And the GPL is okay with that? Can every repo under GPL put up a paywall?

Google: “The GNU General Public License (GNU, GPL, or GPL) is a free software license originally written by Richard Stallman of the Free Software Foundation, which guarantees that users are free to use, share, and modify the software without paying anyone for it.”

Within the analogy (as it compares to Redhat and the Rebuilders), how is Foo helping Bar? Isn’t Foo simply leaving the TVs outside the factory for people to come and pickup? A bunch of trucks branded “Bar” come by, pick some of them up, rebrand them, and take jobs to install them, jobs that Foo thought they were going to get? Isn’t Foo now requiring individual people to walk through a lockable door, sign their name, verify that they don’t work for Bar, and grab a TV instead of just leaving them outside in a pile?

I don’t see how Company Foo can dictate that all other entities (customers, for example) can receive a free TV on their doorstep (since the code is open source) except for Company Bar. To make it map better to the situation, Company Bar would receive a shipment of free TVs, rebrand them, ship them out to customers, and install them.

“They don’t have to give Company Bar TVs to install.” So the GPL doesn’t require that Company Foo permit free access to the TVs? They could decide to not give out their TVs to anyone?

Also, what if I wanted to get my cousin a free TV but charge him a few bucks to install it? Is this only a problem at scale?

Oh, I see. But what do you think of this translation:

“Company Foo makes TVs and is always working to make them better. They give them out for free with the hopes of making money installing them and providing guidance on how to use them, but someone starts Company Bar and installs them for cheaper and starts taking on installation jobs.”

Is this wrong? Isn’t this just the definition of an open market? Please let me know if I’m missing some kind of context. I hope that we can continue to discuss this respectfully.

I should say that I want any open source project with the motivation to write good software to have all of the funding they need to make that happen. I just don’t see how it can be justified in this instance when compared to any other market.

What’s the harm in doing a rebuild? Serious question. I simply don’t understand where the harm comes from. I would appreciate any insight. Thanks.

Here’s a post on Mastodon that links to their blog where they describe different clients.

https://writing.exchange/@erlend/110616473377954593

I haven’t experienced any crashes. I’m just getting annoyed with it resetting the view when I rotate my phone by accident. It takes me back to Local and changes my filter back to default. Painful.

How does this work with the code license? If this is all fine, doesn’t this mean that we should be avoiding the kind of license they’re using in the future?

Thanks!

This is awesome! Thank you!

I have a lot of interest in software development (and the Rust programming language specifically). Any plans to add a software development community? I don’t know of any feeds, though.

I don’t miss the endless commercials.

“Buying up Bethesda and trying to acquire Activision Blizzard is, Spencer argues, a way to compete with Sony.”

This has the same logic as buying up the largest gasoline chains, making them exclusively pump gas for drivers of your cars, as a way of competing with other car manufacturers. Dangerous.

Why are so few people using Tampermonkey? It’s so useful. Is there an alternative that I don’t know about?

I was surprised at how beautiful some of the art could be. I did not expect to enjoy it as much as I do.

So is Meta just not going to display/embed news in Canada anymore or is this a temporary measure until they roll out their plan to pay publishers?

“then it doesn’t deserve to exist”

When I hear that, I hear an implicit value judgement with Meta as the standard. The value of an instance is in if it can survive against a social aggregation to Meta’s instance. Only then is it worthy of existing, if it can compete with the degree of funding, advertising, and account creation streamlining that we would expect from a social media platform giant.

When I hear that, I hear that small, self-hosted instances don’t deserve to exist.

Passwords “should” be hashed anyway, so I don’t understand why there’s a limit. Are they actually being stored as plaintext in a VARCHAR(60) column in the database? Please tell me that’s not happening.

I used to have a phone with a replaceable battery and it was awesome. I would charge the other battery while using the phone all day, carefree. When it was about to die, I’d swap out the battery. It was basically like I had an instant charge of 100% on my phone. Those were good days.