Why Mozilla is betting on a decentralized social networking future
I should have specified that the Audacity CLA allowed Muse Group to relicense Audacity from GPLv2 to GPLv3. Yes, I agree with you that not all CLAs are bad. While you keep the copyright to all your contributions, because the copyright is assigned to them (? I'm not actually sure about this), they can relicense it. The CLA agreement.
You grant MUSECY SM LTD, an affiliate of MuseScore and Ultimate Guitar, (“Company”) the ability to use the Contributions in any way. You hereby grant to Company , a perpetual, non-exclusive, worldwide, fully paid-up, royalty free, irrevocable copyright license to reproduce, prepare derivative works of, publicly display, publicly perform, sublicense, and distribute your Contribution and such derivative works.
There was quite a lot of confusion and outrage about this at the time, so I can't recall whether Muse Group specifically said they wanted to include Audacity in Apple's app store or this was given as an example of why the CLA could be beneficial. My rebuttal was this is not a particularly noble cause. There was also the argument that the FSF requires you to sign a CLA for its own projects so it can reserve the right to relicense it if it benefits the project. My rebuttal to this was...well, it's the FSF. The day the FSF relicenses their software under a non-free license is the day they die.
All in all, I'm not worried yet.
I don't work with music at all, so most of this update doesn't mean much to me. However, it's nice to see the export window was improved—I want my single-click behavior, damn it.
The telemetry is limited to update-checking and error reports. Distributions will disable update-checking because they already handle updating Audacity. Error reports need to be manually submitted. It's possible that most distributions just disable networking altogether when building Audacity, if it even exists in their repositories at all. Fedora's package is waaay out of date. Arch disables networking altogether.
Audacity has still instituted a CLA. This is quite worrying. But nothing has happened yet.
That's a great explanation! Thank you, I get it now. I always did wonder what exactly IPC was about. Yay for Rust in the kernel.
This is the kind of high-quality technical discussion I don't understand a word of that rarely surfaced on reddit.
It seems like this issue is finally, actually fixed with the new driver release.
I haven't had a chance to try it out but the responses on the thread look promising.
Edit: Ah, I see you've already gotten the news. Well, good to hear.
This confused the hell out of me last month. You can install two different versions off fmpeg/gstreamer on Fedora. One version of ffmpeg—the completely free, patent-unencumbered version—is available in Fedora's official repositories. This one does not include decoders for H.264 or H.265. You can still install OpenH264 from Cisco and use that to decode H.264 video, but there is no "free" way of decoding H.265 video. For that, you need to go to RPMFusion, which is not associated with Fedora. They ship the H.265 and AAC decoders, among other codecs that cannot be shipped without paying a licensing fee. RPMFusion is a third-party and they believe they can't/won't be pursued for patent infringement.
And all of that is great, but I installed ffmpeg from RPMFusion and it still didn't work. I had to mindlessly copy commands until it did work. So you're not alone. I'm just giving you the context in case you were curious.
I would be interested in seeing Mozilla invest in making Mojeek better. I think they could be a good match. An independent browser engine and an independent search engine. On the other hand, I don't want Mozilla to acquire them and kill them a few years later. Their short attention span is one quality I wish they hadn't cribbed from Google.
A search engine is an interesting idea, but:
- it needs to be independent. Mozilla can't be depending on Google or Bing. After Bing got what they wanted, they started choking their proxies by pushing prices up substantially. Depending on Google is a similar folly.
- they need to be committed to it. This isn't some project Mozilla can cook up in three or four years and abandon two years later. It needs to be a long-term strategy with hundreds of millions of dollars invested.
That's why I think Mojeek could be a shortcut. But either way, I don't think Mozilla has the bandwidth (or guts, frankly) to commit to this sort of project.
But you are right, they are still depending on the monster that is Google.
And as long as you're depending on them, you might as well take as much as you can.
They should make a search engine. If Kagi can do it, why can’t Mozilla?
The biggest provider of Kagi's results is Google. They are unique in that they have their own Tinygem and Teclis indexes to augment results, though. Mozilla could certainly operate a plain Google proxy like Mullvad does with Leta, but I don't think they'd be making more money out of it than just agreeing to Google's exclusive terms.
Building a search engine with an independent index is hard. Mojeek has done the best job of it, but you can tell there's a disparity in result quality even if they're improving.
15 years ago, I thought I wanted to make a game. Turns out, I didn't.
A few years ago, I sought out Linux. Learning to use it has made me so much more confident and excited about technology. I understood so much more. And yet, it feels like I don't understand nearly enough. So I'm learning programming so I can start looking through codebases for the projects I use, maybe seeing if I can add new features or fix some bugs that are annoying me. I've sort of accomplished that goal for one program. There are also some programs that don't exist, or don't exist in the way I want them to that I intend on developing.
I'd like to learn reverse engineering too...
Well, I guess I'm a programmer only by technicality. I haven't done anything serious and I'm certainly not decent at the art. I'm just curious. 🐇
Did your opinion of the teacher change at all after that?
It is! And OBS is awesome. But it is not proprietary.
I haven't missed a thing. I don't even get most of my news from Lemmy or Reddit communities; I get it from RSS feeds or books. I lurked /r/linux for a long time after I stopped actively contributing. It wasn't until a few months ago that I started contributing to Lemmy, the first collection of online communities I've been a part of in years. I'm of two minds about it.
I'm actually grateful for it because I started complaining about things that have bothered me for a long time, and The Great Lemmy Migration made me realize, well, there's no reason I can't do something about that. It helped me change my attitude. So, in a very real way, I've contributed to several upstream projects because Lemmy made me rethink things and I am now less annoyed. It's weird how Lemmy feels like an actual community in the way no other social site (including Reddit) has.
On the flip side, I think I spend too much time on Lemmy...but this week has been uniquely rough.
Most games just work these days and it is only a handful that don’t,
To add my own experience, I play a lot of Japanese visual novels (it's a good 80% of what I play). Very few Japanese visual novels are released on Steam. But if they are on Steam, they're usually DRM-free or work in Proton anyway. However, most of these games are English-only. I play them in Japanese.
So I need to get my games from other places, like digital storefronts such as DLsite and DMM. However, I quickly found out that absolutely no games that DMM sells will work in Wine. This is because they are all encumbered with a form of DRM that isn't compatible with Wine. DMM is the largest digital storefront for VNs. DLsite sells some games with various kinds of DRM. PlayDRM does work in Wine, but the rest doesn't. They also sell DRM-free games. The selection isn't as large, but it's good. We recently got the DRM tagging feature in VNDB, so it should give you a good idea of what games are incompatible.
You can also buy VNs physically. Some games are DRM-encumbered but many are DRM-free. You generally don't know until you buy, though, and it can be an expensive mistake. Hopefully we can change that with the new VNDB DRM tagging system.
Even when they're not DRM-encumbered, though, you have a decent chance of facing issues with media playback. Older games using DirectShow you can probably get working with native DLLs using Winetricks. If it's a newer game that uses Media Foundation, you might not be able to get it to work at all. Worst case, the game crashes on the opening movie. I'm looking for a way to improve that section of the wiki since I know very little about Media Foundation for solving these issues.
There also tend to be a bunch of Windowing issues with older VNs like fullscreen being broken. Gamescope will solve those issues.
So, while you can play a lot of VNs in Wine, you need to be careful about it. Fortunately, only two of the VNs I bought are unplayable and they're both from DMM.
So it does! I didn't know that. Admittedly, I don't actually use that much proprietary software on Linux-based systems, so my knowledge is limited. It'd be interesting if Lightworks or DaVinci Resolve were one day distributed with Flatpak, although Blackmagic Design believes Flatpak can't handle DaVinci Resolve's needs.
But hey, a community-built Flatpak for Resolve exists already.
This is the original developer/maintainer of Sway and Wlroots' opinion on NVIDIA with regard to Wayland. This doesn't seem like an unfair opinion to me. Gamescope breaks regularly due to bugs in NVIDIA's proprietary driver; even if they know what the issue is, they can't send patches to fix it because it's proprietary. The best they can do is open a bug and beg them to fix it, which is what they do. If there's an issue on Intel or AMD, they can just send patches upstream to Mesa, and I would guess they do.
Thankfully, with the heavy active development of NVK, this might change in a few years.
Mind you, I've actually had a better experience on KDE Wayland than Xorg. Categorically...with the exception of Steam. While the games themselves play fine, the client is very glitchy. But it's a small price to pay for all the other nonsense I've had to deal with on GNOME/KDE X11.
This news is notable because a mainstream proprietary software publisher has chosen to officially distribute using Flathub. I couldn't care less about Discord, but it says a lot about Flathub's mindshare. Proprietary publishers tend to pick AppImage, but this is the first publisher I know of that has chosen Flathub instead. It will be interesting to see if this becomes a trend.
That being said, Cassidy obviously had a very active hand in convincing Discord to adopt the Flatpak package.
Zion isn't going to see my comment because I'm from an instance that lemmy.world blocks. If somebody thinks my comment might be useful to Zion, please pass it on in my stead by reposting it.
The only thing I’m trying to prevent is someone taking the entire project, changing some strings and icons and releasing a paid Android version based on my work.
If you released your program under an open source license, they wouldn't even need to change anything. They could simply republish your program unmodified for a price. Open source is fundamentally incompatible with restricting commercial use because it means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation.
One way you could restrict this is by trademarking the name you publish your program under. This way, no one will be able to publish a version of your program with the same name, as they would be violating your trademark. The good thing about this is that trademarks have nothing to do with copyright and so are fully compatible with open source licenses. The bad news is that someone could always republish your program under a different name. If you're primarily concerned about users confusing another program with yours, though, trademarks are a great option. You should register a trademark for the name anyway...before someone else does.
I don't have a particular license to recommend that prevents commercial redistribution, but you appear to be looking for a "source-available" license. You might need something custom...every program I've heard of that is source-available has their own custom license (Futo Temporary License, the TrueCrypt license, Microsoft Shared Source Initiative, etc.) The closest thing I could find was the Commons Clause. I know very little about it, though.
But if the GNU Project created an OS based on SerenityOS, would it be GNU/Serenity? 🤔
What non-AGPL software were you hoping to be compatible with fediverse software? Or am I misunderstanding why you want non-AGPL software?