it's a real shame no one warned us this would happen when a bunch of corporatists and opportunists wrested the term "open source" from the advocates of true freedom in the late '90s.
Also the FSF squandered its opportunity being RMS’ hobby / support organization and skipped a lot of important discussions, even before the skeevy behavior they’d been ignoring came to light. I used to donate in the 90s but … really feels like that was just flushing cash.
ChatGPT came into the picture long after the open source issues we’re talking about were apparent. AI companies are making it even worse but solid advocacy in the 2010s or 2000s would’ve been helpful.
I'm just not sure how to connect this rhetoric to the facts of the source link, where a hobbyist attempted to extend some source-available code to support a new technology, and the CEO of the for-profit company who owns the license said he's not allowed to for business reasons.
You can be and I am sympathetic towards the CEO! I wouldn't accept a PR for cannibalize_my_revenue.txt either. But if we insist on analyzing the issue according to the categories you're describing, it seems undeniable that the CEO is a corporatist, and that he put an unfree license on his repository to stop people from freely modifying or redistributing it.
There were more-or-less two original spheres of OSS. There were the academics who were too "pure" and holier than thou for everyone else, and then there were commercial FOSS that OS'ed because something already reached its reasonable lifetime potential and it was cool to give away the plans to a cult classic to let it live on in some other mostly permanent, mostly released form. When OSS becomes a mindless pattern, an absolute prerequisite to investment, and/or ceases to be released without regret, resentment, and/or strings attached, then it's not cool anymore and becomes toxic.
The day I stopped giving half a fraction of a shit was the day Google served me malware in an ad. It was one of those fake "Download" buttons on a very popular open source tool. I wonder how many people have been harmed by that.
> medium you are consuming may not exist at all
I've realized that's not my problem. It's not like most of the internet is healthy anyway. It's psychologically manipulative and designed to keep you fearful, angry, spiteful, jealous, and above all, depressed.
Fuck Google. Fuck Meta. And fuck every single last person working for them.
It pretends to be. But in reality it's always been a VC honey pot.
I've stopped commenting here. I've made it a personal rule to only speak out against this tyranny and never talk about tech fluff, which is 100% of the front page of HN. I don't give two solid fucks about SQLite when the US government is throwing people in death camps in El Salvador.
This site is straight tech bro fascism. People are finally realizing that Elon isn't the guy his PR team created. He's not Tony Stark.
you have a lot of faith that Big Balls hasn't been compromised. Because surely none of them are using their personal smartphones or laptops and are following strict access protocols. Seeing that they are so so careful with everything else they've been doing.
I feel like this is a bad episode of the Twilight Zone.
One of the more bizarre things with this whole saga is seeing people act as though the existing government employees are any different. People throwing our “vetted” like it means something meaningful.
No, “vetting” basically means they checked to see if you ever got caught embezzling money, or in the case of clearances, if you lied about committing any crimes (committing them is ok). They are regular people and getting them to abide by sensible IT policies is a giant nightmare and compliance is poor.
Heck, have people already forgotten Trump’s tax returns were leaked by politically motivated “vetted” people working for the IRS? Not the first time that happened either. And they didn’t even find anything interesting!
"Had previously been fired from a job for leaking sensitive company data" tends to be the sort of thing that stops you from getting jobs where you work with extremely sensitive data.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and say no, not without first going through a change management process and going through a privileged session management system, except in the case of an emergency break-glass scenario where using those emergency creds throws all kinds of big DANGER alerts across the org if the access was unexpected. I can't speak to the Treasury and IRS specifically, but that's kinda standard across large orgs, especially ones that get audited regularly on their handling of sensitive data.
Some system protect against that. The philosophy behind IBM RACF is :《 A key security principle is the separation of duties between different users so that no one person has sufficient access privilege to perpetrate damaging fraud.》
> The philosophy behind IBM RACF is :《 A key security principle is the separation of duties between different users so that no one person has sufficient access privilege to perpetrate damaging fraud.》
I am so primed to parse emoticons eagerly that I thought that the philosophy was :《
> No, “vetting” basically means they checked to see if you ever got caught embezzling money, or in the case of clearances, if you lied about committing any crimes (committing them is ok). They are regular people and getting them to abide by sensible IT policies is a giant nightmare and compliance is poor.
However little is involved in vetting, it's something that has been done for regular government employees and hasn't been done for these employees. I'd rather have minimal safeguards than none.
The deal still has me scratching my head. They tossed out the brand name and logo. Elon already had the X name and domain. For much less than $44B I feel like you could clone Twitter and come up with a strategy to acquire users. Hell, for $1 billion you could probably pay a good number of influencers to move to your platform. $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.
> $44 billion is an absolute fuckton of money to kill Twitter and move those people to your pet project.
What's the point of having Fuck You Money if you can't say "Fuck You?" Your value assessment isn't taking into account the value of destroying old Twitter, of removing a major bullhorn in the information environment away from people that Musk probably considers adversaries at best, and malevolent actors at worst. Simply standing up his own competing platform would not have accomplished this.
It's weird that everyone and their mum "could" clone twitter easily. And yet the only products of note that's more than dismissive hackernews comments/slideware with something in production at similar scale was meta with threads and that's still inferior in terms of search and discoverability and scaffolded with the guts of Instagram and bluesky which has the advantage of being founded by Jack Dorsey and has been around for years now. For all the big talk musk et al have I'm not sure they could actually have built a clone. You can pay influencers but if we look at how dominant tiktok is/was making buzz and content is more of an outcome of a bunch of incentivisations and the kind of non technical community management stuff people dismiss as marketing than throwing money at all the big names you can find.
I know it's fashionable to use flatpak, Docker, etc. but I'd still rather not have 30 instances of Gtk running for every GUI app I decide to run. Consider that we still run on Raspberry Pi, etc.
> aren’t these shared libraries a supply chain attack vector
Not any more than the apps themselves. If you're downloading a static binary you don't know what's in it. I don't know why anyone trusts half the Docker images that we all download and use. But we do it anyway.
I think what you mean when you say instance of Gtk is a copy of the Gtk library in memory?
That's not how flatpak works; identical libraries will share the same file on disk and will only be loaded once, just like non-flatpak apps. And because Gtk is usually part of the runtime most apps will use one of a few versions.
There was also Kahn, which was a similar competitor.
I remember playing Duke3d over the internet. I was completely giddy as me and my friends all flew around with jetpacks on trying to kill each other with pipebombs.
The downside was that those games were obviously not optimized for internet latency and there wasn't much you could do about it. But I definitely had a blast.
EVs are the worst proposition for a car rental. When you rent a car, you're planning on driving it. Much more than the car that sits on your driveway and only takes you to work and back every day.
But it doesn't help that Tesla is a tech company and their product is sold as a tech product. No one wants to buy a 3 year old used iPhone, either.
But no, don't let me stop you from justifying your hatred of certain people through the ever-convenient excuse of "evolution".