• 124 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 22nd, 2023

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  • For context, and to help with the semantics, allow me to add that 1 million seconds is 12 days. Meanwhile, 1 billion seconds is around 31 years. So, fairphone CEO can hardly be a billionaire. They do have profit, sure. We all make a living, their is way higher than average but still far from those ‘unicorns’ we call billionaires.

    Ps. I’m with you since your first comment. You just got downvoted because it was being too snarky. Thankfully other user replied showing all the bad things Valve has (while, as we all know, having 1 tangentially-nice thing which is that they used Linux for their products)


  • Some GPLv2 projects monetize by selling: support, extension via custom features, or simply the permission for a commercial use. This is possible, and it’s what I called “the legalese package”. Imagine ffmpeg being able to charge every year any amount they want to the biggest clients, like GAFAM. Yet you’re still able to use it non commercially… To be fair, there’re some middle uses, that get the disadvantage of having to break the license or ask for permission. For example, if you create anything with ffmpeg, then as an indie dev you’d need to launch your product breaking the license or paying them… But even so, situation is manageable (e.g. ffmpeg could spare you and/ or give a 1 year permission to small businesses)






  • “Allow me to interject and explain the four liberties…” (Or, goto fsfe.org/freesoftware )

    If I understand correctly the biggest issue for FFMPEG and other projects is not only the Google and Microsoft that use them without giving back, but their chosen License. They gave permission to corporations to do this. One of the potential ways to fix this situation, is to change the license. For example from LGPL to AGPL. And then they can sell the legalese package of allowing them to break their license. The biggest difficulty is that, as a project, they’d need consent from every past and future contributors. So, yeah. I get it. This is a mess.

    It would be way more easier if more corporations donated to open source projects… There’s too much labour that’s invisible



  • The goal is on documentation itself. There’s technical stuff that I do, combining the docs of 2 or more software pieces. These don’t have much space anywhere. At some point, I have been doing this with the assistance of AI. That’s why I started to wonder, maybe it’s not worth the effort… But that’s a negative thought I might just put aside. I am very thankful for all the inspiring and motivating answers I am getting here.


  • Of course not. In the same sense that you were not romanticizing the war between empires. The Incas for example were able to dominate a lot of land. The greed was there. To understand we are humans, we need to admit even the parts that put us to shame. Only from recognizing shortcomings we can build something better. And it’s not like humans are always greedy, survival of the strongest, yada yada. That’s an oversimplification that some build over this fact (it’s their agenda.), that we are not perfect. But it’s not an essentialism, we can be better.

    Anyway, sorry I ended up ranting off topic. Glad to share.








  • Cure for what? That’s a fascist argument. I am not accusing you. Just wanted to inform. I was intellectualizing like that once: if all humans die, life on the planet would thrive, species that go extinct wouldn’t be an issue we would only be seeing it as a product of the evolution of more biodiversity for sure…

    Yet… A friend pointed out, that such disease is just a theorization and reality has shown that this kind of scenarios are lived in, for example, catastrophes. In those cases, the world ending event hits harder to the most vulnerable. Typically, the poorest fraction. Billionaire and other rich people will have resources, bunkers, time, and so on… They may even be saved.

    And this is actually their agenda in, for example, climate change denialism and inaction.

    That’s one reason why elites don’t care about the ecocide.