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We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

akrites.org

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Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#81

Post by p-e-w »

noufalibrahim wrote: post #75
cryo32 wrote: post #29

No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it. I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.

In a certain way, moving from "Free Software" to "Open Source" started this transition and it's not slowing down.

Imagine if the AGPL had become the default license for open source projects, as it was intended to when the service provider loophole in the GPL became apparent. The software industry would be unrecognizable.

Instead, millions of developers now gift corporations their work by releasing everything under MIT or Apache, and those corporations take from that treasure trove what they want and give back what they want, which is very often nothing.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#82

Post by asfodelsu »

throwaw12 wrote: post #56
oersted wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To save others a search: > The akritai (singular akrites) is a term used in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th–11th centuries to denote the frontier soldiers guarding the Empire's eastern border, facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. (Wikipedia) Akron means edge or border, so "frontiersman" or "those of the border". EDIT: Commenters seem upset about the Muslim part, I didn’t mean to imply anything, you cannot jus…

> facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. if true, then choosing this name was a very bad decision. Imagine how Muslims would feel, demonizing them even more, before they were terrorists, now they are attacking open source and hence some organizations need akrites to defend from them. I really wish such organizations which try to demonize anyone, to fail miserably

Α better translation is "defender of the borders" or "Knights of the borders". Form "Akri" = edge, border.

It's not Muslim related even at the time they exists.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#83

Post by necrotic_comp »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #70
cryo32 wrote: post #29

No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it. I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.

Idk I swapped to a Linux-only PC last April and have been steadily shifting over to open source software for basically everything in my life. I haven’t done everything, I doubt I ever will hit 100%, but well over half the stuff I use on a daily basis I have real control over now and can audit. Keep in mind I am not a coder/engineer, I’m just kind of a tourist in that world, so if I can do it it’s clearly very achieva…

One of the reasons why a source-based system like Gentoo is particularly nice is that you can compile your binaries with debug flags, so if you hit bad behavior you can inspect, write a patch, compile into your running system, and then push the same patch upstream.

I barely have to do it, but imho, this is how software should work and what running a computer should feel like.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#84

Post by ninjagoo »

> We are joined by Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft and GitHub, NVIDIA, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler

A lot of open source folks are going to be very skeptical, rightly so, of this group of players.

> ... to find, fix, and responsibly disclose vulnerabilities in critical open source software ...

How this is implemented is going to be key. Are they going to contribute through (a) existing channels, pull requests etc. or (b) are they going to fork the projects under the guise of 'security' or (c) offer bug bounties or (d) contribute financially?

Approach (a) brings the community along. (b) alienates the community, splits resources, and in the long term will likely cause many open-source projects to die. (c) has potential but timing and speed can be unfavorable for critical bugs, and doesn't mesh with 'responsible disclosure'. (d) can be ineffective for critical bugs unless paired with support for maintainers, which can be incredibly helpful for the opensource ecosystem.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#85

Post by p-e-w »

pydry wrote: post #58
cryo32 wrote: post #29

No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it. I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.

Defeatism is easy

Do you have any concrete plan to make things better that doesn’t involve magical thinking or pseudo-appeals like “everyone just needs to…”?

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#86

Post by justincormack »

jdw64 wrote: post #78

After reading this. I realize how different Asian and Western consciousness really are. My entire technology stack was built on Microsoft's ecosystem, not on open source. This was Microsoft's attempt to expand their base for the corporate hiring market and OS market share. Conversely, open source was a huge barrier for me. When I have a product I've built, I have to get past open source, but accessing open source com…

The corporate environments were here too, most companies used to run on Windows server. 20 years ago companies used to pretend they didnt use Linux, but they were, it was just introduced to places they didnt know about, as it was free so it didnt have to go through purchasing. The rise of the early web in the post dotcom years was the catalyst, Perl, PHP, Linux servers etc. Before mobile, that did bring back proprietary development to some extent, for clientside. That was the era when Microsoft said "Linux was a cancer". Many companies still have large Windows (dot Net pre dotnet core) codebases, but Java mostly runs in Linux now.

The language barrier is interesting, there is more Chinese open source now too, but yes so much is English. I remember using google translate for Nginx from Russian back in the day, and openresty from Chinese, but yes we are lucky,

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#87

Post by [deleted] »

Forgeties79 wrote: post #70
cryo32 wrote: post #29

No we won’t. We’ll make grand statements about it, leave it for commercial entities to corrupt it, then complain loudly about the state of it when we really did nothing about it. I expect we’ve got a future of “undo forks” as I’ve called them which is rolling back to pre-insanity times and rethinking again. That’s only something people unencumbered by commercial requirements can do.

Idk I swapped to a Linux-only PC last April and have been steadily shifting over to open source software for basically everything in my life. I haven’t done everything, I doubt I ever will hit 100%, but well over half the stuff I use on a daily basis I have real control over now and can audit. Keep in mind I am not a coder/engineer, I’m just kind of a tourist in that world, so if I can do it it’s clearly very achieva…

[deleted]

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#89

Post by justincormack »

einpoklum wrote: post #8

> We are joined by Amazon Web Services, Anthropic, Chainguard, Cisco, Citi, Endor Labs, Ericsson, Google, IBM, JPMorganChase, Microsoft and GitHub, NVIDIA, OpenAI, RapidFort, Red Hat, Rust Foundation, Sonatype, Vodafone, and Zscaler Many of the names on the list makes the initiative rather suspect. Companies who do a lot to undermine free and open-source software, who hide critical software behind their walls, preven…

It won't be out of the public eye if it is part of Linux Foundation, it will be open.

Re: We all depend on open source. We will defend it together

#90

Post by oersted »

adamo wrote: post #69
oersted wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To save others a search: > The akritai (singular akrites) is a term used in the Byzantine Empire in the 9th–11th centuries to denote the frontier soldiers guarding the Empire's eastern border, facing the Muslim states of the Middle East. (Wikipedia) Akron means edge or border, so "frontiersman" or "those of the border". EDIT: Commenters seem upset about the Muslim part, I didn’t mean to imply anything, you cannot jus…

This is a very simplified and uninformed view of what the Akritai were. The name choice is so wrong, it cannot even be called out as cultural appropriation, because it is far worse than that. LF just stick with languages you understand.

I would be glad to learn if you are willing to explain, this what I found from trusted sources, but it would be great to know if there’s additional nuance.
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