I don’t drive, but rarely feel restricted by this. I’m able to get anywhere important to me, just with walking, cycling, buses and trains. I live in London, I know it’s not the same everywhere, but I’m happy that I don’t have to drive.

I quite strongly disagree with this post.

Here’s the point: If you can’t handle contributions to your open-source project, then maybe just make it closed source. Leave the developer community alone rather than poison it.

No. They have given us a gift. Even if they just give a single tarball and nothing more, they have increased the total value in the world, not poisoned it. If you don’t like it, then walk away yourself. No-one is forcing you to interact with this project, no-one is forcing you to use it. Go associate with other projects that share your values, but don’t push away people who are sharing something freely and improving the total value in the world.

What you are doing is saying to someone, who is already giving you a gift, “that’s not enough, I want more. And if you’re not going to give me more, you should stop giving gifts to anyone at all”.

The inherent disrespect is extremely corrosive—there seems to be no sense of the time that goes into providing issue reports and PRs. That includes the bad ones—and the AI ones.

So maintainers should have to dedicate their free time and energy (often more time and energy than it took for the other person to raise the issue report) to something they don’t want to do and will make them more burned out? The author acknowledges they’re volunteers, but doesn’t seem to have really internalised what that means. And so they are saying “they should spend their free time doing what I want them to do”.

Yet if you want to be part of the open-source community, then start with manners. Treat your contributors with respect and gratitude. Go out of your way to handle issues.

If you want to be part of the open-source community, accept that some people have different priorities than you, and that no-one in this space owes each other anything. As I say, they have already given you a gift. Is that not enough?

Ok. Now I’ve calmed down a bit, I can meet the author halfway. I think that a lot of projects could do a better job of communicating what their boundaries and expectations are. If projects were more upfront and extremely clear about what level of support they were willing to provide (like SQLite), that could only be a good thing. That way, no-one would waste time contributing to a project in ways that the maintainers have made clear they don’t want to accept, and it would prevent misunderstandings like this.

I get that it feels bad to spend time on a contribution and then see nothing come of it. It feels like you are left hanging and I empathise. But even if your contribution is not accepted into the original project, you’ve still offered something by making it public. Other people can pick that up in their forks if they want to. And if you discover that it’s important to you to be in a community who quickly reviews your contributions, then you now know to choose a different project to contribute to, or to start your own.

Then it wouldn’t be free as in FOSS

I had the same perception as you before I read the article, so I presume we both made the same wrong assumption. Apologies if I misunderstood your comment.

It’s not suggesting anyone changes the licenses to enforce this. Instead, it suggests that the package repositories should charge companies for access. Companies that want to use a free mirror will, but many will pay for convenience of using the official repository. A cut of that money is then automatically shared to maintainers.

What made me think along those lines is that someone I know vibe-coded their own personal/private XMPP client recently. I’m sure it has lots of problems, but it does what they need and has a nice UI that looks how they wanted. In their case, it doesn’t need to be bug-free - just bug-free on their machine, for the tasks that they do with it.

But for some software, I definitely agree about the reliability and edge-cases / environments. Knowing 1000s of people have tested my backup software and ironed out the bugs is a big plus. I can’t imagine many people would want to use a vibe-coded one.

Thinking about Blender, IIRC, their filetype is effectively a memory dump of the process. So, if I worked in an animation studio and wanted a custom feature, I’d definitely write a plugin instead of making a bespoke tool. But then again, if I could export to .ofx or another common format, and have everything import perfectly, I’d be more tempted to go for a bespoke tool again. It’s interesting to think through the scenarios.

I use AI at work, but not at home.

There was an interesting post here which reasons through when it’s ethical to use proprietary software to further FOSS. I generally agree with the argument, but AI doesn’t meet that threshold for me.

I think our goal should be for everyone to be able to use FOSS for everything. That means, if we use proprietary tools, we have to be able to replace them eventually. Otherwise, we’re just dependent.

But that doesn’t seem possible with AI yet. If there was a project making a truly open AI (open weights, open, consensually retrieved and properly licensed training data, open harnesses, open training infra etc.), and using existing AIs somehow helped with that, I’d be all for it.

Another aspect is how it shifts the way things are made. Projects are built on collaboration and shared understanding, but AI is such a different way of working - so what does it mean for some people in a project to use it and others not to? Why would I spend a week working on a very tight, clean patch when someone else can re-implement literally the whole project in an hour? And why would they contribute to this shared project at all, when they can build something tailored exactly to their needs by themselves?

It makes me wonder if FOSS as we know it will become less important, but open standards will become more important. Since you can make software tailored exactly to your needs, clients will proliferate. But when you have to integrate with others, you still have to negotiate and come to an agreement on how to connect together, so that work will be even more valuable.

Leahy informed them their flight processing system did not have a dedicated backup due to Nats being in the midst of a “complete overhaul of its systems” and because the amount of data it keeps meant duplicating it would cost “vast amounts”.

Rolfe ruled out a cyber-attack, which was initially suspected, saying he “believes we’ve never seen an incident happen more than once, so this will be something different that we’ve never seen in 50 years of operation”.

Oh my goodness, that’s terrifying! How is it that bad? They sound like they’re just winging it and hoping for the best, and this is an air traffic control system!

For me, it’s the Jaffa Cake followed by the Chocolate Bourbon, followed by the Ginger Nut.

Hobnob and Jammie Dodgers are honourable mentions.

I’ve never had Garibaldi, but it looks good from here :)

Ginger Nuts were my Grandma’s biscuit of choice. I think my Grandad had those polar bear mints instead of biscuits (yuck!) Very fond memories of both though :)

That’s awesome! It looks like it was definitely worth the effort!

This is what I love about bikes. Simple, cheap, repairable, and last forever with a bit of maintenance. And even if they deteriorate a bit over time, they can be brought back to life again :)

Thank you so much! Of course, no worries if you drop it at any time.

Ah, the AI crawlers have screwed everything up again :( I’m sorry that it’s so difficult. Anyway, no pressure.

would a RSS feed for the last post be enough for the feed to have the text and the remaning be just a link

Yeah, that would be enough for me! Or even a separate feed with just the latest article. I’m pretty sure my feed reader would notice a change to the existing entry and download it again when it updated to be just the link, although I’m sure I could filter that out.

I’ve seen a few of your posts around on the fedi and they’ve always made me think, so thank you for sharing! Would you consider a full-text RSS feed by any chance? I’d love to add your blog to my reading list.

Yeah! I stepped backwards onto what I thought was someone’s foot, apologised, but it turned out it was actually the prong of a swivel chair.

I’ve checked out Gemini a couple of times and find it a fun project.

In my opinion though, we gain more by participating in the wider web. There are a plethora of small web websites out there - it’s only difficult to find them. Blogrolls/blogrings and dedicated search engines like Marginalia help with this.

This also lets everyone have a more granular definition of what’s important to them: lack of javascript, minimal page size, lack of styling, full-text RSS feeds, compatibility with text-mode browsers etc. Everyone can pick and choose what they value without having to hash out agreement over the spec.

Are you the original author? If so, thanks, I enjoyed the post! It made me think. I’ve subscribed to the RSS feed but it returns 404 for me FYI.

My main questions is, what does platform cooperative provide that is not already provided by open standards, and do you think that governance should be tied to the protocol, or exist below it at the instance and/or software implementation level?

I think that democratic processes should exist where this is power imbalance, exploitation and no safety release valve that lets the vulnerable people freely step away. E.g., we have democracy to prevent authoritarian rule, and because it’s hard to move country. We have workers co-ops and unions to prevent the power imbalance between bosses, customers and workers.

So, a co-op of taxi drivers makes sense to me, because all of those conditions exist: Uber is dominant, they own the two-sided market so it’s more difficult for customers or drivers leave, and the drivers are exploited because they have few alternatives.

But, don’t open source and open standards provide safety release valves that prevent such exploitation? At every layer of the stack, you can choose to swap out a part, be it client, server, instance, etc. You can choose to engage in the standards process, or you can build your own software that doesn’t completely follow the rules if you want, and still take part in the network. Who is being exploited in this environment, when there are ways to jump ship from any of these?

Of course, open standards are vulnerable to capture by big players, since the user count determines your influence over the network. But, is that really a big problem? You still get the tools to build your own pocket of the network with like-minded people, like what we’re doing on the fediverse now. You can still convince people to leave through argument, persuasion, freedom of association and making it easier for them to jump ship without losing everything.

On the fediverse, we already have co-ops where each user gets a stake in the rules, moderation, etc. We also have instances that are run as more of a benevolent dictatorship, but where everyone is there freely. We have single-user instances too. To me, this is the best of all worlds, because everyone can choose the governance model that suits them, and we can all co-operate together.

This is where my opinion depends on what you’re arguing for. Is your suggestion to tie the governance to the protocol itself, or to push for more co-operatively run instances and software? If the latter, I’m all for it :) but if it’s the former, to me that’s a step backward, because we’re placing a checkpoint on who can join the network that removes the safety release valves and pushes people into a democratic system that they might not agree with.

Open source is about who can see the code. Federation is about who owns the network. Cooperativism is about who holds the keys.

For me, this the essence of the argument. But I’m not quite sure what the keys are to: what power and influence do they unlock? Open source makes sense to me because the people doing the work have a say in what’s happening. I’m nervous to give power to users, who are not doing work, over volunteers, who are doing work. But then, when there is funding involved, I think that naturally leads to more users having more influence, because they can always take it away if their priorities are not met. See Snowdrift Co-op for instance. To me, the biggest solution is finding a way to fund open source projects directly from users.

I have a lot of search shortcuts configured in Firefox, and find vertical search is a good way of avoiding google.

• Wikipedia, Wikidata: for factual things, finding links to homepages of brands or well-known venues, macros of ingredients.
• Wiktionary: for definitions.
• OpenStreetMap: for physical locations, to get opening hours or websites of physical shops.
• OpenStreetMap Wiki, PostmarketOS Wiki, Debian Wiki, Guile Mailing List Archives: if you can find a wiki, forum or mailing list dedicated to your special interest, then searching these directly can be pretty good.
• Lemmy: for recommendations, general opinions, looking for negative opinions about services before I try them.
• Podcast Index: I used to use Apple Podcast’s website to find the canonical RSS feed for a podcast, but someone on Lemmy pointed me to this website, which is more independent.
• Marginalia: for recipes, especially with the no javascript filter enabled, just by typing in the names of some ingredients I want to use, I’ll find all sorts of weird and wonderful webpages with nice recipes on.
• Repology: to look for software packages.

And then, for general searches, I normally start off with Marginalia, followed by SearXNG, followed by DuckDuckGo if desperate.

I actually want that. Not so I can chat to the AI, but so that everyone else who is forced into the office so that they can be on a call with their teammates in other regions don’t distract me, and vice versa. I have noise cancelling headphones, but even they aren’t enough.

Prosody for me. I set it up over 2 years ago, and the only time I touched it was when updating to the latest Debian stable and enabling some new features in the config files. It’s been rock-solid and just worked without complaint.

I’m pretty good at Mario Kart. I hadn’t played it for about 10 years, but I beat all my friends when I played Mario Kart World for the first time with them recently.

For me it comes down to trust, since the distro maintainers have root on your system. You’d better trust their competence and alignment with your values!

If you were Starmer, and wanted to keep any chance to hold onto power but also not completely tarnish your legacy, what would you do?

I reckon I’d set out a timetable for departure, with a default of Andy Burnham, say “I won’t start a contest, but if anyone else does, I’ll put myself forward” and then wait to see what Streeting does.

That way, if Streeting (or anyone else) does challenge, you can stay in with a shot while also not being the person who caused all the chaos.