Notices by Stefano Zacchiroli (zacchiro@mastodon.xyz)

@cwebber @bkuhn @ossguy @richardfontana

My current answer to your "is it safe" question is to answer a slightly different question. Namely: "is it any less safe than accepting code from a random employee that claims to be submitting under a inbound=outbound regime, whereas in fact they cannot?". The latter we have been doing for decades, with limited damages to the commons.

(I *also* think the legal odds are more in our favor with AI-assisted contributions than in the previous case.)

Street art in #Paris is weird these days.
#Debian #GNU/#Linux

@Codeberg so, to clarify, do you have evidence that the bots were solving Anubis challenges or not, i.e., it was due to the configuration issue? (I think it's inevitably going to happen if Anubis gets traction. I'm just curious if we're already there or not.) Thanks for your work and transparency on all this.

@liw I don't think subcommand or not is the right dimension to make that decision. One man page (like most documentation items) should be split into sub-pages if it is too long.

So, for instance, a command with relatively few (or simple) subcommands can very well document all of them in a single manpage.

Whereas a complex command without subcommands might deserve being documented across multiple manpages.

Sorry for being contrarian!

@jwildeboer Amen. Also, it's much worse than just having to agree to those licenses. The #Redis contributor agreement grants the company a sublicense right, making de facto the AGPL ineffective against them.

@bkuhn Oh no! (as in: "oh yes"!). Should I feel responsible for this, due to a certain FOSDEM 2025 dinner conversation about Mastodon, UX, engagement, etc.?

@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.