I’m not sure the McDonald’s complaints are really about McDonald’s as opposed to a clear example of inflation. Unless you’re talking about something I haven’t heard.

Well, you certainly made me feel much more optimistic, thank you.

I suppose you’re right that copyleft is not the primary motivator for contributions.

I’m aware that forks happen often when a takeover is attempted. There are many big success stories in FOSS. However, my point was that most FOSS software isn’t that successful. There are plenty of projects out there with very few contributors, and it is those I’m saying are easy for taking over. Perhaps they get taken over because most of the community doesn’t care, but it still happens from time to time. I originally commented because you seemed to make out that proprietisation was impossible.

I get your point that it’s incredibly unlikely for anything that matters however.

Edit: I think I misremembered an example I gave of a successful fork after an attempted takeover, but it was something Oracle.

I think the point of both is that even if he skipped all the text explaining he’s about to break the system, he would have still have had to type the words explaining them, and therefore hopefully think about the words he’s typing. It might not protect against copy-paste as effectively, but there’s a higher chance he’d read what he’d copied than a wall of text. Not 100% effective, but it’s probably going to catch more users than “do as I say”, where he still thought he was installing Steam, so it’s good those changes were made.

But yes, it won’t catch everyone like Linus because they either won’t think about it or they will copy-paste without reading. Ultimately an immutable distro might be best for him. Then again he might still find a way to break it somehow.

I suppose it’s true that neither would have been called feature complete by its authors, proprietisation is much more likely when there is still a lot missing. But I would still caution against thinking that having all the features you need means you’re immune to it.

Sorry, I didn’t explain what I was talking about.

The problem is that in the modern software environment there’s a constant need for updating and patching, and if a proprietary fork provides those updates and a free original can’t keep up for whatever reason, the proprietary fork (that could have contributed otherwise) gains inertia until the free original dies. This is admittedly harder to pull off in a mature and well maintained free software ecosystem, but I think you’d be surprised how many important free software projects lack needed manpower. It doesn’t help that MIT practically encourages people not to publish code, compared to GPL.

People make out forking like it’s a big protection against proprietisation, and it is, but it’s not foolproof. Good forks are usually founded by community members that already understand and contribute to the code, most forks actually die quickly. The fewer contributors relative to the project’s size and complexity, the more realistic it is to either be overtaken by a more competitive proprietary fork, or for the maintainers to sell out and relicense without anybody to fork it.

Realistically, I don’t know how likely this would happen to anything decently important, but it has happened at least a few times. I remember using Paint .NET while it was still MIT licensed years back, but nobody forked it. Since we’re on Lemmy, Reddit used to use a Free software license.

Code complete is arguably a myth when talking about security. You need to update when vulnerabilities are found at minimum. Sometimes, the changing software environment changes and so the software has to start adding features again or get replaced. Rarely old features are the vulnerability, and have to be removed.

I think there were a few other changes indirectly inspired by what had transpired, but admittedly I can’t remember most of them. I think Debian also modified apt.

I also think I remember immutable distros taking off just after this.

From the description, it sounds like the children might have mtDNA from the mother, so they have 3 genetic parents. Still a very impressive feat, from what I understand up until now nobody had found which genes to trigger a sort of cellular reset to do this, and trying to reset everything doesn’t work.

If it’s anything like religious “Great Awakenings” that the US seems to go through every now and again (which I think it is), I think you’ll find the movement much smaller than it first was as people on the fringes peel away quietly with each disappointment. They didn’t lose anybody for years because they didn’t really get to be disappointed, but now they have their promised messiah back in power they’re struggling to make sense of it all. The core might double down after each disappointment until the leader dies, but each time they have to add a new layer of complexity to what they believe, and each time they will lose a few people, particularly people that find the least community and identity through the movement. People that won’t lose as much if they leave.

Where at the peak of some “Great Awakenings” the majority of people are part of the movement, by the end it’s sometimes just a small community of a few thousand members. There is never a single event that causes most people to leave, it’s gradual.

Edit: I’d also like to note that they didn’t have much opportunity to be disappointed in his first term (most of the terrible things he did didn’t really disappoint his followers) until the end when people were dying and inflation was rising, but their messiah was out of power before they saw the full effect of it, and so they got to blame somebody else for inflation and Covid deaths and so on (if they even believed Covid existed).

I sometimes forget that us Linux users often lack social skills. Understanding other people is hard.

Anyway, I’ll try this grass, is it on GitHub?

As far as I’m aware, contributor license agreements can include a clause stating that you agree to hand over copyright on submission of code. If every contributor has signed the CLA, there is only only one copyright holder, making relicensing easy.

However, successfully using this to relicense to something less open is extremely rare, and this isn’t a concern anyway as they don’t have a CLA.

I kind of suspect life wouldn’t exist today if it didn’t make the occasional error. Although I believe DNA does have rudimentary correction mechanisms: each strand is paired up with its negative and duplicated chromasomes will have 2 chromatids. In those cases there are kind of 4 copies. Sometimes errors are corrected by using the other chomatid as a template. However, not all that useful before the chromosome is duplicated.

At some point the data has to be copied for reproduction, so DNA must be writable at least for new copies, but that’s part of what makes the copying process so vulnerable. However, I do agree that it’s too easy to trigger a write, and while histones reduce writability, they also reduce readability.

Maybe it’s because I’m not an Arch user anymore, but I wouldn’t dream of cutting out “junk” DNA. It’s incredibly important.

I should probably add: if it becomes proprietary, the remaining soft fork will likely die. Turns out very few people have the technical knowledge for Audacity.

If you want to read the telemetry controversy/drama, I found this one I’d read years ago: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

I remember feeling a bit bad for the maintainers. There’s a lot of complaining for a minor and optional change, but at the same time it’s interesting that they added telemetry anyway. (Not unmodified however)

As far as I remember, Audacity’s maintainers, previously just some volunteers with no organisation, decided to sell the ownership of the project to a company with some guitar platform. Nothing changed at first, they employed the maintainers to work on the same project they were already working on.

Then they started adding controversial telemetry and some soft forks appeared. I vaguely also remember hearing that there’s some contract that the company owns the source code, so relicensing to a proprietary licence is easy and possible in future. All the new software the company launches is proprietary, and there’s signs they want to tie it all together into a single suite.

Nothing majorly bad has happened to Audacity, yet. But decisions are no longer community driven, as shown by the telemetry drama. I fear it’s a matter of time.

What stops those open source projects having that same rugpull? AOSP was open source and for a long time could be installed on one’s phone indefinitely.

You could argue ownership, but if Audacity can be bought then so can nearly anything.

Possibly, I’m waiting until a motive is confirmed.

Everybody described him as being withdrawn, it seems like nobody but his roommates knew anything about him, but those roommates haven’t talked as much. It’s like none of the people that were physically around him were part of his world, and they describe him as being online a lot.

I think he was more shaped by the internet than the people physically around him. Especially since he was described as being apolitical until after he left his parents’ home.

No, but I also hear that there are a lot of leftists with right wing parents, especially in Utah. Maybe that was why he moved out, I don’t know.

Maybe he was more right wing instead. I don’t know. I’m not the person who was saying he was leftist. I was just pointing out that he wasn’t a registered Republican.