Captain Beyond

CC non-commercial is not a free license. FSF lists it under documentation licenses because it doesn’t recommend any CC license for software but the concerns are still valid.

Note that selling copies of free software is explicitly encouraged; free refers to freedom (specifically the “four freedoms”) and not to price. Commercial usage restrictions conflict with freedom zero (although it’s unclear how this applies in the case of a game) and commercial distribution restrictions conflict with freedoms two and three.

Being proprietary is enough of a reason to refuse it. On top of that, being owned by Facebook is another good reason.

With proprietary software the developer is in control, and in this case the developer is known evil.

There should be a law that any time someone uses the word slam in a news context it should be about someone literally being slammed.

This is proprietary (and running in a web browser does not make it less so)

The problem is the works they didn’t pay for. “Copyright infringement” is quite the anodyne term for “theft.”

Other way around. Copyright infringement is the alleged crime. “Theft” is the entertainment industry’s spin term for it. https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/words-to-avoid.html#Theft It is best to call things what they are and not buy into this silly narrative.

Aaah so a backtick is for strings? WRONG!!! IT EXECUTES THE FUCKING COMMAND!!!

To be fair this is what they do in Perl and shell scripts (and in PHP too), so it’s not unexpected behavior in that world.

But but but I thought Apple was the good guys, all the degooglers said so

This

I’ve been very outspoken about my non-belief in intellectual property; I don’t think reading information or making a copy of it is stealing it. On the flipside, these bots are effectively performing a denial-of-service attack on public infrastructure, wasting computing resources, bandwidth, and time that is finite. The internet is for humans first and bots second; I don’t care about bots so much as long as they are well-behaved, which these are not.

My own instance went under several weeks back, then I installed Anubis and suddenly it’s usable again.

Intellectual property is imaginary and making a copy of something isn’t stealing it. In contrast, Disney actually has contributed to something which could more easily be likened to theft - namely, strangling of the public domain (after helping itself generously to public domain stories and characters).

I don’t like Midjourney as it’s a proprietary service-as-a-software-substitute, but Disney actually is the greater evil here. It’s probably worth noting that Disney didn’t actually create the vast majority of characters at issue here.

Pidgin is still around, and you can even use discord with it (no voice, mind you).

I would like to bring the multi-platform client back.

This doesn’t even make sense. If the spell falls apart without Kier’s symbol, then Kier’s symbol absolutely is “actually necessary.”

From a technical or legal perspective, copyright infringement is not theft. The relationship a copyright holder has with a work is of a completely different character than actual ownership. See Dowling v. United States (1985).

Whether or not “AI” training constitutes copyright infringement is, as far as I know, still up in the air. And, while I believe most of us can agree that actual theft is unethical, the ethics of copyright infringement are as far as I know also very debatable.

Disclaimer - not an uncritical supporter of “AI.”

open source, but not free

Free here means free-as-in-freedom. The free software definition and open source definition are almost identical, there are very few apps that are only one or the other.

It’s the free software movement, though - the four freedoms are literally the cornerstone of the movement. They’re not simply a “nice to have” they’re the bare minimum of what we should ask for. If we promote non-free “alternatives” we are saying that these basic freedoms are not an expectation, but are optional and negotiable - we are moving the message away from the four freedoms and towards “evil” proprietary applications, while making exceptions for the “lesser evil” ones.

When I say Obsidian is non-free I am not saying Obsidian is evil or you are not allowed to use it. As non-free apps go Obsidian is probably one of the least-worst, as you and many others point out it is just a markdown editor so there is no vendor lock in or weird proprietary format. I am simply saying, this is a movement focused on “the four freedoms” and Obsidian does not meet those four very basic criteria.

Proprietary software is proprietary no matter how “nice” it is. It should not be advertised in FOSS communities and falsely presenting it as “FOSS adjacent” is harmful to the movement IMO.

There are many places so called “good proprietary apps” can be promoted and discussed.

This article is clearly about beans, not onions.

But they told me I can just not connect it to the internet and it’ll be just like any dumb device.

Eventually these things will come with modems built in so you can’t even do that.

Same reason anyone would use a dedicated provider-independent client instead of a proprietary web application locked into a single provider: less vendor lock-in, more local control, and so on.

Vivaldi’s target audience is people who don’t mind proprietary blobs as long as they are “good” or make things “work better.” Given that Vivaldi itself is essentially a proprietary blob combined with a Chromium backend this makes sense.

The most obvious difference going from Debian stable to GNU Guix is that Guix is a rolling release distro, not stable (in the Debian sense) at all.

Package management is also very different as it’s fundamentally a source based distro, although sometimes the build servers can provide prebuilt packages if they’re available. Also, Guix has the concept of “profiles” which group sets of installed packages; typically, there is a system profile as well as a profile for each user, but users can also create their own separate profiles. This means that a user can install packages to their own profile without needing root permissions.

Profile updates are done in an atomic manner, such that changing the set of installed packages (installing, updating, or removing a package) actually creates a new generation of the profile, and it’s possible to roll back to a previous generation if something breaks. This is true of the system as well as the user profile(s), of course. A profile generation can also be exported as a manifest, which can then be imported to create a profile generation on another system, allowing package management to be done in a declarative manner.

Finally, Guix has a commitment to ship only free software, and uses linux-libre as its kernel. Debian has a clear separation between free and non-free components but does ship non-free software, including firmware blobs, and I believe as of recently the installer provides them by default. There are unofficial Guix channels (=repositories) that provide these things.