241–250 of 371 posts
This story is analogous to a landowner and a group of neighborhood kids. The landowner allows the kids to play baseball in his field, but then the kids complain the grass is not cut, they are playing late into the evening, a few kids vandalize damage his flower bed, and his lawyers tell him he will be sued if he doesn't make all these safety changes, and so the landowner says screw it and puts up a fence.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That is not true. Censorship is the suppression of expression. Full stop. Anyone who controls a medium can do it. Only the U.S. government can violate the First Amendment to the Constitution. People often conflate the two. That censorship and First Amendment violations are one and the same. They are not. And the reason the U.S. government saw fit to restrict its ability to censor its public is because they recognized…
No. Censorship is when the government kicks down your door to arrest you for your wrongthink. People getting banned from some site or project because of obnoxious behavior is not censorship, it's just normal social activity and group homeostasis. They can always seek other ways to express themselves. They can buy a domain and blog about it. Dang rate limited my HN account because I got into too many controversial dis…
The word 'censorship' is clearly defined to include actions by many groups, not just governmental entities.
Now, I think there is a line between moderation and censorship but it is not based on who is doing it. That line is can get real fuzzy, but in my opinion (and it mirrors some supreme court decisions) the most significant difference is in what they try to control. Moderation tries to regulate how people communicate and censorship tries to control which ideas get expressed. Almost all moderation also includes some amount of censorship.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> they wanted to openwash it and get free labor from the open source community. This is such a ridiculous accusation. Why do discussions about source-available models often turn into accusations of soliciting free labor? Why can't authors just provide access to source code, but reserve some or all of the distribution rights? It's their code, after all. Nobody is forcing 'the open source community' to contribute under…
> Why do discussions about source-available models often turn into accusations of soliciting free labor? Simple. Because the company literally wrote this in their press release[1] at the time they were releasing it. Direct quote “This is an invitation to global collaboration, where developers worldwide can contribute their expertise, ideas, and passion to help this iconic software evolve.” Further direct quote: “With…
I'd also be careful attributing these actions to malice without further motive, when it very well could also be attributed to excitement i.r.t. sharing and collaborating on Winamp's source code in public, under a single-source.
This story is analogous to a landowner and a group of neighborhood kids. The landowner allows the kids to play baseball in his field, but then the kids complain the grass is not cut, they are playing late into the evening, a few kids vandalize damage his flower bed, and his lawyers tell him he will be sued if he doesn't make all these safety changes, and so the landowner says screw it and puts up a fence.
Rather in this analogy the landowner didn’t own all of the field and somehow the kids get blamed for him failing to keep track of what he does and does not own.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I can't see the original issue, but it's interesting that the title chooses to highlight the fact that the GPL code was modified . Actually, under the GPL, this fact is immaterial. If the Winamp player contained any GPL code at all, modified or not, then it is a derivative work of that GPL code and anyone receiving a copy of Winamp is entitled to demand the full corresponding source be provided under a GPL license.
> Actually, under the GPL, this fact is immaterial. If the Winamp player contained any GPL code at all, modified or not, then it is a derivative work of that GPL code and anyone receiving a copy of Winamp is entitled to demand the full corresponding source be provided under a GPL license. That's just not true, surely? Lest everyone using any flavour of Linux is liable to the same problem? How many apps out there are…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That’s rose coloured. Maybe people were more intelligent, but even 10 years ago people would absolutely flame each other in GitHub issues on public projects.
I suspect the author is thinking back to more than ten years ago. But yes; even newsgroups, BBSes, etc. were subject to this kind of stuff. People have always been people, even smart people with money to purchase computers.
Yes, "good ol' days" types will always move the goalposts further and further back when you point out that things were exactly the same in the mythical time period they want to return to
We've lost a lot with the deletion of this repo. Not the code - that's already out in the ether - but the absurdist comedy of the issues, pull requests, and commit history of trying to piecemeal delete third party non-FOSS software.
sorry, but this was a real shitshow. I dont understand: wtf makes people think spamming an repo in the way they did is in any way useful?
This is a cautionary tale for preservationists. My current preservation project is still not open because we are very slowly reviewing the code to make sure we don't accidentally include any IP when we open the source code. The real things that get you are similar to what happened here: codecs, graphics libraries, and a really big one to look out for is fonts. It'd be great if there was a scanner that could detect th…
Unpopular opinion: preservationism shouldn't care about licensing and legal nonsense. Because what is the point if something is distributed in a restrictive license, can't be preserved and then gets lost to time? Also, licensing is to avoid distribution, modification or outright copying by competitors; preservation is completely orthogonal to those concerns. It is to avoid losing a piece of craft to the sands of time…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Great idea except it won't make anyone money. Therefore it will never happen. Copyright law in America is not based on good ideas, reasonability, or even preservation. They are based on profit. Your idea is great, but we do not live in a world where good ideas matter at all. Only money matters here, and this idea will not make anyone money.
It's not a great idea, because law and policy are designed to privilege makers rather than takers. It's a subversive degenerate kind of morality to argue that things belong to the people who desire to consume them.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Completely incorrect. This work is being done under a non-profit, and whether or not the original owners care is irrelevant. Doing this would immediately open the non-profit to litigation and endanger the entire project. Just because we don't think anyone cares doesn't mean we won't get sued. This project is preserving the source code around a distributed chat system from the year 2000, the E programming language, an…
> If you put the source code for Windows 95 online, you'd be sued into a pile of ashes by MS within 10 minutes. The Windows NT 4 source code exists in multiple public repos on GitHub, and the one from the first Google result has been there for at least four years.
On the one hand, great, but on the other, that's how much (little) they care about Windows as a source of revenue.