Notices by Dr. Quadragon ❌ (drq@mastodon.ml), page 7

Why have I brought this up at all?

Well,

https://github.com/uutils/coreutils

It's a nice project, I quite like it. But the license choice kinda irks me.

The author states that its goal is not to fight the GNU project. While that might not be the intention, in my opinion, this is actually one third of the way to the EEE scenario.

MIT license means it's easy for corporations who choose to make proprietary software to adopt it for their projects. So the "Embrace" step is basically done, voluntarily.

The next step is to Extend it, to make it on par or better than GNU Coreutils. Which has not been achieved yet, but this is the goal.

If this has the potential to be better than GNU coreutils (and it does, being written in a more modern language, and by that virtue having more potential for modernization), then why use GNU coreutils at all? That will be the Extinguish part.

We already have GCC basically obsoleted by LLVM (which, again, is great - but it's also permissive, it was made by corpos); GlibC still holds, but I doubt it's for too long, as Musl is coming along nicely, and the Linux kernel we pretty much lost to tivoization. What remains of the GNU project, then?

I mean, I'm in no position to tell the author what to do, he can do whatever the hell he wants to, but it's still sad to see that sweet free software protection for the base OS to slowly erode and fade to irrelevance like this.

Again: it doesn't make a difference to me, the user, if, say, the new Windows effectively becomes a *nix system and adopts those while staying just as proprietary. (it still would be better than what they have right now, by a mile, but merely technically)

And what I always liked about the Free Software movement, is that it turns the power dynamic of the copyright law on its head, therefore making an actual, tangible, political difference. Which is what I'm after.

There's an argument that permissive licenses offer more freedom.

And to that, I say - yes. If you subscribe to the naïve, individualistic definition of freedom, where everything is permitted, without restrictions.

And in the ideal world, maybe that's where the story ends. But we don't live in that world. No man is an island, and if you allow anyone to do anything unrestricted, that means you permit somebody to take someone's freedom away using force. And eventually you end up with a very unfree world.

How do you combat this? Well, with solidarity, of course. There needs to be a concerted effort to protect freedom from those who tend towards smashing it to pieces. That means, some boundaries must be set up. People who respect freedom must stand together and declare that freedom and non-freedom don't mix.

You know how the corpo kind tends to say that GPL "viral" and compares Free Software movement to Borg? Well, that shows what they fear the most. Copyleft represents this solidarity.

A nice compact explanation for permissive vs. copyleft licensing I found:

Both models provide freedom and protection at the expense of the developer;
Permissive model provides more freedom and protection for your *immediate downstream user* at the expense of the end user;
Copyleft model provides more freedom and protection for your *end user* at the expense of the intermediate users.

It's pretty context-dependent which way you wanna go, but personally, in a toss-up, I'm gonna side with the end user. Because that's what actually matters in the end: the ability to actually use the software freely.

At the end of the day, if I have to use a proprietary, locked-down system that spies on me, doesn't let me modify it, or even look at its insides, and generally treats me, the user, like crap, it doesn't make a nick of difference to me that it has a BSD kernel inside, or MIT-licensed coreutils, right?

Can't get over the fact that Black Mesa is probably the bestest video game remake ever created, and it's actually done by a bunch of nerds in their spare time who just love Half-Life series that much.

Looking forward to Blue Shift and Opposing Force parts to come out.

Note to self:

Flatpak stores all of its user configuration and otherwise application-specific files in ~/.var

Which is actually great for a) not polluting ~/ and b) having all of the config in one place, finally.

Although the naming could have been a little more obvious.

Y no Popcorn Time flatpak?

Stop putting fucking YAML everywhere, it sucks.

@ZySoua @sneexy @lea Yeah, please don't fucking impersonate actual human persons, it's trash.

Corpos whatever.

Upd: thanks for placing a link on there at least.

@microsoft "Fun"... Yeah. This is what "fun" looks like these days, I reckon.

Well, sorry for ruining your quote-unquote "fun", I was just following directions listed here:

https://lea.pet/@sneexy/pages/information

> we allow parody accounts as long as they have some notice on their profiles that marks them as a parody. we don't allow impersonating individual people for no reason.

There was no indication of this being a parody account, as per screenshot, so:

> if you think another user might be breaking our rules/tos/being a dick, please report them from your instance and ask your instance moderators to forward the report to here.

@lea @sneexy @ZySoua

@7666 I dunno. Have you stopped masturbating to Kermit the Frog for a dinner table prayer?

Maybe you shouldn't have.

@lea @sneexy @microsoft @ZySoua

I want a feature in the package manager, like "you probably don't need this", that shows the most rarely used software in your system and suggests you to delete it.

@ZySoua Когда попробуешь?

@ZySoua А для чего, по твоему мнению, используют компьютер пользователи linux?

@lina @mo

@ZySoua На самом деле, ковыряться во внутренностях попросту увлекательно, особенно если ты молодой и увлекающийся.

Но никто не заставляет никого погружаться в какие-то дебри. Ставишь манджару с гномом (готовый дистр, ставится за 10 минут), и радуешься простому как палка десктопу, интерфейс почти как на мобильной ОС: статусбар сверху, меню приложений с поиском во весь экран, док снизу если что-то надо каждый день, большинство приложений - три кнопки, не запутаешься и не промажешь. Если что-то надо поставить, вон там менеджер пакетов (ака центр приложений). Ставишь через него стим в два клика, и играешь во все.

Собственно, я так и сделал, живу так уже много лет. Вовнутрь лезть нет никакого соблазна.

@lina @mo

@dotterian у меня аллергия на RPM-based дистры.

А, ну еще rolling (поставил и забыл, не надо обновлять между релизами) и можно юзать aur, в котором есть все.

@ZySoua @lina @mo

@evan Thank you for starting this whole beautiful mess!

The radio signals we broadcast are escaping into outer space, creating a radio layer, that's ever expanding at the speed of light.

Meaning, some alien somewhere somewhen is watching our TV.

Moreover, the first broadcasts that were sufficiently powerful to break through our ionosphere took place in the late 1930s.

Meaning, the first thing they'll see is probably Hitler.

Man, no wonder nobody comes to say "hello". I bet our dumpster fire of a planet is a wicked show, though.

Reverse engineering is gnireenigne.