The main problem is that, thanks to Chrome's massive market share, Google is in a position where they can effectively dictate the future of the Web as a platform.
We've already seen a few instances of this: Manifest v3 and FLoC/Privacy Sandbox, for example, were met with widespread opposition, but eventually they made their way into Chrome; WEI, on the other hand, was withdrawn due to backlash, but make no mistake, it will come back at some point.
The current state of Web standards can be summed up as: whatever Chrome does is the standard. The other browsers have to follow along, either because their modest market share doesn't afford them the luxury to be incompatible with Chrome, or because they're based on Chromium, so they hardly have a choice. The only exception is Apple, but let's be honest, they only do so because of their own business interests.
Ideally, Chrome/Chromium should be spun off as an independent non-profit foundation set up to act in the public interest. Obviously there would be trade-offs: a slower development cycle, new features taking longer to be shipped, etc. But in my opinion that's far preferrable to having Google continue to exert this level of control over the Web.
Unfortunately, the current administration has two months left in its term, so it's not going to happen.
I don't necessarily blame the developer for selling: I understand that some offers are difficult to refuse. But I absolutely do blame him for being dishonest to his users and contributors.
No one was told about this. People only found out about the sale by chance, because someone noticed that the Play Store listing details were changed and made a post on Reddit.
When confronted on GitHub, the developer gave evasive answers, citing vague and unrelated issues, such as "the quality of the Android ecosystem dropping".
I assume a lot of users bought these apps with the expectation that they were not infested with ads, data mining, dark patterns, etc. Most people have automatic updates enabled, and they will get all of the above shoved into their face before they can prevent it.
The value of these acquisitions is determined almost entirely by the userbase. The developer was only able to get this deal because of his users. At the very least, they deserved to be treated with some basic amount of respect.
I once found a nice open source ambient noise generator on F-Droid. Fully local, offline.
One day the developer decided to switch to a pay SaaS model. They updated the open source app to be a thin client for their web service.
Surely many existing users on the play store found quite a surprise when they updated!
F-Droid at least provides a little protection here, with the independent builds and easy downgrades, and if the community is big enough you see forks appear. But sadly this kind of cashing in is always going to be a risk with open source software in app stores.
So, to be fair, the thing about his displeasure with Android was in response to somebody asking if he would be involved in helping maintain a fork that’s being set up. He said no and gave his Android reasons. Which to me sounds like he’s literally getting out of Android development.
Now, I didn’t read all the way to the bottom of that thread and GitHub, but no one really seem to ask him why he didn’t give notice of to anybody. The comments were either like, no, don’t do it, or we’ve gotta fork this. They weren’t really about how he has handled the issue.
Doesn't the GPL protect third-party contributions in ways that liberal licences do not? I think the author might have trouble re-licensing third-party GPL contributions under a proprietary licence, but IANAL.
From what I gather, the author isn't re-licensing the code but is selling their copyright and brand (trademark?) to Zipo, who in turn will probably try to re-license it (without permission from other contributors) or will simply choose to violate the license.
The latter part is not legal as far as I know, which then makes the first part moot. Unfortunately, I cannot find a good reference for this from the FSF's website, I am going off of memory. But I believe this matter is precisely one of the reasons not to use a liberal licence, or be wary of contributing to liberally-licensed projects.
If all the other contributors had signed over their copyright to the original author, then the author or whoever he sells the copyright to could release future versions under a different license. Copyright assignment is often done (for instance, with official GNU projects) because it makes license enforcement easier. However it also makes re-licensing easier. As far as I know, other contributors to these projects never signed over their copyright, so the original authors can't sell that code to this company in the first place. Since the company doesn't own that code, they can only use it under the terms of the GPL.
With liberal licenses (BSD, etc), the license permits distributing binaries without releasing the code so re-licensing isn't even necessary. Any corp can take the code and make it proprietary in full compliance with the original license.
Makes sense, thanks for clarifying. Also, I take it whatever adware they want to add is proprietary, so that won't be compatible with the GPL'ed code anyway. The legal basis for this sellout seems very thin to me altogether. I think the company's only option would be to remove every single third-party contribution?
> GPL, on the other hand, can make it possible for a corp to buy the project and effectively prevent further development, like it happened with MySQL.
That's not correct.
All of the MySQL GPL code was and is free for continued development. The company has no right to stop you or me from continuing to work on it. MariaDB was forked from MySQL and continues to be GPL licensed.
How do you think the GPL "effectively prevent further development"?
Oh, sure you can develop it - same as with every other open license, including public domain. But it prevents you from replicating the original business model.
Explain? Isn't MariaDB the fork of MySQL that derived from that sellout? Oracle can't prevent further development of it or any other forks. The GPL is doing its job here.
"The fair use of a copyrighted work [...] for purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research, is not an infringement of copyright. In determining whether the use made of a work in any particular case is a fair use the factors to be considered shall include—
(1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
(2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
(3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
(4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work."
I don't know how one can read this as an impartial observer and make an honest argument that OpenAI is in the right.
Their use of copyrighted material does not fit any of the purposes enumerated in the first paragraph; it fails criteria #1 because it is of a commercial nature; it fails criteria #2 because it includes all kinds of works; it fails criteria #3 because it's not limited to very small extracts; and it fails at criteria #4 because their products are already having an obvious effect on the market.
Incidentally this will create a reaction that companies will make their content to be unavailable on public sources to prevent they working for free to feed AI freeloaders.
The opposite view is also valid. SEO-types will figure out on how to deploy their BS into models so that they will recommend their stuff.
As AI models tend to replace the “search” market, they will become as useless as today search tech.
I don't think it fails (3) specifically, and the others are moot if it doesn't fail (3). 99.9999% percent of the time, it just straight up does not reproduce any concrete part of the piece.
It just reproduces some very very hard to quantify tiny fraction of the logic or idea of the document.
It's like saying someone is infringing copyright if it's able to recite a document they read, because it has had an unimaginably tiny effect on their general writing skills, and they're able to recite it if they're asked to.
but it also fails on the very philosophical framework used to come up with those laws
they're using philosophical frameworks older than digital computers; which is ok, and is as should be. up to the point where those ways to understand fail to capture certain qualities of computers and digital technology which break the whole notion of copyright and have been doing it for a few decades now.
those lawmakers are using obsolete philosophy!
but we gotta wait until they all die off, is not like people, specially older people, are willing or possibly able to change how they think
I blame digital technology, it just doesn't work like the rest of reality does...
but they're using the 'same' obsolete philosophy as the founding father used when writing those things
so it's correct that they do this, else they would change the meaning behind those words.
what is needed is that congress approves new philosophy so they can use it to make better (meaning up to date) laws which are appropriate for this technological epoch
and what is needed for that is that the academic community comes up with new philosophy
Your post would be more substantial if it were informed by the arguments against the points you raise by the linked article. In general, looking only at the text of a law is insufficient as a basis for legal analysis.
and after that court case, I’ll go after other accepted fair use works under a 14th amendment challenge saying it needs to apply equally to other use cases simply because ads are being used, or a university charges for a book, or a publication charges for subscription access
which I’m fine with, dont think I’m trying to deter you with a slippery slope fallacy, we’re already at the bottom of it
And what does the training data then do? Just sit in a box, or produce content for "direct human consumption" that would have market impacts?
If all anyone has to do to invalidate copyright law is introduce an intermediary step where it is used for a non-consumption purpose, then copyright is already dead.
I question whether it's wise to launch a new product before the supply chain issues which have plagued Raspberry Pi for years have been fully resolved.
Granted, the situation has improved slightly over the past few months. But you will still find Pi 4s out of stock more often than not.
The CEO said last year not to expect a Pi 5 in 2023, because they wanted to take the time to recover. Why the u-turn?
The point here is likely to pull the rug out from under scalpers' feet.
With the Raspberry Pi 5 out in two weeks, all the held-back inventory of older models will be dumped, prices will plummet, availability will become a non-issue.
Finding older models were also almost impossible in the past two years. It's unlikely that Raspberry Pi 5 will solve the issue. But even so, it's not a wise move because what is the point of bringing a new model when they can't make it available to normal people?
The Raspberry Pi 5 will only be for sale to individuals until the end of this year (no industrial customers competing for inventory like the older models)
Plus, they're only launching the 4/8gb models to start. So there'll be another wave of cheaper ones a little later. Really hoping they still hit the $35 price point on the 1gb model.
I think I've seen Pi Kits at my local target. The issue with those is, they're for niche things I might not care about and now I got tech waste on my hands, but also might not be the exact model I want.
Note I'm not disagreeing, just saying in some cases, the ones in-store are kits.
I have and it is still a pain. Many websites still have limits on how many you can buy. The situation has improved but it is far from what your comment implies.
Many websites still have limits on how many you can buy.
For a hobbyist / individual, is that really a big deal? I mean, how many do you need at one time?
Anyway, the claim all along has been that supplies would be "back to normal" by the end of this year, and so far things seem to be tracking that way. If you look at rpilocator.com now, the entire first two pages are full of green lines, which is a DRASTIC improvement compared to just 6 months ago. And some of the major distributors are getting in shipments of 5,000, 6,000 at a time of some models and having them in stock for weeks on end. So one can clearly see that the situation is improving rapidly.
That said, I will make no claim one way or the other with regards to the question of whether or not shipping a Pi 5 is a "good idea" or not.
I'd be surprised if reselling through authorized sellers isn't much simpler and problem-free than selling them directly.
I also expect that using resellers ensures better odds of protecting the brand/project goodwill. Resellers deal with problems like "I paid a ton of cash for a board and it arrived late and/or broken". Support alone is a nightmare, and I recall that raspberry Pi struggled with PR when they started out. I vaguely recall Liz Upton being behind some ill-advised episodes that didn't improved Raspberry Pi's image and would get anyone other PR person sacked.
I think scalping is more of a supply issue, raising the official price of the product would only require more cash when scalpers are doing their buying.
Raspberry should raise the price until scalping isn't profitable. Keeping the price low is just handing money to scalpers that should be going towards future product development, until they can meet the demand.
I think it's completely acceptable so long that a legacy compatible "Pi SE" options would be available, in Pi 3 and Pi 4 form factors.
Raspberry Pi are used installed as components into third party engineered products, and Raspberry Pi brand holds no value to potential industrial customers if new products did not technologically exchange with existing such products. That is to say the exact mounting details, electrical compatibility, software compatibility, DO provide the value the "Raspberry Pi" brand offers if its competitors offered it.
What I'm saying is, if Espressif brought that new ESP-branded 32bit thing in the Pi 3 mounting dimensions and onboard eMMC and 1/5th performance at $35+9%, that kind of thing could outsell Pi 5 at this rate, and I wouldn't mind watching that happening.
There's nothing stopping a person from putting an ESP on a RPi B board format (or a Zero one), other than certain IO limitation. The upcoming P4 might be a candidate [0]. If you are interested in sbc in Pi form factors (B, Zero, CM3, CM4), then something I follow is CNX [1]. It will typically have notifications of any new Orange Pi, Libre Computer, etc.
It might make sense given pi2040’s PIO capabilities. Additionally, the RPi5’s io chip, RP1, might have some similar tricks inside.
The Raspberry Pi Pico has a fascinating peripheral known as the “Programmable Input/Output” (PIO). This device allows us to write very simple assembly programs to emulate a number of different peripherals and communication protocols.
RP1 is our I/O controller for Raspberry Pi 5, designed by the same team at Raspberry Pi that delivered the RP2040 microcontroller, and implemented, like RP2040, on TSMC’s mature 40LP process.
Through hole components resulted in previous Pi's being slightly slower to manufacture, the Pi5 only uses surface mount components which should increase Sony's build cadence.
Upton talked about this in an interview. It's partly the interplay of manufacturing at this point, too.
When they have parts, they'd like to catch up with the backlog faster. Because the 5 doesn't rely on the robots that place through-hole components, its production can to a degree "overlap" with the Pi 4, basically increasing the total number of boards created per hour.
Having two SoCs that don't require the same machines also helps ease a bottleneck there.
I'm much more surprised that they decided to launch with a GPU that would have been considered awful if it had been released with previous pi four years ago.
The recent crop of unrefined, made-for-experimenters RISC-V chips that have GPUs that are a LOT faster. Add an extra $0.50 to the chip cost and use an out-of-the-box Mali GPU that's several times faster and has better driver support courtesy of ARM (who now support the open source drivers).
My little pi CEO anecdote: Eben Upton visited local hackerspace many years ago, someone asked about Pi2 (or maybe 3) potential release date and should he wait or buy now, Eben answered they arent even planning next version. A week later Pi2 was announced.
Meh, that's pretty standard practice due to the Osborn effect. [1] At the Pi1 phase, Rpi was a pretty small company. It wouldn't have been great for them if rumor got spread far and wide that Pi2 was on it's way in a week or two.
I think the criticism of saying "we're not even thinking of a replacement" is fair, the standard dodge "we don't have anything to announce at this time" which is enough to avoid the Osborne Effect.
I don't find the "theft prevention" argument raised by many of the comments here particularly convincing.
If the concern is to prevent the resale of stolen devices or parts, Apple could simply provide users with a way to report the device as stolen (e.g. via iCloud.com), which would put the serial numbers of both the device and its parts into a blacklist. Problem solved.
Instead, the current system effectively assumes that ALL parts coming from a different device must've been "illegally obtained", which is nonsense.
You can do theft prevention without actively making independent repair shops' lives miserable. But Apple's goal is to make independent repair shops' lives miserable; theft is just a pretext. Just look at their track record, from the humble pentalobe screw all the way to the repair program NDAs.
Plus, as a developer, you're not required to go through Steam, if you don't think it's worth it.
There are plenty of other options (Epic Games, Microsoft Store, etc.), each with a different revenue share arrangement. Or you can self-publish on your own website and infrastructure (Minecraft did this and it worked out pretty well for them).
Most developers (not all!) clearly have decided that the value Steam provides (features+audience) is worth it. But, crucially, with Steam, it's a choice. With iOS, it's not. You are forced to go through the App Store whether you like it or not (for now, at least). And if tomorrow Apple decides that 30% is not enough and they'd like a bit more, there's not much you can do about it.
(Apologies if this is not terribly relevant to the rest of the thread, but it bugs me when I see this kind of "apples to apples" comparisons between Steam and the App Store)
Even on my Steamdeck I have itch.io and other launchers installed. Granted as a consumer, cross platform cloud saves of Steam and my 19 year old catalog has a pretty strong network effect.
> It is legal[1] to require users to agree to data collection or pay a subscription. Some news sites have already begun to implement this scheme.
From your link, almost at the top: "The cookie wall is a mechanism where the user has only one option to access the website: accept the processing of the cookies. The cookie wall is prohibited.". So no, requiring users to agree to data collection, per your article, is prohibited.
You have to read the whole article though, not just stop at the first paragraph.
The article makes a distinction between cookie wall (accept or no access) and paywall[1] (accept or pay). The former is prohibited, the latter has been okay'd by several national DPAs.
> The Austrian, French and Danish DPAs have already indicated that the paywall system is a valid solution as long as the subscription to the site has a modest and fair cost so that it does not constrain the user’s free choice.
> The Spanish DPA indirectly shared its position implying that cookie walls can be used as long as the user has been clearly informed of the two available options for accessing the service: 1. accepting the use of cookies; or 2. another alternative, “not necessarily free of charge“, that doesn’t require giving consent to cookies.
[1] Not to be confused with the "hard" paywall (pay or no access) we see on some publications. They've just called it like that for lack of a better term.
That is a monetization service. A short internet search quickly reveals that data-or-paywall is a bad idea at best, and explicitly illegal per multiple nations. It only requires one user from one of those states to file a report.
Counterpoint: if you compare Gandi's old/existing prices for all other products (domains, hosting, etc.) with the competition, they are not exactly on the cheap end. It seems to me they've always positioned themselves as a premium option. So either they decided to make an exception for email (why?) or the €0.35/month price is not necessarily the steal you think it is.
Could you elaborate on Cloudflare's support? My understanding was that unless you're on a plan ($20+/mo per site) you don't get access to support at all, just community/forums.
I only pay them for domains, and they have my CC for Cloudflare Workers (but I've never paid them).
I ran into a few issues with their platform, once with R2 when it first rolled out, and a couple of times with domains, and once with caching not clearing.
I think I submitted my request through some form (this is a while ago, hazy) and someone always got back to me within 4 hours. I think they're supposed to get back at least 24-48 hours.
Mileage may vary, and this was a while ago, so maybe things have changed now.
The main problem is that, thanks to Chrome's massive market share, Google is in a position where they can effectively dictate the future of the Web as a platform.
We've already seen a few instances of this: Manifest v3 and FLoC/Privacy Sandbox, for example, were met with widespread opposition, but eventually they made their way into Chrome; WEI, on the other hand, was withdrawn due to backlash, but make no mistake, it will come back at some point.
The current state of Web standards can be summed up as: whatever Chrome does is the standard. The other browsers have to follow along, either because their modest market share doesn't afford them the luxury to be incompatible with Chrome, or because they're based on Chromium, so they hardly have a choice. The only exception is Apple, but let's be honest, they only do so because of their own business interests.
Ideally, Chrome/Chromium should be spun off as an independent non-profit foundation set up to act in the public interest. Obviously there would be trade-offs: a slower development cycle, new features taking longer to be shipped, etc. But in my opinion that's far preferrable to having Google continue to exert this level of control over the Web.
Unfortunately, the current administration has two months left in its term, so it's not going to happen.