@fakefred@mastodon.technology
Uhm... sounds familiar...
You are ignoring time into your reasoning.
If you code for a small élite (which is totally fine, even if such élite has a cardinality of one), the probability that what you build is going to attract economical and political interest is actually low.
In such case, public domain is as good as copyleft, since you only care about the few people you are coding for and, if a venture capital turn your tool into an oppressive proprietary spyware for everybody else, your small élite can still use the public domain software you coded.
BUT, if you are hoping to free more than a couple of persons, if you aim for a wider reach, releasing code in the public domain is exactly working for free for those you want to beat.
You are taking the risks.
You are doing the hard part of Research and Development.
And what's worse, you are building a new well defined market for them to enter.
If you build something that, even for a small period of time, have a chance to succeed, by releasing as public domain you are just doing your enemies a favour.
Now, as a workaround, #copyleft is NOT perfect. In particular, #GNU licenses have too many loop holes.
BUT, if you don't protect your work so that its evolutions will stay in the #commons, you are renouncing to any hope for your principles to spread.
A #community is defined by the rules that protect what the members held in #common from their own individual egoisms.
So if you look at things into an historical perspective, you should see that putting work into the public domain is always to support oppressors in the long run.
While I'm happy to look something more effective than GNU licenses, a a strong Copyleft can slow down a bit the Embrace, Extend and Extinguish strategy that is the immune system of #Capitalism.
@walruslifestyle@octodon.social
@xj9 @walruslifestyle@octodon.social
That's what they want you to think.
But afaik #GAFAM didn't do a clean room implementation of #Linux, for example.
Also suggesting to not share ideas means suggesting to not do anything innovative or subversive, since once you distribute something innovative you ARE sharing ideas.
#Copyleft isn't perfect but makes it harder to run EEE tactics.
But throwing subversive code to the public domain is just a way to do R&D for big corps for free.
The second #Nextcloud #Podcast is out - listen to our latest episode discussing Design and much more with @jancborchardt !
https://nextcloud.com/blog/nextcloud-podcast-part-ii-lets-talk-about-design/
Do others feel that the *vast* majority of the exciting open source work these days happens outside the U.S.? (In a larger proportion than you'd expect based on where commercial software is written, I mean).
At first, I thought it was just that #rust had a non-US tilt due to Mozilla's involvement.
But the more I look around, the more it seems like (almost) all the exciting Foss projects are in Europe – with the notable exception of https://sr.ht/ and a few others.
Agree? Disagree?
While this is the smartest objection to my usual comparison of free software and free speech, I think you are missing an important detail.
#FreeSoftware is a work-aroud to defeat unjust #Copyright laws.
If I take #Microsoft #Windows code (or executables, it doesn't change much), modify it and publicily share the result under any form, I'm going to be criminalised and actually indicted for copyright infridgement.
Now for a #hacker, programming is a form of expression just like writing is for everybody else.
International copyright laws and agreements is basically statal censorship for economical (thus ideological and political) gain.
Now, one might argue that #hackers are a tiny minority that do not deserve such right to expression and it have to sacrify it for the other mainstream programmers.
And it's surely true that the #OpenSource people did their best to take Free Software from hackers to turn it into an exploitative, ethically washed, #marketing tool.
And I agree that, because of that, we are reaching the limits of what a #copyleft licence, however strong, can protect.
For example, thanks to the progress of #hardware, we can all see that all free software copyleft forgot the right (duty?) to #SelfHosting.
But free software still stands as a tool to create a protected zone of free programming expression in a hostil environment ruled by (corporate friendly) copyright law.
Since copyright infrigement can lead hackers to statal jail, free software IS free speech.
I have been a very active member of the #Italian #PirateParty.
I can say that not even one single time moderators behaved like that.
On the contrary, the used their role to impose their own personal opinions, even banning people who disagreed.
I for one was banned for 2 weeks for arguing that the #PPIT shouldn't use #YouTube or #Facebook except to drag people outside, since (back then) the party bragged about #privacy. "You don't have the moral flexibility to be a politician" they said back then.
The people who wrote the text you've found are gone long ago.
For those contemplating the Librem 5 #smartphone by @purism, hold your breath competition is about to start. See http://volla.online
Facebook: "oops I did it again !"
Facebook admits to improperly giving user data to third-party developers, again
https://mashable.com/article/facebook-gave-users-data-5000-third-party-developers.amp/
Hi @fdroidorg@mastodon.technology I've read aboit #FDroidServer and it looks quite easy to setup, but I wonder: what's the bare minimum for serving a repository to #FDroid?
I mean: most of fdroid server cope with apk building, but we could build them on a machine and serve them from a less powerful one..
In a pure functional language, all constructs can be expressed as anonymous functions ("lambda functions"). I wrote an article "Everything is a function" that explains how this works.
https://wimvanderbauwhede.github.io/articles/everything-is-a-function/
WAT?
E' stato pubblicato il rapporto sullo stato del Web Decentralizzato dopo una serie di interviste a ben oltre 650 sviluppatori del "DWeb"
Si parla di valori, sfide tecnologiche e protocolli futuri. Sembra che questo sia il primo rapporto sull'ecosistema del Web Decentralizzato in assoluto.
Speriamo che troverete il rapporto così esaustivo e perspicace come ci è parso a noi:
https://medium.com/fluence-network/decentralized-web-developer-report-2020-5b41a8d86789
Olimex is a manufacturer of open source hardware and components, follow their new account here:
Their website is at https://www.olimex.com
Amongst other projects, they make the Pioneer FreedomBox home server running software by @freedomboxfndn : https://www.olimex.com/Products/OLinuXino/Home-Server/Pioneer-FreedomBox-HSK/open-source-hardware
They also make an interesting DIY laptop: https://www.olimex.com/Products/DIY-Laptop/