Notices by trdebunked (trdebunked@mastodon.social)

@mjg59 bloat is subjective but it reduces accessibility.

for me, squaring the circle and a perfect world isnt bloat-free because theres no reasonable way to define that. in a perfect world, bloat is optional because non-bloat is always available and an option.

for me the crime of systemd is how damned hard it is to completely eliminate from your system, not from the world. it approaches the idea of mandatory software. for years people have debated the finer points of this while it takes over.

@mjg59 i simplify this by saying that the more bloated a project becomes, the closer it approaches a binary blob. my original interest was electronics, which makes me very sympathetic to free hw. i appreciate takes like yours that point out the times where machine code / decompiled binaries actually works like source code. not all hacking is source hacking- a lot of it isnt actually.

the other side of that of course, is that source code makes many changes more accessible.

@mjg59 yeah not inherently, just most often in practice. its more of a tendency.

one of my bigger obsessions with free software is looking at ways that freedom can be effectively diminished without being explicitly violated.

note i prefer openbsd to gnu/linux because i think it does more to protect freedom 3, but i love any work done to remove non-free stuff from it too. if the goal is perfection there will be detours and setbacks, while the fsf paints things into corners.

@mjg59 it should be/isnt obvious that the more you obfuscate the process of compilation the farther you get from a compiler that gives you freedom 1- regardless of the input giving you 4freedoms & the output being a result of that input.

btw i wrote a toy transpiler that turned stallmans verbatim-copying-only essays into transformative, executable scripts and he didnt get the humour or the point. he thought i was trying to prove something- i was just trying to get him to look at it differently.

@mjg59 one of the things that really pisses me off about the movement in general- and i bet you share my pain on this- is that to create gnu it was necessary to temporarily enlist non-free components to bootstrap something more fundamentally free... and while of course this is not denied and even granted an explicit exception- when you do it, it becomes subjected to all sorts of double standards and bad takes from the orthodoxy.

for example: free hw deserves the same graces to become viable.

@alice also im pretty sure this is the timeline that biff created.

#freesoftware never figured out how to stop from being co-opted. copyleft is insufficient, no sort of license can actually stop this.

it isnt enough to use freely-licensed software. it isnt enough to write copylefted software.

a free software movement that doesnt want to just make it cheaper for big companies to remake decades of our work in their image, at our inconvenience, has to resist corporate control.

thats the future of free software, if it has any. rms and the #fsf arent interested.

@ErickaSimone unions are one of the few roads to real progress. definitely not the only one. but for example when i talk about the limits of foundations i offer unions as an example of an alternative.

im not saying unions are perfect. indispensable, but still human.

@BethanyBlack breeders arent sending their best!

honestly i dont hate the next generations.

"next youll be saying they should go to special schools."

"THEY DO!"

@youronlyone

> Where do we draw the line?

not at the license. it makes no sense for a work to magically cease to be "fanfic-able" the moment it enters the public domain. thats arbitrary. fanfic is only incidentally, not fundamentally, about copyright. licenses are about copyright. approval of a particular work is not.

> Scenario #1: Author A dedicated their story to the Public Domain. Is it fan fiction if Author B uses that Public Domain work?

yes.

@youronlyone its not a bad thing to have beliefs or opinions. sometimes though, the "what" of these things is more complicated.

if you skip those and ask yourself "why" you think a b c d e are or are not fanfic, sometimes this simplifies things a lot.

@youronlyone

> What's your take on it?

i think wikipedia appears to support your original position first:

> The author uses copyrighted characters, settings, or other intellectual properties

but supports the points i try to make here:

> Fan fiction can be based on any fictional (and occasional non-fictional) subject.

that implies worlds no longer restricted by copyright.

> It may infringe on the original author's copyright

implies it still may be fanfic if pd or free-licensed.

@youronlyone

> specifically stated instead of it the norm.

> the need to state any derivative work is not a fanfic

by default the authors opinion has no bearing on this. if an author somehow blessed the work as "canon" like the council of nicea, itd be a rare exception. ff as a rule ignores the approval of authors entirely.

what defines fanfic IS the norm, the custom, rather than law. what constitutes a hot fudge sundae depends not on licenses but the things people typically make it with.

@youronlyone to sum up:

unlicensed deriv: ff

licensed but not
SPECIFICALLY approved: ff

author reads ff after its public and likes it: still ff

author reads before release and approves it: MAYBE not/less ff but hard to say

author uses own world based on your deriv of it? maybe not/less ff, hard to say / depends?

2nd author bases on public domain: ff- BUT, large mainstream works/disney arent called fanfic usually

regardless, i dont think copyright/licence is what determines fanfic status.

@youronlyone

to NOT be ff itd have to be a traditional collaboration. if two people BOTH decide to work on something together, for example you & cory doctorow write a book together based on 1 of his novels- thats not a ff even though you didnt create the world.

if you create something based on his world but just have a license, still ff. if you dont have a license, still ff.

if he creates something based on HIS world but YOUR deriv, harder to say. imo not, or less ff- you could argue it is.

@youronlyone @trdebunked

> even if a fanfic author is given an automatic permission to write a derivative work, it still is fan fiction?

very simply. legal permission does not count as approval of the work, its only permitted- as distinct as allowing a plumber entry and calling them a friend.

> when is fiction a fanfic and when it is not?

maybe, not a fanfic when the author gives SPECIFIC approval before release. written w/ only blanket permission (license) isnt approving the specific work.

@youronlyone im just saying that youre confusing permission to reuse a work with approval of the result. you and i are both fans of free licensing, if you delve into the legal wording of cc you can tell that these are two different things.

theyre actually always two different things. the cc licenses tend to be explicit about it- the same applies to all licenses.

did we just lose the ability to create steamboat willie fanfics?

@youronlyone so a fanfic is an unauthorised biography of fictional characters, and copyright/license status has nothing to do with this.

@youronlyone thats a pointless distinction. it can be "unauthorised" without breaking copyright law. not that i think copyright should apply for more than a few years, or to copies of works that are not being sold commercially. id be perfectly happy if we got rid of it altogether. you really think fanfic would suddenly become impossible if copyright didnt exist?

for another example of "authorised" that has nothing to do with copyright, consider "authorised biographies". its not just about (c).

@maxleibman @polotek

quoting is fundamental to human discourse.

i missed this the first time:

> But quoted posts are also the foundation of true discourse

marco actually said it first, but i completely agree- nearly word for word.