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   Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 00:04:01 JST Drew DeVault

   🧵 Biggest threats to FOSS and some proposed solutions

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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 00:04:00 JST Drew DeVault

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     1. GitHub, and to a lesser extent GitLab. These platforms commodify the FOSS community and minimize the social aspects that matter -- people over stars. They are proprietary (or open core) and consequently encourage a consumption culture with respect to FOSS: users consume GitHub, rather than participating in it; and this culture fans out to the broader culture associated with projects and people that work with it.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 00:04:43 JST Drew DeVault

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     Consumption of proprietary platforms in our infrastructure erodes support for the very real participatory projects that exist and need your support and legitimacy to succeed. The solution is to eschew consumption of proprietary software, and build your infrastructure on free software platforms. This is a problem of critical mass, and it won't be reached unless enough projects are bold enough to take the loss of access to these proprietary platforms and their reach on principled grounds.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 00:16:03 JST Drew DeVault

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     2. Open washing, which is to say the proliferation of licenses that look FOSS if you squint but don't work if you look closer, and practices related to these licenses. Here we have big players like Elastic, Redis, MongoDB, and numerous smaller cases as well. The practice of building off of the lavish advantages of being in the FOSS ecosystem, then pulling the rug and seeking exclusive commercial monopolization of the end result.

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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 00:16:50 JST Drew DeVault

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     To address this we need to better educate people on how money and free software can co-exist in a way which does not threaten FOSS, and for people to learn and *grok* the social and economic dynamics of free software. The commercialization of FOSS is not a bad thing -- so long as the *critical* provisions that all users are equally entitled to share that wealth and capitalize on it on equal terms is upheld.

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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 00:16:50 JST Drew DeVault

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     Moverover, we need to re-discover reciprocal licenses like GPL and EUPL and hold copyrights in common between all stakeholders. Which is why you should never sign a CLA!

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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 00:16:50 JST Drew DeVault

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     Oh, and on this subject: AWS is not really a threat to FOSS, if anything it's mostly been a boon for us. Any time someone cites AWS while taking any of the four freedoms away from you, you should start asking some pointed questions.

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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 00:17:34 JST Drew DeVault

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     3. Discord. This is another proprietary platform and many of the same arguments regarding GitHub apply here. It's an incredibly popular platform, and it's no surprise to find it landing on our shores. However, it is especially toxic for FOSS in many respects: it seeks legal action to prevent anyone from attempting to build software on top of it. It's a walled garden: Discord is an incredibly exclusionary platform which has countless accessibility issues for the disabled, poor, and many others.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 00:18:21 JST Drew DeVault

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     It's also exclusionary, and even unsafe, for many other marginalized participants. Many Discord servers are infested with far right recruitment and campaigns of hate and harassment. Many harassment campaigns are launched from Discord and racist and queerphobic sentiments go unpoliced. It's an issue with the platform, which retains ultimate control and refuses to use it to moderate this behavior, and with the culture, who develop small monarchies where these problems go unanswered.

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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 00:18:21 JST Drew DeVault

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     Worst of all, it's really good. It's simply outcompeted the FOSS market. This isn't like GitHub, where the alternatives are equally good or better on technical merits. To solve Discord we need to both take the approach of committing our own projects to free platforms, but also *investing* in our free chat platforms to make them even remotely competitive with Discord.

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     Dillo browser (dillo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 08:30:09 JST Dillo browser

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     @drewdevault one of the main reasons we are still on GitHub is that we cannot test Dillo on Mac and Windows on builds.sr.ht (at least not easily).

     Context: https://lists.sr.ht/~sircmpwn/sr.ht-discuss/%3CC3ZF0IF242P4.3JN5FF60I1J20@keymaker.local%3E

     We try to support Dillo on proprietary systems too so that users that may not know yet other OS can learn how to escape by reading the Web, when provided with a browser that runs well on old hardware.

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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 08:30:09 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

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     • Dillo browser
     @dillo @drewdevault Maybe only use Github for this feature via mirroring to it? (Like via a git hook on your own repository or with a builds.sr.ht script)
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     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: (lanodan@queer.hacktivis.me)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 08:44:18 JST Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

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     • Dillo browser
     @dillo @drewdevault Yeah but effectively proprietary software means you're simply not going to get ability to run CI on your provider of choice, regardless of the provider choices.
     
     Exactly like how Apple forces Apple hardware for any access, and in practice Microsoft Windows has similar limitations and clauses (specially for recent versions of Windows).
     
     As usual with proprietary software, the ball on support is on their side and here you're effectively stuck with GitHub.
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     Dillo browser (dillo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 08:44:19 JST Dillo browser

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     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan @drewdevault that may work, but I would like to stop using GitHub entirely.

     Sr.ht has the benefit it can be mostly used from Dillo itself unlike many other forges.

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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 08:50:52 JST Drew DeVault

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     Moreover, we need more people than just programmers. You know why we don't have an answer to Discord? A big part of it is that we don't have people doing visual design, translations, marketing, etc. Learn about people who differ from you and your expectations: their struggles, their victories, and their needs and what's important to them. Become a student of the other, and take your skills to your leadership and moderation roles, to make safer and more inviting spaces.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 08:50:53 JST Drew DeVault

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     We need to *deal with* bigotry. In particular we need to acknowledge the quiet sort, especially sexism and the behavior of problematic men in our communities. For all of our advances in other domains (in spite of the loud pushback against these advances), sexism remains an important flaw in the FOSS community.

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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 08:50:54 JST Drew DeVault

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     4. Lack of diversity in FOSS. Yes, I mean the culture war sort, but also others besides. Most of the people reading this post still fit the mold: the relatively affluent white male cishet computer science major. We live in a time of struggle and if we don't foster solidarity with other political movements it's going to break down our doors sooner or later. We need different perspectives and backgrounds among our *peers* and *leaders*, and so far they're mostly relegated to users if even that.

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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 08:51:43 JST Drew DeVault

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     5. The Free Software Foundation. #hottake

     The one thing all of these issues have in common is that the FSF has no answers for them. The EUPL and MPL are doing a better job of facilitating copyleft than the GPL family. Savannah isn't a match for Codeberg, let alone GitHub. Most egregiously, the FSF has utterly failed to address diversity and social issues, especially sexism, and with RMS's position restored and maintained at the helm that is never going to change.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Drew DeVault (drewdevault@fosstodon.org)'s status on Wednesday, 03-Jul-2024 08:52:30 JST Drew DeVault

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     The FSF is dead, but its message cannot die. Free software is the philosophical superior of open source, and its lost a lot of ground due to the FSF's negligence and incompetence that we must recover. We need to underscore the political and philosophical meaning of free software independent of them and reclaim our movement so it can succeed without them.

     Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell: likes this.
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     Dillo browser (dillo@fosstodon.org)'s status on Thursday, 04-Jul-2024 05:26:28 JST Dillo browser

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     • Haelwenn /элвэн/ :triskell:

     @lanodan @drewdevault didn't knew that about Windows too, but I woudn't be surprised.

     In any case our interest to cover older versions from 5 to 20 years back more or less. I'm also considering if we could try targeting ReactOS or Wine, but I don't think we could guarantee it would work on Windows anyway. Similarly with Darling for macOS.

     A computer that can run a new Windows or macOS version is already powerful enough to run mainstream browsers.

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     🐛 (apophis@brain.worm.pink)'s status on Tuesday, 03-Sep-2024 10:43:40 JST 🐛

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     @drewdevault my experience is that getting art types interested about foss is like getting suburbanites to care about ancient laws of hospitality
     
     it feels like guys like david revoy are one in a history of organic life on a given planet
     
     i think one problem is that culturally artists are so used to a perpetual struggle against art theft that they no longer have a concept of not doubling down on proprietary models of valuing their own creative output
     
     foss projects need to commission artists more - to give *foss* exposure
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