“Copying is theft” is the argument of corporations for ages, but if they want our data and information, to integrate into their business, then, suddenly they have the rights to it.

If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software and AI models, as well, since it is available on the open web.

They got themselves into quite a contradiction.

Check if you find anything about this in the kernel log (dmesg).

Generally, I tend to think more in the direction of that there is some misunderstanding happening, then people being stupid. Maybe that is just the optimist in me.

What exactly is meant when people say they don’t know git. Do they mean the repository data format? Do they mean the network protocol? Do they mean the command line utility? Or just how to work with git as a developer, which is similar to other vcs?

I think if you use some git gui, you can get very far, without needing to understand “git”, which I would argue most people, that use it daily, don’t, at least not fully.

It also means that anyone can make their own instruction set extensions or just some custom modifications, which would make software much more difficult to port. You would have to patch your compiler for every individual chip, if you even figure out what those instructions are, and what they do. Backwards, forwards or sideway (to other cpus from other vendors) compatibility takes effort, and not everyone will try to have that, and instead add their own individual secret sauce to their instruction set.

IMO, I am excited about RISC-V, but if the license doesn’t force adopters to open their designs under an open source license as well, I do expect even more portability issues as we already have with ARM socs.

“you” as in person with required skills, resources and access to a chip fabrication facility. For many others they can just buy something designed and produced by others, or play around a bit on FPGAs.

We will also see how much variation with RISC-V will actually happen, because if every processor is a unique piece of engineering, it is really hard to write software, that works on every one.

Even with ARM there are arguable too many designs out there, which currently take a lot of effort to integrate.

Also state owned is only really useful for infrastructure, where it doesn’t make sense to have multiple providers and monopolies are easily attainable. Like roads, rails, electricity, internet backbone infrastructure and providers, social media, etc. Democracy is the currently best way we know of managing monopolies.

For other stuff, you probably want employee owned democratic collectives. You would still have competition on the market, but its ordinary people that have the say. This would give more power to the people enthused about the tech and long term success, then all the short term gains.

No, publicly traded. One of the first steps to enshittyfication.

Yeah, but we are talking 2000-2005 or so.

I wasn’t that much a fan of the skins and found the interface of winamp very small and fiddly.

The milkdrop plugin however was rather nice though.

Maybe someone can explain to me why Winamp is still so popular?

I have used Winamp 2, 3 and 5 around 2000ish, and it was a fine player, but nothing really special. After Winamp I think I switched to MediaMonkey, which IMO was easier to manage my music collection. Then I used VirtualDJ, which supported cross fading between music with synchronized beats. I think I also used foobar2000 a bit.

Winamp was an okayish player, but there was much more powerful software around at that time. It this just nostalgics or is there really something that people miss today that Winamp provided or still provides?

There is a different term for that:source-available

So you can play a racing game in your car, while letting the autopilot kill you.

And so that the manufacturer can sell you a new car, so that you can play newer games.

What I meant is that is caches the password database for offline use.

There is not much difference between having two apps (password manager and authenticator app) or one app, that does both on the same device.

So, if you want more security, then you have to deal with a hardware token and never with a authenticator app. But then if you loose your token, then you have trouble.

I used to use Aegis, but after setting up my own vaultwarden, I use the normal bitwarden app/plugin on all my systems for passwords and TOTP.

The advantages are that I don’t need my phone to login, the keys are synced and backuped in the encrypted vaultwarden database, which I can then handle with normal server backup tools. It still works offline, because bitwarden app caches the password.

This is IMO much more convenient and secure (in a way that loosing access to a device doesn’t shut you out, and you don’t need to trust third parties) then most other solutions.

Not the drama itself should influence your judgment, but how they will deal with it.

Whenever people work together on something, there will be some drama, but if they are dealing with it, then that should be fine.

Nix and NixOS are big enough, that even if it fails, there are enough other people that will continue it, maybe under a different name.

Even it that causes a hard fork, which I currently think is unlikely, there are may examples where that worked and resolved itself over time, without too much of burden on the users, meaning there are clear migration processes available: owncloud/nextcloud, Gogs/Gitea/Forgejo, redis/valkey, …

As I said, it is not impossible to move away from gh compared to many other cases in other industries, just that it is more difficult than necessary because vendor-lockin is allowed.

If vendor-lockin was illegal, companies had more incentives to use established or create new standards to facilitate simpler migration between software stacks, without changing the external interface.

For instance allowing your own DNS name to be used as the repo/project basepath instead of enforcing github.com, Allowing comments, reviews, issues and pull requests via email or other federated services, instead of enforcing github accounts to do so, providing documented, stable and full-featured APIs for every component of their software, so that it is easy to migrate and pick and choose different components of their while stack from possible different vendors, …

There are so many ways that would improve the migration situation, while also providing more ways for other ideas to compete on a level playing field. If a bright engineer has an idea for improving one component from github, they should not be required to write a whole separate platform first.

Well the reason for that is the vendor-lockin and centralized technology.

If your project for instance uses a similar development method as the linux kernel does, e.g. sending and reviewing patches via mailing lists and providing url to push and pull git repos from, it is quite easy to switch out the software stack underneath, because your are dealing with quasi-standart data: Mbox, SMTP, HTTP(s) and DNS. So you can move your whole community to a different software stack by just changing some DNS entries and maybe provide some url rewrite rules without disrupting the development process.

I am not saying that the mailing list development process is the right one for every project, but it demonstrates how agnostic to the software stack it could be.

If vendor-lockin is made illegal, the service providers would have more incentives to use or create standardized APIs, so that their product can be replaced by competitors. So switching to or from github/gitlab/… becomes easier.

It has more than you expect, if your project is established on github and want to move away you have to deal with:

• migration of issues
• migration of pull requests
• migration of all review comments etc
• migration of the wiki
• migration of the pages
• convince all contributors to possible create a new account somewhere else
• changing of the project urls. I don’t think github offers a url rewrite service
• forks on github will not have the new destination as the fork base
• change the ci and release process
• because you cannot add url rewrite rules to your old gh project, you might need to only ‘archive’ the project there with manually written text, to point to the new destination, for people to find it

You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.

What the author is probably searching for is “vendor-lockin”, which is an anticompetitive practice for so long that it became the way many companies rely their business on. It favors established products over new-comers by making switching offerings difficult/expensive or even impossible, thus better products often have no chance of competing in a field, that was dominated by a single supplier for a while.

IMO there should be strict regulations and high fines associated with it, because it hinders innovation massively across all industries.

The cost of switching away from github for a project is high, but not as high as in other fields.