turned out to be an HTML redirect to some mirror site, so I understand the frustration.
Same for when he tried to use apt-get on Manjaro in the beginning, I guess because he learned (or was taught) that apt is “the Linux package manager” which makes me wonder how much he prepared for this challenge. It seems he was sold on the premise that “Linux” is a perfect drop-in replacement for Windows and found out the hard way it is not.
Then again, the whole premise of “Linux gaming” seems to be making GNU/Linux into Windows, in a way, which is why I’m skeptical of the idea. GNU/Linux works just fine for me but I don’t use it for gaming. I don’t like the implication that GNU/Linux must be judged based on how much it can act like Windows.
You’re being heavily downvoted because this instance is “a community of free software and privacy enthusiasts” as the title on the front page suggests, and this in particular is the !opensource@lemmy.ml community. Discord is the complete antithesis of this, as it is a proprietary application locked to a centralized server that also spies on its users.
What is wrong with Discord (Richard Stallman)
Spyware level: Extremely High (Spyware Watchdog)
That being said, there are modern alternatives to IRC, such as Matrix, XMPP, Zulip, Mattermost, or RocketChat. However, I think IRC is fairly good at what it does.
This is not reddit. Please engage with other members as fellow humans and do not dismiss them as “bots” or “shills”