when you said that Nextcloud might not meet your needs, was your concern specifically the server-side data format?

I'd prefer them as plain files. Technically it doesn’t matter much to me if it's a database, if I have to spin up an S3-compatible API, or if I need to slice up a zvol for it, but I just prefer the files because then I can do zfs snapshots (in which I trust) and backup with restic (in which I trust)

That gives me hope, thanks. I’ll try it, then.

Lots of files. I'd offload old projects that I worked on with synology drive so they aren’t stored locally, only remotely (but are easily accessible).

It was my first introduction to the type-length-value concept over the network, seemed radically different from the text only IRC protocol that I knew back then. I remember how fun it was to write an elegant parser for the ICQ messaging, and how I ended up on somewhat a DOM model where I converted the on-wire format into series of nested objects. Not the most efficient idea, but it was neat.

Or just slap a GPL and subsume everything within a vortex of FREEDOM, and thusly become a true FOSS dude

Yeah, no. I suppose this is sarcasm, but just in case: not every license is compatible with GPL, GPL has a few versions, and not everything is GPL-3-and-above.

Personally, I prefer Apache-2.0. It just seems more fair.

Fediverse generally runs on ActivityPub, which uses HTTP as a transport, so you’ll be good. The problem is that the clients don’t talk to fediverse, it's more of a server-to-sever protocol; you'd look into the specific server APIs. But you’re good there, too - all the big fediverse players use RESTful HTTP for their client-facing API.

Your requirements sound a lot like Chrome Remote Desktop and it's pretty trivial to install, which might be a handy thing for family members that aren’t tech-savvy.

yeah, I thought I deleted it immediately but the deletes federate in weird ways. was a client bug.

By all means, use the publicly available code within the limits its license permits. Always strive to give credit back (I oftentimes add notes to where I took config bits even in my private my-eyes-only repos to have some breadcrumbs).

Remember that licensing and copyrights are kind of separate things. People own copyright to their work (unless they explicitly give it up), and licenses are the terms on which you can use their copyrighted work.

Know the basics of the OSS licenses and know which ones you can copy things from verbatim (e.g. don’t touch AGPL code unless you also use AGPL). Generally, I just keep the original license and add a note to my license file saying that e.g. this code is licensed under Apache 2.0, but some parts are MIT.

It gets somewhat murkier when you use someone's code and base yours on that. IANAL, and that's very much the legal territory. If at all possible, just reuse the original copyright and license and then derive your work (given the license allows that).

Being on the receiving side of this a few times (people using my code verbatim in their projects I stumbled upon) it leaves a bit of a sour taste in the mouth when you see your copyright header replaced with someone else's completely. Don’t do that. All the three times it happened to me, the other party was quick to remedy the situation, though (2 added the original copyright note back, 1 removed all my code). So just don’t do that. Make a habit to read that dumb tall copyright notice at the top of the file every time and you’ll quickly learn what to expect.

The free news app was, sadly, never free for all, and missed in a bunch of regions.

While you could practically install macOS on ipads it'd work no better than windows used to work on tablets (it got a bit better nowadays). macOS is just not designed for touch input and would be a hideously subpar product. Can you imagine trying to use your fingers with the blender UI at 1x scale?

There is a toolset to easily get metal mac apps on iPad, though. I actually looked into what'd it take to port bender to iPad previously, and metal is the least of all problems. Blender is just a notoriously complicated piece of software.