Notices by Dave Lane :flag_tino: 🇳🇿 (lightweight@mastodon.nzoss.nz)

Nice to see these (thanks for the tip @thelinuxEXP!) - https://unite.un.org/news/osi-first-endorse-united-nations-open-source-principles and https://news.itsfoss.com/un-ditches-google-form/

@lxo ooo, nice quote - yes, I remember seeing Allison talking about this stuff around that time - he's the real deal.

Huh - what do you know? https://redis.io/blog/agplv3/ - turns out that when a software category is dominated by a #libre option (e.g. mobile operating systems, database & blog engines, and now value stores/caching systems), nothing proprietary can compete. And the rest of the world benefits from it. Imagine that.

@lucasmz yes - that's true - they're some proprietary binary blobs for drivers (like GSM and a few other specialised things, like VoWifi)... so there's no time for complacency. We need to keep up the pressure.

Whelp, the water's pretty high out there. We're on the way towards having a rather large lake across the road.

This is what home be like (after wild weather walkies)...

Australians, please review! https://yewtu.be/watch?v=zXHq04W0kBs or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zXHq04W0kBs

So, this is kinda huge: https://yewtu.be/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0 or https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pVI_smLgTY0 This is (last I checked) the guy with 100 million YouTube subscribers... switching to Linux (Mint) with a lot of useful commentary and some choice words for Microsoft and Windows. This could be a bit of a big deal.

@craftygardennz one of the most worthy targets is surely our use of (total dependence on) US-owned IT services and systems... and reversing the historical shunning of domestic alternatives.

@apropos @Suiseiseki seems to me that either could be forked pretty trivially if the US was being boycotted. Sure, the original devs wouldn't be as likely working on it, but let's not forget that Torvalds is Finnish even if he's been in the US for many years.

It'll be funny if, on the eve of the 50th anniversary of Microsoft's founding (not something to celebrate in my opinion, of course), Trump's tariffs could cause people to choose non-US-owned technologies, i.e. Linux. I'd be ok with that.

@stephenharlow we used to use that in my company - my colleague @lightshow was a dab hand with it - it's a seriously powerful publishing tool... let us know how you (and your student) go with it!

@stephenharlow @lightshow yes, I've had words with my boy's vice principal who sent an email to all students' parents encouraging them to use the 'student discount' to buy copies of Adobe products. I (delicately) likened it to being a dope dealer on behalf of Adobe - first hit's free(ish). But she was unimpressed. She, too, made the 'industry standard' excuse, but it's a totally depraved practice.

Here in NZ, we've recently been told that the Alpine Fault which runs down the spine of the country & through our capital, Wellington, has 75% chance of rupturing (with a 8-9 magnitude quake) in the next 50 years. (see https://af8.org.nz). I think we're blindly waiting for a similarly devastating 'quake' in the mainstream digital platform landscape. Don't know what it'll look like, or who'll be affected, but it'll be bad. We have way too many eggs in too few badly incentivised baskets...

Just watching this Trump tariff debacle unfolding is like watching a kid playing what he thinks is a game of monopoly, not realising that there're real people in those streets & utilities, houses & hotels. In this case, we're dealing with a mentally deficient man who probably doesn't care. I feel desperately sad for all the millions of people - most poor sods in the US - who'll have their lives upended by this madness. I just hope it doesn't affect people outside the US as much. 1/2

Just upgraded our FOSSDLE PieFed instance - https://link.fossdle.org - thanks to the PieFed General Matrix group for the nudge - and thanks @rimu for your hard work on such a very cool platform! (PieFed is a fully #libre and Fediverse-enabled alternative to Reddit!).

I've got to admit that I always feel a bit let down when I see good #libre devs using VSCode.

I know it's a bit petty, but I gotta admit it: I'm a bit sad that - given the myriad of better (more libre) options - the new Gnome site is built with a .Net framework, even though it's ostensibly open source. Just feels yucky, with the foul taint of MIcrosoft dependence on it.

To my dear but deeply flawed land-of-my-birth: when your democratic process delivers an intellectually & morally deficient autocrat & his evil entourage... the response is not 'we need incremental change!'. No. The *system* has failed. The response must be massive, grassroots, fundamental structural change. It must reject, entirely, the concept of billionaires (plus a 'margin of safety'), neoliberalism, & even unfettered capitalism. There's no incremental way out of this deep hole.

@jdmcg yeah, gonna get in front of the staff on this one. Just forwarded the similar email I sent to the deputy principal I sent to the similar email from 2023, to which I received no useful response and suggested it'd be great to have more engagement this time around so I can assist CHS provide better equity of opportunity to their students, especially those surprisingly astute ones who choose to run Linux rather than an Adobe-supported platform.