Captain Beyond

The silver lining of “AI” is that it’s a convenient excuse to be anti-user. It’s okay as long as you are “fighting the AI”

I expect to be chugging verification cans in 2027

It is also (as far as I can tell) proprietary

Free software is about freedom, not price. It’s perfectly acceptable to sell it. It being a paid download doesn’t necessarily mean it’s proprietary. He’s not required to actually post the source online for all to access, he can send it only to paying customers. As long as the customer receives it under a free software license it is free software.

However, without mention of a free software license, I am inclined to believe it is proprietary - although it is described as open source on the page, he might mean to say source available.

russian proprietary software

The “Russian” part is not the problem here

It’s a funny story but it’s worth noting that copyright does not apply to typefaces in the US (although maybe it does in other jurisdictions)

Isn’t this proprietary?

Ironically though this makes the reverse a bit more defensible (i.e. using an LLM to reverse engineer a proprietary app) because that proprietary app’s source code is less likely to be among the publicly available dataset.

But I imagine the corpos aren’t going to look fondly on that for obvious reasons.

I wouldn’t characterize myself as “the GOS camp” (I use LineageOS) I just happen to agree with them sometimes, and this is one of those times.

I do imagine this response is to some degree influenced by their beef with /e/ (an OS I don’t have a high opinion of either, but for other reasons). It just seems to me that people see “not google” and think it’s a good thing, but a gatekeeper determining which OS you are allowed to use with what apps is fundamentally a bad idea even if it’s not google.

It’s much more correct to say that Lineage or Graphene are Android than saying that Android is Linux.

Both of these are correct. LineageOS and GrapheneOS are AOSP; AOSP is Linux.

Linux is a kernel. Other components must be added onto Linux to create a complete Linux operating system. Adding stuff onto Linux does not subtract any Linuxness from it. Any Linux OS is “real Linux.” Saying that some Linuxes are not real Linux is like saying if you add peanut butter to bread you no longer have “real bread.” It is nonsense.

GrapheneOS is critical of this initiative here and I think their criticism has merit. This simply moves the gatekeeper from Google to a handful of OEM’s who won’t let you use anything other than their blessed OS’s.

I think the fact that the maintainer is intimately knowledgeable about the original codebase is enough for it to not be a clean room re-implementation, no? That’s what makes it “clean”

You’re being downvoted but it’s true. The GNU Image Manipulation Program is held back by its inappropriate name. Not only does it have several problematic connotations it is also just not a very flattering term in general. To describe something as gimped is not a compliment.

As techies we’re sympathetic to the project and are likely to give funny or inappropriate names a pass, but think about how “normies” would see it, especially in e.g. a business or education context, with knowledge of the derogatory meaning(s) of the word.

It’s not really free (libre), merely “free” (gratis). Since that’s something that matters to me I won’t use it.

I don’t believe that is the case. I believe they have their own fork of Gecko that they maintain here.

This is proprietary

https://github.com/thunderclient/thunder-client-support/blob/main/LICENSE.txt

They stole our brain? Wasn’t that a Star Trek episode?

Brain and brain, what is brain 🧠?

I’ll go through and evaluate the freeness of each item on this list at some point however we’re already not off to a great start - Build engine unfortunately is non-free.

https://github.com/vogonsorg/BuildGDX/blob/master/buildlic.txt

I feel like listing copyright infringement next to actual harms is sort of an “arson, murder, and jaywalking” moment.

But yes, I wouldn’t mind banning discussion of this nonsense as well.

Hallucinations, but also not helped by the fact that people (knowingly or not) promote proprietary garbage in FOSS communities. I remember the “reddit answers” feature when I tried it out frequently suggested proprietary crap in “list of best FOSS” type topics.

I always had the impression that the free software idea had a stronger presence in Europe (and, generally, non-Anglo areas) and have generally chalked that up to the fact that the ambiguity of free (as in freedom)/free (as in beer) largely does not exist outside of English. Note that “open” is every bit as ambiguous as “free” here - i’ve had way too many arguments with people who thought “open” just means you can look at the source code (imagine thinking that a store was “open” just because you can look through the window and see products).

However IMO the author goes a bit too far in presenting free software seemingly as some sort of uniquely European concept - he seems to suggest that the creation of Linux came about entirely out of thin air, and almost reads to me like Linus Torvalds originated the idea of copyleft - with no mention whatsoever of the American GNU project upon whose shoulders he stands. Allegedly he was inspired by a talk Richard Stallman gave at his university in 1990.

https://www.oreilly.com/openbook/freedom/ch09.html

Edit: Git also did not come out of thin air, Linux developers were using a proprietary (American) VCS in the beginning, under a gratis license specifically granted for Linux development. The Australian developer Andrew Tridgell is arguably the person most responsible for inciting the development of git, as the proprietary VCS developer withdrew the gratis licenses once he developed a free tool which could interoperate with the proprietary servers.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/mcvoy.html

(That proprietary tool is now licensed under the Apache 2.0 license, but as far as I know no one uses it anymore)