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airglow

@ airglow @lemmy.world

Posts
3
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62
Joined
2 yr. ago

  • Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to redefine open source so badly

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  • If you are referring to licenses that prohibit commercial use or prevent certain types of users from using the software, those licenses are not open source because they "discriminate against any person or group of persons" or "restrict anyone from making use of the program in a specific field of endeavor".

    For example, if a developer offers their software in a source-available "community" version that is restricted to non-commercial use and a proprietary "enterprise" version, neither the community version nor the enterprise version is open source. On the other hand, if a developer uses an open core licensing model by offering an open source "community" version and a proprietary "enterprise" version, the community version is open source while the enterprise version is not.

  • Why Mark Zuckerberg wants to redefine open source so badly

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  • Open source software can be sold at different prices to different customers, and still remain open source. Open source software can also be sold only to certain types of customers, and still remain open source. Who the developer decides to sell or distribute the software to, and at what price, is unrelated to how the software is licensed.

    However, because the Open Source Definition prohibits open source software licenses from discriminating against "any person or group of persons", the customers who buy open source software cannot be restricted from reselling or redistributing the software to any other individual or organization.

  • Grayjay for desktop has arrived!

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  • Nobody has any objection to companies making their source code available, and they are free to call their software "source-available", "source-first", or some other term because their source code is available. But if they restrict what users can do with the software, then it isn't open source. MongoDB, Redis, and even FUTO now all recognize this distinction.

    The FOSS community, at large, doesn't tolerate the watering down of recognized terms such as "open source" by bad actors who want to co-opt the term for marketing while denying users the right to use open source software for any purpose. That is known as openwashing. This kind of misappropriation is not welcome in any kind of movement, not just the FOSS movement.

    The free software and open source software movements both support rights for users, which include the right to use free software and open source software for all commercial purposes without restriction. These movements support the release of source code as one requirement for ensuring these user rights, but source availability is not the only requirement for a piece of software to be open source.

    There's no problem with creating another classification of restricted source-available licenses as long as it isn't called open source, a term rooted in the open source software movement's adoption of the Open Source Definition for over 20 years.

    As for myself, I personally prefer source-available software over software with no source available, though I also prefer FOSS over restrictively licensed source-available software.

  • Grayjay for desktop has arrived!

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  • Grayjay for desktop has arrived!

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  • Proprietary source-available software existed before open source software, and that's what these restricted licenses are. The FOSS community does not appreciate businesses co-opting the term open source to promote software that doesn't grant users the right to use the source code for any purpose.

  • Grayjay for desktop has arrived!

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  • Yikes. I'll be sticking with NewPipe and other FOSS apps.

  • Was America ever really made for you and me?

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  • uBlock Origin on Firefox with the annoyances filters enabled takes care of that for me.

  • What browser is better: DuckDuckGo or Vivaldi?

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  • Between these two options DuckDuckGo Browser is at least free and open source, while Vivaldi is closed source, which makes DuckDuckGo Browser the better choice.

    Firefox and its forks are better than both. Firefox's Gecko engine is independent of Google and Apple, while Vivaldi uses Google's Blink engine and DuckDuckGo Browser uses either Blink or Apple's WebKit engine depending on platform.

  • RFK Jr. says a Trump White House would immediately push to remove fluoride from water

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  • The paper does not recognize fluoride as a neurotoxin in its current application in Europe:

    Overall, despite the remaining uncertainties, and based on the totality of evidence the present review does not support the presumption that fluoride should be considered as a human developmental neurotoxicant at current exposure levels in European countries.

  • RFK Jr. says a Trump White House would immediately push to remove fluoride from water

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  • The article you linked explicitly concludes:

    Overall, despite the remaining uncertainties, and based on the totality of evidence the present review does not support the presumption that fluoride should be considered as a human developmental neurotoxicant at current exposure levels in European countries.

  • KDE's New Distro: Btrfs-Based, Immutable Linux OS, with Flatpak and Snap

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  • (and possibly Snap)

    I hope they exclude Snap from the default installation. Don't want an OS with built-in support for Canonical's closed source app store service when Flatpak is decentralized and FOSS on the server side.

  • TIL that by opening plastic items, between 14,000 and 75,000 microplastic particles are released

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  • Opera explains how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support as Google Chrome disables it

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  • Hey, I think you're totally right to challenge a statistic when it looks questionable. Censuswide didn't release the full data publicly, and the survey was commissioned by the Ghostery ad blocker, so there's reason to suspect that the data is biased.

    I trust the YouGov data more, since YouGov is also a credible pollster and the data is being provided as market research data for businesses. However, since I don't subscribe to their data service, I don't have details of the methodology here, either.

  • Opera explains how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support as Google Chrome disables it

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  • Frankly, I'm not sure about the quality of the Censuswide survey.

    Market data from YouGov Global Profiles shows that 51-52% of people globally (in "48 markets") use ad blocking on at least 1 device. That percentage is 45-46% for people in the US.

    My point is that when a significant proportion of internet users have ad blockers, they're not just niche tools anymore.

  • The Fennec Android browser is currently behind on Firefox security updates, deemed unsafe by F-droid

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  • Mull has defaults that improve privacy at the cost of performance and website compatibility. They maintain a list of changes that you can reverse through about:config. If Mull seems slow for you, consider re-enabling the JavaScript JIT.

  • Opera explains how it plans to keep uBlock Origin support as Google Chrome disables it

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  • Deleted

    Permanently Deleted

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  • Tusky has been working very well for me on Android. There's also Ice Cubes for iOS. Both are free and open source.

  • UBO Lite Pulled from Firefox Store by developer

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  • Any details on that? The full uBlock Origin works well on mobile and I don't see how a lite version with reduced blocking effectiveness could be more useful.

  • I like both, but usually prefer Ubuntu

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  • That's not the worst possible scenario, I'd love to see the Snap Store completely replaced with decentralized FOSS alternatives. Any scenario in which the Snap Store takes market share from decentralized FOSS alternatives is considerably worse.

    Also, who said I wouldn't use proprietary apps? I refuse to use Snap because Flatpak and other FOSS application packaging solutions that aren't locked to a store controlled by a single for-profit company already serve my needs. I don't have any objection to using proprietary apps that don't have alternatives that meet my needs.