Notices by Stefano Zacchiroli (zacchiro@mastodon.xyz)

@ryanmarcus darn, are you reviewing my paper? 😂

Repeat after me: if #Firefox stops being maintained, #LibreWolf is not a viable long-term alternative (nor is any other Firefox-based web browser).

I always conclude my bug reports to #opensource projects, or even my first followup message to a bug report filed by others, with a sentence like: "Thanks a lot for maintaining PROJECT, it's amazing!".

It's a little gesture, but it goes a long way.

When you use #freesofware made by others, remember that it is first of all a *gift* that they are giving to all humanity (and you among them), and only second a software product with defects and avenues for improvement.

Several talks at #FOSDEM will be related to recent work of mine. I'm highlighting them in the thread below (with links). Feel free to reach out to me if you want to know more and/or cannot attend.

… and have a great FOSDEM!

@zimoun will present « Guix + #SoftwareHeritage Source Code Archiving to the Rescue of Reproducible Deployment » on Saturday: https://fosdem.org/2025/schedule/event/fosdem-2025-5897-guix-software-heritage-source-code-archiving-to-the-rescue-of-reproducible-deployment/

The presentation is about the work we did to integrate GNU #Guix with the @swheritage archive, so that when users try to (re)build packages whose source code has disappeared from the new, it will still work!

This is key for scientific #reproducibility. See our #ACMREP paper from last year for more details: https://upsilon.cc/~zack/research/publications/ieee-sw-repro-builds.pdf

#FOSDEM

@wwahammy amen to all of that

@wwahammy yup, a lot of so called "open source AI" aren't open source at all. Getting them to the level that would make them OSI-definition-compliant would be a *huge* step forward on many fronts. (The most common offenders are: (1) lack of data provenance information, (2) closed training pipeline.)

…and yes, an open data training dataset would be even better! But in the meantime, I wouldn't mind at all if they achieve the above.

@luj @Zimm_i48 Congrats Julien! Very important work for @reproducible_builds , @nix , and safety of free/#opensource software more broadly.

Slides from my #keynote this morning, at the 10-year anniversary event for #SeminairesCodesSources by CNRS et al. here in #Paris: https://upsilon.cc/~zack/talks/2025/2025-01-23-semcodessources.pdf

Great event!

Also, fun fact, it's where for the first time *publicly* #SoftwareHeritage was pre-announced 10 years ago, at the end of a talk of mine about #Debsources. (I've dug up some of the old slides and put screenshots at the beginning of my talk. Fun!)

@zimoun @khinsen avec plaisir, quand tu veux :-)

@khinsen Merci pour la pub ;-) Tu n'es pas sur place, si?

@cwebber oh, didn't know about magit-annex! nice!! thanks!!

I love git-annex

Thank you @joeyh <3

@plumtrie Public congratulations are due, in addition to the already-delivered private ones ;-) Kudos for this amazing achievement. It is both very innovative and very useful work. Looking forward to the upcoming presentation at #ICSE2025.

BTW, note that while #HelloQuitX is raising money via donations, it looks like it's money that is going to be used for activism/information on a number of IT-related topics.

That too is great!

But users should be aware that it is not money going towards making Mastodon hosting sustainable.

Here in France the #HelloQuitX initiative https://www.helloquitx.com/ to leave #Twitter/X—and join Mastodon or Bluesky as better options—has gathered a lot of attention: politicians are talking about it in prime time on major medias.

That's great!

My only nit with the initiative is that it is *not* encouraging to donate to the chosen Mastodon server (for people choosing that over Bluesky).

A better social media world also needs users to understand there is no free lunch for hosting costs.

@karen looks like it's a global trend, I've just received this SPAM in French (some translated keywords: non profit, social impact, digital solutions):

> Pour faire court, on aide les associations et ONG à à maximiser leur impact
social grâce à des solutions digitales sur mesure et accessibles, avec une
tarification adaptée aux budgets associatifs.

@karen so good that you might even want to meet them 🤣 (not)

Very important work by @conservancy , which tries to ensure the right of recipients of #AGPL (but more generally: *GPLs) software to strip disguised "Further restriction" clauses in free/#opensource software: https://sfconservancy.org/news/2025/jan/13/neo4j-amicus/ . It is unfortunately something that happens quite often on the market (even here in France!), where such clauses are regularly used by vendors to turn standard #FOSS licenses into #badgeware ones.

@bremner regress is the new progress