hendrik

But that’s just not true. I think you’re confusing this with some source-available licenses or these silly amendmends to licenses that make it defacto proprietary. But this isn’t the case here. This statement in the CLA doesn’t take away any rights. It gives additional ones. And it’s in addition to the AGPL. All of the AGPL applies in addition to the CLA. Every single freedom, just as if the CLA weren’t there. You can use it, modify it, copy it, etc…

The “around a decade” of course applies. And none of that has to do with the signing away copyright per CLA. You also don’t know if Linus Torvalds is around in 5 years and keeps maintaining the kernel to your liking. You also don’t know if any of the big open source projects of today get bought by some shady investors and the next updates won’t be free software anymore… These things happen. And it has little to do with a CLA (like this one). Happens to plain standard licenses without extras, too. And it does to ones with this kind of licensing. But this really isn’t the distinguishing factor.

I think what you mean is modified licenses. Or similar additions that render something not open source anymore. I agree, you should avoid those projects at all costs. But that’s a different story and not what this project is doing.

My point is a different one: While focusing on some small details of a hypothetical case that I think you got partly wrong… Have you checked for any big elephants in the room? Because I don’t see anyone talking about the database / search index and whether that’s available. The website is just a very small part and just the frontend to query the database. I’d say it’s almost pointless to discuss what we’re arguing about. I can code a search frontend website in a week, that’s not the point. And completely irrelevant if it’s open source… What about the data that powers the search engine? I think that’d be the correct question to ask. Not whether the frontend is 99% or 110% open source.

Let’s hope this means the resulting oversaturation/-production will then make laptops half the price for us Europeans.

That “either” means, it doesn’t matter which path you took, from now on the following text applies to both… So you don’t need to care.

I’m not sure if you people are paying attention to the right thing. It’s fairly common to do this. And it doesn’t mean they can take away anything. Everything will still be AGPL and still available. Someone is then going to fork it and maintain it as it happened with lots of other projects. This just means they’re also able to also sell it under different conditions, including your patches and contributions.

I think what you should pay attention to is, whether the search index is open or closed. That’s something with significant impact. Not if they’re able to monetize your small bugfix without paying you. I mean that’d be nice, too. But not a super big thing unless you contribute a substancial amount of code. I mean you get a whole open source search engine in return for signing away your copyright. And it doesn’t change anything for the people using the software. For them it’s still AGPL. And the maintainer could stop developing the software at any point, anyways. Could (and does) also happen to projects without a CLA.

And learning from the dataset is kinda the whole point of LLMs, right? I see some fundamental problems there. If you ask it where Alpacas are from, or which symptoms make some medical conditions, you want it to return what it memorized earlier. It kind of doesn’t help if it makes something else up to “preserve privacy”.

Do they address that? I see lots of flowery words like

Integrating privacy-preserving techniques often entails trade-offs, such as reduced accuracy or increased computational demands, […]

But I mean that’s just silly.

Btw: With the regular Linux software mdraid, you can also swap drives without powering down. That all works fine while running. Unless your motherbard SATA controller craps out. But the mdraid itself will handle it just fine.

I read about some PCBs that let you repurpose old laptop screens but I’m pretty sure that’s more complicated with phones and tablets. These have tiny and very specialized electronics. Oftentimes not built in a modular way. And people tend to break them, give them away or dispose of them. I don’t see people repurposing these devices.

And it’d be hard to bypass the boot time and Android experience. Sometimes you can flash a custom ROM like LineageOS. Though, that’s still Android. Other operating systems aren’t really a thing within that ecosystem.

I like to flash LineageOS and then use extra phones/tablets as a kitchen radio or TV or as a TAN generator.

You could also install Termux and install Linux software. Like a webserver or something like that.

What does “Until Morale Improves” mean? I read the rest of the article but can’t find what this is about.

Let’s hope it’ll get us a few more Linux handheld devices and maybe closer to the dream of a decent Linux phone. I bought a Pinephone back then, but that’s pretty limited. And we also need better power management, software that is designed for small touchscreens. And support for the dozens of other diverse components in a phone, touchscreen, camera, gps, all the other chips… Having the SoC supported is only the start.

Some of the German IT news sites I read seem to add a note if they change something of substance. I don’t think they do that for minor things or if they fix the spelling… I can’t find any example but I’m pretty sure I’ve read some articles on heise.de that ended in a paragraph ~we’ve corrected xyz which was stated incorrectly in an earlier version of the article~ They don’t do Git or anything like that, though.

Certain people in another large country are currently proposing tariffs.

We currently habe arbitrary numbers to choose from:
https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html

I’ve read exactly the opposite article a few days ago:

https://www.cio.com/article/3540579/devs-gaining-little-if-anything-from-ai-coding-assistants.html

All is well that ends well? cough

Uh, nice. Seems fucking over their users and moderators turned out well for them. I wish there was some hidden sarcasm, but I don’t think there is.

Read the ActivityPub protocol and a book on webdevelopment… Also have a look at existing projects and their codebase.

Wow, that lasted a long time. I remember reading the original article a few days ago😆

Did they cover their asses and write down beforhand, it was just an experiment? Otherwise this is just some lame excuse and classic backpedaling.

https://sepiasearch.org/search?search=autism&resultType=videos

I got the same warning for Mull. Is the patching so extensive? I always thought they have a patchset for some of the shortcomings and just apply that onto the newest Firefox version… Or do they do a full code review on all of the changes?

Mmhm, I’m not sure if I’m entirely on the same page. Admins have complained. Users would like to run their own instances, but they can’t as the media cache is quite demanding and requires a bigger and costly virtual server. And we’re at the brink of DDoSing ourselves with the way ActivityPub syncs (popular) new posts throughout the network. We still have some room to grow, but it’s limited due to the protocol design choices. And it’s chatty as pointed out. Additionally we’ve already had legal concerns, due to media caching…

Up until now everything turned out mostly alright in the end. But I’m not sure if it’s good as is. We could just have been lucky. And we’re forced to implement some minimum standards of handling harassment, online law, copyright and illegal content. Just saying we’re amateurs doesn’t really help. And it shifts burden towards instance admins. Same for protocol inefficiencies.

I agree - however - with the general promise. We’re not a big company. And that’s a good thing. We’re not doing business and not doing economy of scale here. And it’s our garden which we foster and have fun at.