Well, you certainly made me feel much more optimistic, thank you.

I suppose you’re right that copyleft is not the primary motivator for contributions.

I’m aware that forks happen often when a takeover is attempted. There are many big success stories in FOSS. However, my point was that most FOSS software isn’t that successful. There are plenty of projects out there with very few contributors, and it is those I’m saying are easy for taking over. Perhaps they get taken over because most of the community doesn’t care, but it still happens from time to time. I originally commented because you seemed to make out that proprietisation was impossible.

I get your point that it’s incredibly unlikely for anything that matters however.

Edit: I think I misremembered an example I gave of a successful fork after an attempted takeover, but it was something Oracle.

I think the point of both is that even if he skipped all the text explaining he’s about to break the system, he would have still have had to type the words explaining them, and therefore hopefully think about the words he’s typing. It might not protect against copy-paste as effectively, but there’s a higher chance he’d read what he’d copied than a wall of text. Not 100% effective, but it’s probably going to catch more users than “do as I say”, where he still thought he was installing Steam, so it’s good those changes were made.

But yes, it won’t catch everyone like Linus because they either won’t think about it or they will copy-paste without reading. Ultimately an immutable distro might be best for him. Then again he might still find a way to break it somehow.

I suppose it’s true that neither would have been called feature complete by its authors, proprietisation is much more likely when there is still a lot missing. But I would still caution against thinking that having all the features you need means you’re immune to it.

Sorry, I didn’t explain what I was talking about.

The problem is that in the modern software environment there’s a constant need for updating and patching, and if a proprietary fork provides those updates and a free original can’t keep up for whatever reason, the proprietary fork (that could have contributed otherwise) gains inertia until the free original dies. This is admittedly harder to pull off in a mature and well maintained free software ecosystem, but I think you’d be surprised how many important free software projects lack needed manpower. It doesn’t help that MIT practically encourages people not to publish code, compared to GPL.

People make out forking like it’s a big protection against proprietisation, and it is, but it’s not foolproof. Good forks are usually founded by community members that already understand and contribute to the code, most forks actually die quickly. The fewer contributors relative to the project’s size and complexity, the more realistic it is to either be overtaken by a more competitive proprietary fork, or for the maintainers to sell out and relicense without anybody to fork it.

Realistically, I don’t know how likely this would happen to anything decently important, but it has happened at least a few times. I remember using Paint .NET while it was still MIT licensed years back, but nobody forked it. Since we’re on Lemmy, Reddit used to use a Free software license.

Code complete is arguably a myth when talking about security. You need to update when vulnerabilities are found at minimum. Sometimes, the changing software environment changes and so the software has to start adding features again or get replaced. Rarely old features are the vulnerability, and have to be removed.

I think there were a few other changes indirectly inspired by what had transpired, but admittedly I can’t remember most of them. I think Debian also modified apt.

I also think I remember immutable distros taking off just after this.

The funny thing is that this is a WebP.

I sometimes forget that us Linux users often lack social skills. Understanding other people is hard.

Anyway, I’ll try this grass, is it on GitHub?

I kind of suspect life wouldn’t exist today if it didn’t make the occasional error. Although I believe DNA does have rudimentary correction mechanisms: each strand is paired up with its negative and duplicated chromasomes will have 2 chromatids. In those cases there are kind of 4 copies. Sometimes errors are corrected by using the other chomatid as a template. However, not all that useful before the chromosome is duplicated.

At some point the data has to be copied for reproduction, so DNA must be writable at least for new copies, but that’s part of what makes the copying process so vulnerable. However, I do agree that it’s too easy to trigger a write, and while histones reduce writability, they also reduce readability.

Maybe it’s because I’m not an Arch user anymore, but I wouldn’t dream of cutting out “junk” DNA. It’s incredibly important.

I remember being a big fan of FLIF when it came out. I remember it had come out of nowhere to steal PNG’s crown, and then the author suddenly disappeared before finishing it. I soon learned they had been picked up by a company to work on a successor named FUIF and then some time after that FUIF was merged into JPEG XL.

Because of this, I was really excited when JPEG XL came out. An obscure but brilliant format had essentially been merged into the successor to JPEG, and I thought it was really going to take off. It had support from many major tech companies including Google. Browsers quickly started adding experimental support and then… nothing.

Soon after JPEG XL was finalised, AVIF was too, and AVIF was essentially Google’s attempt at making a successor to WebP, by using much the same technology as AV1. So the question was, which one to support? Google made a comparison between image formats, focusing almost exclusively on lossy compression ratios (which I think isn’t entirely fair, considering they both have a lossless mode to compete with PNG) and AVIF won. So they dropped JPEG XL from Chromium, claiming lack of interest or something (which was wild, I’d never heard of a faster uptake of an image format). Soon after, Firefox was talking about removing it too, but ended up deciding to wait and see.

Things looked bleak until Apple picked it up, and then things have just stalled since. I’m happy there’s still interest in JPEG XL, its FLIF/FUIF derived lossless encoding produces smaller files than both AVIF’s lossless encoding and PNG, while having features neither could dream of.

Okay, knowing that you view it as neutral helps. For some reason I didn’t get that.

(I doubt it would have been used as an example of hypocrisy otherwise),

The drinking example was that blarghly was clearly criticizing other for their choices of what they put in their bodies because it is unhealthy while ignoring blarghly is also putting something in their body (alcohol) which could easily be criticized for being unhealthy. blarghly was demonstrating “Rules for thee, but not for me”. That rubbed me the wrong way.

I get that it’s meant to pick out hypocrisy, however I keep reading a deeper implication. Maybe I’m just reading things that aren’t there, but if drinking was virtuous, the right thing to do, would it be hypocritical for blarghly to drink? I don’t read it that way. I interpret that it’s treated as hypocrisy to mean that drinking is bad, that blarghly probably shouldn’t drink.

Maybe I misread this interaction, and maybe it’s not my business, but this reads to me as a judgement on blarghly for both implying judgment on other people and for drinking (I doubt it would have been used as an example of hypocrisy otherwise), then I read it as about how you make the superior decision to not judge people for drinking.