• 2 Posts
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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 13th, 2023

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  • There is a clause about redistribution (1), and it expressly specifies that it applies to “aggregate software distribution containing programs from several different sources”, not single, standalone works.

    That is a weird way of wording it. In practice I doubt there are any OSI-approved licenses that prohibit standalone commercial distribution. If there were, you could trivially comply by just including a “hello world” program to make it an aggregate distribution.




  • The goal of the copyleft movement (which overlaps heavily with the free software movement) is to carve out an intellectual commons that can’t be re-enclosed. This commons is important for a number of reasons, including that it tends to be better for end-users of software in the sense that anti-features can’t really gain a foothold. It does not automatically solve UX issues, nor does it stop people from using the knowledge of the commons to do bad things.

    Much of the strength of the intellectual commons is that it builds on itself, instead of having to re-invent the same things in a dozen or more different proprietary endeavors. If we were to start a “peace software” movement, it would be incompatible with the commons, due to the restrictions it imposes. Peace software can’t build on copyleft software, and none of the commons can build on peace software. These sorts of things were considered, and compatibility was deemed more important than pushing more specific values. This isn’t a matter of the FSF or OSI standing in the way, it’s just that “peace software” would have to go it alone.

    Due to this dynamic, those that want to build “anticapitalist software” would be better served by using the GNU AGPL, rather than a license that restricts commercial use. The AGPL fixes the loophole that the GPL leaves open for network services, and should allow us to carve out a new noncommercial online ecosystem. It should even be used for non-network code, as that code may be repurposed or built upon by network services. I’m glad to see lemmy, kbin, and mastodon using it.









  • So just speaking from my personal experience, XMPP was absolutely useless for me, whereas OpenOffice wasn’t. Microsoft did succeed in preventing OO from eating significantly into its market share, but OO continued to exist and be useful. It eventually caught up on the ability to read and write MS Office XML files, and in the meantime I only had a few occasions where I had to tell people “I can’t read docx, send it to me as doc or rtf”. To be fair though, I’m not a super heavy user of Office software.

    In contrast, XMPP was basically nothing without Google. I couldn’t use it before Google federated, and I couldn’t use it after Google defederated. ¯\(ツ)

    Kbin/lemmy/mastodon are in a far better bargaining position than XMPP was, and in a better position than OO as well. They’re perfectly usable without being connected to corporate platforms, and they don’t need to market to corporate customers either. To be clear, I’m not saying that they should or shouldn’t block the corporate platforms. I think it’s actually probably best if some of them do and some of them don’t.


  • One key difference between link aggregators (kbin/lemmy/reddit/digg) and microblogs (twitter/mastodon) on the one hand, vs social networks (facebook/myspace/diaspora/friendica) and instant messengers (aim/icq/xmpp/signal) on the other, is that the latter is highly dependent on your real-life social network, while the former is not. People using instant messengers and people on facebook want to use them to interact with their friends and family, so they have to use the platforms that those friends and family are on. On the other hand, people are happy to use link aggregators and microblogs as long as there are interesting people and communities to follow, even if they consist entirely of strangers.

    Back in the early days of XMPP, when it was still known as “Jabber”, I tried switching to it from AOL Instant Messenger. I told all of my contacts about it, and tried to get them to set up Jabber accounts. I was super excited that instant messaging was finally being standardized the way email was, and we wouldn’t have to deal with AIM vs MSN messenger vs Yahoo messenger vs etc. I think I was also still bitter about being forced to switch from ICQ to AIM because all my friends had switched. I don’t think I got a single person to start using Jabber, though. At one point I even declared that I was going to stop using AIM entirely, and that people would have to switch over so that we could keep talking to each other. Didn’t work, of course. I just ended up not being able to talk to anyone until I finally went back to AIM.

    A bunch of my friends use reddit, but we don’t use the site to interact with each other in any meaningful way. This made switching to kbin really easy. Sure, I’ve told a few of them about it, but it doesn’t really matter to me if they switch or not. As far as I’m aware, XMPP never really became it’s own “thing” and experienced the kind of growth that the threadiverse has. Since we’ve passed the point of being self-sustaining, we can keep growing one user at a time, as individuals decide that they’re tired of reddit and make the jump.

    Because of this difference in dynamic, we’re in a much better position against Meta than XMPP was against Google. The fact that we can even consider outright blocking Meta is a really good sign for us, regardless of whether we do so or not. Even if we do end up in a situation where 90% or even 99% of users are on Meta’s platform, we can still refuse to allow them to compromise the ActivityPub protocol. Attempts to “embrace, extend, extinguish” will likely just result in non-blockading instances joining the anti-Meta blockade. With the connection to Meta severed, we’ll just go back to enjoying the company of the 1 to 10% that remain, and that portion will likely be much larger than what we have now.