Notices by Matthew Garrett (mjg59@nondeterministic.computer)

There is a well defined process for how elections are run (https://opensource.org/about/board-of-directors/elections). This year, several candidates were removed from the election results for supposedly refusing to use proprietary software to sign the board agreement. The requirement to do so is not stated anywhere in the election process. The bylaws allow the board to ignore the will of the electorate, but removing candidates who didn't violate any election rules is just fucking ridiculous.

If the membership chose a candidate that the board refuses to appoint, the membership deserves to know that.

Like many nonprofits, membership of the @osi board of directors is technically down to the existing board choosing to appoint new directors. OSI "membership" (in the sense that donors can become "members" of the organisation) isn't a thing that's defined by the by-laws, it's a process that the directors have chosen to adopt. As such, the elections that members participate in are just guidance for the board's decisions, rather than anything they're obliged to respect.

Every semester I teach best practices around build pipelines, and every semester someone mentions SolarWinds, and if I, as a company, wanted to set up an entirely independent build pipeline that was entirely independent of the rest of my infrastructure and was managed by different people so I could build in two places and verify binary outputs were identical, how would I do that today? (Assume my build is already reproducible, let's not complicate things)

When Twitter launched encrypted DMs they were bad. They haven't improved. The person behind them is now a senior member of DOGE and getting appointed to the board of a government-backed mortgage giant: https://mjg59.dreamwidth.org/71188.html

Nobody is going to try to make money on a proprietary fork of an MIT Coreutils. Nobody is hiding their trade secrets there. This isn't the 80s.

What is a bigger issue is the more symbolic nature of things. People had the opportunity to pick a copyleft licence and chose not to. We can view this as an attack on copyleft (albeit one that's likely symbolic at best), or we can accept that the copyleft community has been doing a poor job winning the hearts and minds of new generations of developers

What Coreutils-adjacent GPL enforcement there has been centred around Busybox, a GPLed implementation of many POSIX and Unixish tools, commonly used in embedded devices. Busybox-related enforcement has been an effective tool in obtaining compliance, to the extent that it's been reimplemented under a permissive licence with the explicit goal of reducing enforcement risk. Coreutils has simply never been subject to enforcement in the same way, so there's no significant impact.

I'm a huge proponent of copyleft licensing, I'm in favour of using the GPL as a tool to ensure users have the ability to modify the software on their devices, and I'm just having trouble getting too worked up about the Rust reimplementation of Coreutils being MIT. Philosophically? Yeah, it sucks. Practical outcomes? Almost certainly none. The GPL violators aren't going to change coreutils implementation to avoid being sued, the FSF wasn't going to do that anyway

My god https://github.com/ArcaneNibble/i-cant-believe-its-not-webusb is an incredible hack but also I'm now wondering whether there ought to be a spec for devices to explicitly opt into WebUSB

The discovery that lifepo4 power banks are now at the point where they can switch from AC fast enough that they're usable as UPSes is about to change my life in a short term expensive but long term cheap way

Every so often I remember this quote from the old Unix Support page at Cambridge:

"Please note that we don't support VMS or Ultrix, the former because while it is a worthy operating system it isn't Unix and the latter because while it is a Unix it isn't a worthy operating system."

@lina @nishi awh I'm going to go and cuddle up with some breasts now enjoy your alone time

@lina @nishi my spouse has kept their cocks next to the bed since before their bottom surgery, you just seem very confused

@lina @nishi oh right you're just factually incorrect and I can ignore you

@lina @nishi yeah uh what gay sex do you think is happening here?

@lina @nishi not sure what part of my relationships you're slurring against there

@lina @nishi hey you're the one incapable of actually making your point explicit, I'm merely having sex with a bunch of incredibly attractive people (sometimes at the same time)

@lina @nishi oh, you're homophobic? I mean nobody I'm dating is AMAB but you're still a piece of shit

@lina @nishi sounds like I'm having more fulfilling sex than you? Sucks to be you

@lina @nishi My spouse's cocks are all kept next to the bed could you please be more explicit about what you believe is happening here