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Joined 2 months ago
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Cake day: February 24th, 2026

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  • You’re on the open-source community, of course we’ll be biased in favour of open source. One thing to point out is that open-source and closed source are both pretty broad categories that cover several licenses. Source available means people can see the code, but there are restrictions to how they can use it. Is there a specific thing you don’t want people to do with your code? Do you not want them to edit it for example? Or you’re fine with them editing it, but not for commercial purpose ? Any restriction of this type will make it source-available. If you’re fine with them doing anything, it’s open source. If you want them to mention somewhere that their code is based on yours, it’s still open source. And if you want any code made by editing yours to also be open source, that’s still open source (that’s the idea of the GPL). But other restrictions might make it not fit that category.

    I personally usually default to the GPL3, I’m fine with people doing anything with my code except making it non-open source. Well “my code”… It might be a bit presumptious of me, I’m not really a programmer, I’ve just made a few small and not very useful things. There may be legitimate reasons for not wanting your code to be open source sometimes, but for me the stakes have always been low.

    As for whether using Github creates an expectation for Open-Source… Not so much at this point. It’s very used by the Open-Source community, but not only. Plus, it’s not really open-source itself, so the most purist prefer other git platforms like git-lab, forgejo or source-hut.


  • I think there’ll always be an issue depending on how dependent a project is on a company. Because the main risk isn’t that some bumbleling idiot of a CEO will run the projects and his company to the ground, but that sensible people will take decisions that serve their own interests, but not the interests of users.

    Free software creates a framework wherein companies may have an interest in the success of a project and contribute to it. This is a good thing, insofar that to companies, the project is just a tool that needs to work well and to the programmers, the company is just one of several contributors.

    In a community driven project, those who take decisions are the programmers who directly contribute to it and who are also usually users. Their interests are closer to those of all other end users. They want the project to work, and that may also be what financial contributors want.

    However, if the software is a product of the company, they’ll intend to extract value from it directly. The interest of shareholders will supercede those of programmers and end users. That is why they may take decisions that are bad from a user’s perspective, not because their dumb, but because they have other interests in mind.
    Inserting adds is a good way to get fundings from add companies at the detriment of users.
    Adding suscription tiers is a good way to extract wealth from part of the users. Adding AI is a good way to secure loans from banks that speculate on the AI bubble, and maybe even from companies like Nvidia, interested in making the bubble last and grow.

    It’s not a matter of being sensible or not, it’s a matter of whose interest you’re sensibly serving.


  • What was that joke about Firefox again? “We’re the browser beloved for being the only one not hitting our dick with a hammer. Now, you’re probably wondering why we brought this hammer and and took out our dick. Well you see…”

    More seriously, I think until the bubble pops, writing “AI” anywhere is a way for companies to attract fundings, and that money is too easy for many to pass.

    That’s why I tend to trust community managed distros over corpo ones. I don’t see Arch or Debian pulling this bullshit.

    Tho, I’d still be suspicious of the other big private company, Redhat; which is very involved in maintaining Systemd.

    Honestly, if it comes to this I’ll distro-hop as far as I need to escape AI.