301–310 of 371 posts
This, btw, is why open sourcing proprietary software rarely happens: you actually have to go to a fair amount of careful effort to get it right. If you don’t, you end up with this debacle.
And here's another story to add to the book "How to shoot yourself in the foot by not knowing how the Internet and software licenses work", should anyone write that one day. Also, from one ArsTechnica link posted later in this story, one former dev told that the 4 WA Legacy developers were fired and soon he left too, so I guess they presumably had either no one or very few resources who knew that code and were in the…
It's not ideal if the way the software was written was itself illegal. Still the advantages of having it out in the open seem to outweigh the benefits of litigating all license violations.
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Pacifism only works if there is someone who can protect the pacifist. In the Christian religion, God ultimately protects the virtuous pacifists by putting them in Heaven, away from bullies. In an online forum, there's no transcendental force to render such a service, so...
This is only true for a very narrow definition of pacifism. It is the literal reading of Matthew 5:39. But not even all Christian scholars subscribe to that definition, let alone pacifists in general. Many pacifists are perfectly ok with self-defense.
But, to my mind, pacifists choose to not fight back by definition, or that would be violence, so their prolonged existence is only possible because other social mechanisms hold back violence which would destroy them. Interaction with these mechanisms may be the point of holding a pacifist position: say, a monk or a nun may have a higher moral authority because of a declared personal abstinence from any violence, and hence indirectly incentivize lay people to protect them.
Of course there are people who call themselves pacifists but admit a right for self-defense, but only not organized or military; such a position again is only possible when someone else would partake in a defensive warfare and protect them.
Abstaining from aggression while being ready and willing to respond to aggression with full force, lethal when required, looks to me like the most logical "lawful good" position. It has a chance to produce an equilibrium when multiple parties live in peace for a long time, and any violent deviations are quashed.
On the other hand, Radionomy's clear incompetence over the years sours me. Having the IP for all those years and laying it to waste, culminating in a half-assed attempt to open source it. It pains me to say as their intentions may be good at least in part, but one has to let Darwin get his way too.
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Seriously, watching that unfold was hilarious. I also feel like some were being too harsh for no reason. The repo owner was responsive and merging PRs.
Might be another person than the one making the calls. It is abit sad that they messed up the licensing. It would be fun nostalgia to run the 'real' Winamp on Linux. Native. Emulation does not count.
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> My personal code isn't licensed, so there is nothing that stops you from doing that if you get your hands on my hard drive This is not true. You can't redistribute someone else's IP without a license from the owner.
In which country? What if the owner has passed?
In my country it's legal to do so -if there's no profit- on media, but not for propietary software with sharing restrictions.
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It's WWII all over again with switched roles, and hacktivits DDOSed archive.org
I don't see any credibility to the claim that 'BlackMeta' were/are in fact hacktivists. Do you have any reason to repeat that?
We can quibble about whether a "hacktivist" group can even exist at all or if it's a convenient lie the Internet has collectively told itself to justify groups of thugs attacking the targets they don't like as "the good ones", but they fit the modern definition of a hacktivist group.
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You are confusing Open Source with Free Software . GPL family of licenses are the ones propely securing everyone's right to distribute modifications.
This is wrong. Permissively licensed (MIT, BSD, WTFPL, Apache, etc.) free software is still free software. Open-source requires the provision of the same right to distribute modified copies as free software does. Copyleft licenses like the GPL assert the same right recursively for downstream users, more or less (details vary between copyleft licenses). But granting the right (to distribute modified copies) to first-o…
I dislike prescriptivist language. I will continue calling things open source whenever I can see the source code, no matter the license.
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> non-compliant with Github's license agreement Oh no! I did notice all the hallmonitors calling for teacher. I absolutely support dumping proprietary code on any platform and I'm glad I got a copy the day it was uploaded which lets me verify any fork claiming to be from it.
So basically you're glad someone broke their contract so you could hoard more code on your local end?
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The troll issues are exactly why my OSS group does not use GitHub at all. It's become a toxic platform for quite awhile.
That's just the reality of any platform that doesn't gatekeep who gets to participate. Eventually assholes are going to join, that's simply unavoidable.
The problem is that to outsiders, the initial set of gatekeepers who arose naturally in the early community as "the people that knew what it was about" will themselves appear to be "the toxic assholes", so every community will naively eventually cut out its gatekeepers to be more inviting to newcomers.
Only to have the actual toxic assholes flood in, become the new gatekeepers, and dominate the discussion, and suddenly your Faces of Evil speedrunning Discord must have a stance on the war on Gaza and the US election because we clearly need to keep out the neo-Nazis according to our CoCs, right?
And no, I don't have an answer to this other than to largely disconnect from online platforms and start engaging in your local community. Something I myself am not guilty of doing.