beyond

joined 3 years ago
[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 2 points 2 months ago

Aseprite is proprietary, but so is this. There is LibreSprite though.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 12 points 2 months ago* (last edited 2 months ago) (1 children)

I feel like there's a lot of FUD around this subject, because people bring it up as if it's purely a negative without talking about the reasons why it's done the way it is. The whole point of F-Droid is that it's a repository (not a store) of free software applications. They have an inclusion policy forbidding proprietary code and dependencies, and in order to enforce this policy they have to build from publicly available source code, and in order to do so they need to sign the builds themselves. This means, yes, you are trusting F-Droid instead of the upstream developer - but given F-Droid has higher standards than upstream developers this is a tradeoff I am willing to make.

Reproducible builds solves this in a way that preserves the standards of F-Droid, however, "security peoples'" favored "alternatives" (such as Accrescent, Obtainium, and Google Play Store/Aurora Store) forego this entirely, showing they don't either have a viable solution to offer or that they don't really care about the problem that F-Droid is addressing to begin with.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 12 points 3 months ago

Same reason anyone would use a dedicated provider-independent client instead of a proprietary web application locked into a single provider: less vendor lock-in, more local control, and so on.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

Unironically one of the greatest people in the technology space of the last 40 years, in the sense of accomplishments and impact on the world. I'm talking specifically about the free software movement, copyleft, and the GNU GPL. The world would be a much worse place without those accomplishments. The fact that a lot of his life's work is erroneously attributed to the kernel guy doesn't change that.

As a thinker, absolutely brilliant and unfortunately misunderstood. He espouses radical ideas about the relation of users to the technology they use that are still relevant to issues of today (e.g. enshittification, planned obsolescence, surveillance capitalism, and so on). It goes far beyond "you can look at source code to see if there's bugs or spyware in it." There's a reason "Stallman was right" is a meme.

As a leader and a figurehead I'm not convinced he's as effective. Regardless of the coordinated smear campaign from a few years ago (in which it was erroneously said "he defended Jeffrey Epstein" or "he blamed Epstein's victim" or some such), he has demonstrated behaviors that alienate people and people who have worked for/with him (e.g. FSF employees and GNU maintainers) have said he is not a good boss. His comment about "voluntary pedophilia" is inexcusable, even though he has said he no longer stands by it. The Epstein association was fabricated from a quote taken out of context, but I don't think it was wise to even join that discussion. The glibc manual abort() joke incident from 2018 is probably what convinced me of this - not so much that the joke is bad (humor is subjective) but that multiple developers objected to it and said it made them uncomfortable, yet he "pulled rank" and insisted it be left in (although as of now it seems to be absent). I believe his intentions were good (the "joke" isn't actually about abortion as such, but rather the US government "global gag rule" suppressing discussions of such) but forcing it in against the protests of the community was inappropriate in my opinion.

Overall despite the above I feel he's done more good than harm to the world, however, I'm not sure how much more good he can do in his position. I feel like the term "Stallmanism" would be an apt term for his thought but because of the above I feel leery associating myself with the guy.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 2 points 3 months ago

To be clear, it used to be fully free software, then became proprietary for a little while, and then as of 17 June 2024 it became free again. So the most recent release 11.15.0 (from two days ago) is fully free, but the previous one isn't.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

"Privacy centric" is irrelevant because because this is the free software movement, not the privacy movement (also, this is not reddit, we have a higher standard of conduct here).

Further reading on free software philosophy. Most relevant is why software should not have owners (1994) as this is fundamentally where FUTO disagrees with the open source/free software movement.

I also made a prior comment here about the fundamental difference between "fauxpen source" licenses like FUTO's and real FOSS licenses. You seem to characterize it as "stealing code and profiting off it" but the strength of free software is in collaboration and community, not so much competition, so sharing is considered a virtue here. I talked more about it here in a reddit comment referencing my previous lemmy comment.

This will probably be my last comment on FUTO/Grayjay in this thread, since I've said all I intend to say several times here and on reddit. I might make a master post about the problems of fauxpen source at some point.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (7 children)

I don't have any opinion on grayjay but this is the open source community and grayjay is proprietary. That's the only reason I downvoted your comment

Feel free to use it if it works for you but I think it's poor form to advertise proprietary products in a thread about a free software project.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

My guess (and it's only a guess, I haven't looked at the source code) is that the scraping is being done on a server end that they can update without having to push an app update.

edit: my guess was wrong, I found where the source code is and they do the parsing locally - however it's a plugin that I assume gets loaded in on app start so they can still update it without having to publish a new apk. this is the fix

interestingly although Grayjay itself is proprietary this plugin is Affero GPL licensed.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 6 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Vivaldi's target audience is people who don't mind proprietary blobs as long as they are "good" or make things "work better." Given that Vivaldi itself is essentially a proprietary blob combined with a Chromium backend this makes sense.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 2 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Icedove (Thunderbird) works well enough for me. Maybe the reason it's "old fashioned" is because it works well enough that it doesn't need to be changed that often.

In the proprietary software world we're used to UI's being redesigned on a regular basis for no user benefit.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 14 points 3 months ago (1 children)

AFAIK FUTO/Rossmann, to their credit, stopped trying to openwash themselves. They created their own phrase "source-first" to describe their proprietary EULA.

That doesn't change the fact that it's proprietary and not worth promoting here.

[–] beyond@linkage.ds8.zone 1 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

If Valkey is the de facto successor of Redis, then maybe abandoning Redict is the right move. If he continued to put effort into Redict, people would just ask why is he wasting time with Redict when Valkey exists.

Note that I generally don't think time put into free software is wasted, because once its put out into the commons it can be picked up and reused elsewhere - although in this particular case since Redict is licensed under LGPLv3 contributions made to it cannot be reused by Valkey which is licensed under the BSD license. One is, however, free to add their own contribution to both projects as neither requires a CLA, however both do require a Developer Certificate of Origin (DCO) https://codeberg.org/redict/redict/src/branch/main/CONTRIBUTING.md https://github.com/valkey-io/valkey/blob/unstable/CONTRIBUTING.md This is as far as I know an unusual case as generally forks use the same license allowing code to be freely exchanged between them.

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