Captain Beyond @ beyond @linkage.ds8.zone

Caretaker of Sunhillow/DS8.ZONE. Free (Libre) Software enthusiast and promo

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4 yr. ago

No, this is a common misconception. F has always stood for Free as in freedom. No part of FOSS or FLOSS refers to price.

This confusion is one of the reasons why the term FOSS or FLOSS is problematic.

Google is also one of the most prolific contributors to Linux, and was the #3 corporate contributor in 2022. If you're avoiding everything Google had a hand in you literally can't use any GNU/Linux.

GitHub allows you to select any license (including a proprietary license) or no license at all. This does not mean that GitHub encourages one to select a free software license or any license at all.

In 2014, John Sullivan, then Executive Director of FSF, also asserted that GitHub's choosealicense.com was anti-copyleft.

Anti-copyleft bias noted by Stallman and Sullivan is evident from the very beginning, from the founder Tom Preston-Werner himself. In 2011, Preston-Werner wrote that one should "open source (almost) everything" under a permissive license, because the GPL is "too dogmatic," but keep "anything that represents business value" proprietary.

Kate has native LSP support, which by default uses "typescript-language-server" for JavaScript. As I don't really do much JavaScript stuff I can't say how well it works, or if it works with those particular frameworks.

https://docs.kde.org/stable5/en/kate/kate/kate-application-plugin-lspclient.html

The meat carrot is just turkey meat in the shape of a carrot, covered in carrot flavoring made in part from carrot. Yes, one of the ingredients of "meat carrot" is actual carrots.

I wouldn't say I "hate" Microsoft (or Apple, or Google), but I recognize the harm they do to the free software movement and to the technology world in general. I wouldn't avoid a good quality free software just because it's made by a GAFAM company (as long as I stick with the free parts and avoid proprietary extensions), just like I wouldn't use proprietary software just because it's not made by GAFAM.

The point isn't to hate GAFAM but to seek freedom and control over your computing.

Sublime Text is proprietary, which makes it a non-starter for many including myself. VS Code, on the other hand, might be developed by Microsoft but there is a liberated version called VSCodium that has none of the telemetry and such.

That being said, on GNU/Linux I prefer Kate.

GitHub has been recognized as harmful to the free software community at least as early as 2015, years before the Microsoft acquisition. See RMS email on GitHub.

1 tracker = 266 classes.

Please be more explicit about the so-called "tracker" reported by exodus here. "Tracker" is a broad term that covers not just actual tracking and ad libraries but also crash detection and error reporting libraries, which can be useful as long as they are opt-in with informed user consent. Without knowing the exact library detected here, and how it is used, one cannot assess whether it is truly spyware or not.

From a cursory glance at the build.gradle I do see ACRA as a dependency here, which is sometimes (mistakenly) considered as a "tracker" but is actually a free software crash reporting library used by many free software Android apps including NewPipe and the F-Droid client itself. A cursory search across the codebase reveals ACRA is not even always enabled (it seems to depend on build configuration) and this dialog appears to be where the user is asked for consent for sharing a crash report.

Of course, Exodus can't tell how a library is used or even if it's used at all, it just sees a scary class name and warns about trackers. It might be useful to check if some proprietary app has suspicious behavior but it is by no means an actual malware scanner.

edit: it doesn't appear Exodus considers ACRA as a "tracker" as it is not included in their list however my point still stands. an Exodus report by itself isn't proof of nefarious activity unless backed up with more concrete evidence e.g. network analysis or source code analysis.

edit 2: I just installed ClassyShark and ran it on NewPipe, and it does show ACRA as a "tracker" however Exodus itself says NewPipe has no trackers. ClassyShark has not been updated in over a year so I assume it is using an out of date database. Something like TrackerControl which is more actively updated might be a better alternative.

This is not free software. See license.

Subject to the terms of this license, we grant you a non-transferable, non-exclusive, worldwide, royalty-free license to access and use the code solely for the purposes of review, compilation and non-commercial distribution.

I certainly hope no one is actually wishing for Stallman's death, but I feel at least a few people will be "glad he's gone" as Stallman said of Steve Jobs.

ChromeOS is Linux with Google’s desktop environment

Always has been. One does not "use Linux" they use an operating system built on top of Linux.

Chrome is not Linux, but Xfce also is not Linux. Gnome is not Linux. KDE is not Linux. Linux is Linux.

When will we learn? (Drew DeVault, May 2022)

This isn't even the first such incident with snap. https://github.com/canonical/snapcraft.io/issues/651

The code merely being "available" isn't the same thing as the user having the legal freedom to modify and share it. Besides, that's not always the case; sometimes JavaScript is minified, obfuscated, and packed in ways that make it effectively no different than any other compiled program.

Note that source code is "the preferred form for making modifications" so obfuscated code is by definition not "source."

Yes, if the JavaScript is running on a computer he owns. JavaScript programs running in a browser are just as much software as any other type of program.

See The JavaScript Trap

Software freedom applies only to hardware you personally own. It wouldn't even apply to machines you interact with but do not own (such as ATMs or kiosks) since you aren't the one who agrees to the proprietary software license.

Stallman himself explains it in his computing FAQ.

I would dispute that the kernel is "the most important part of an OS." It certainly is an important part - but it does nothing by itself, and a user cannot do anything with it.

Anyway, the reason Hurd isn't a priority anymore is because we have Linux (well, more specifically, Linux-libre). There's no need to reinvent something that is already available in the free software world.

Well, a "set of tools" is not any more or less an operating system than a kernel by itself is, yet not only do Linux fans insist on their kernel being an OS, but that RMS's "set of tools" is somehow part of "Linux the operating system." If he's "salty" about anything it's probably his life's work being attributed to someone else who doesn't even share his philosophy, which I think is understandable.

If you want to be really pedantic, like me, you can note that the Linux-libre variant of Linux is an official GNU project, so you can say that there is an official GNU kernel.

Regardless, I would say the most important contribution of the GNU project is the GNU General Public License, moreso than any specific tool or "set of tools."

Nah it's proprietary garbage. If it weren't proprietary it would be an option (although in that case a "deMicrosofted" version would be better). there are free Chromium browsers and free browsers that aren't chromium, this one offers nothing of interest.

10+ years of experience in the thing you created 5 years ago, even.