

Free the code or perish🖕
I mention software freedom whenever I can.
Profile avatar is “paperclip” by Sina Schulz. CC BY-SA 4.0 | I am not affiliated with OpenMoji.


Free the code or perish🖕


Where have you seen people refer to MIT licensed or public domain works as copyleft? An insane asylum?


Those who rely on industry behemoths die by industry behemoths. We need to educate scared parents and lobby against papers please on the internet ourselves.
People sue companies that take our code and redistribute it while denying their users the freedoms we indended for them (via the software license). We call it GPL enforcement, or copyleft license enforcement. https://sfconservancy.org/news/2015/oct/01/compliance-principles/
That’s many new words for me, seems some groups of people also have no usage of words that others use!
I value software freedom; basically being in control of your own computing. I dislike others taking my code and then denying their users the same freedoms they enjoyed. If not for that I could do without most of Copyright as it is today.
Words have different usages among different groups of people. Wikipedia seems to support my use: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyleft
There are 2 tools to stop someone from harming others: words or violence. If people disagree an action is harmful to others then we aught to use our words to discover who’s belief better represents reality.
I think using AI to write software could be okay but the AI in use today isn’t. AI makers circumvent our social licenses and redistribute our code covertly through a mathematical blender. Debian OS authors agreed that there are legal unknowns regarding the copyrightability of generated code and didn’t say AI was okay or bad one way or the other. Debain should already know today’s AI spits at our faces.
Copyleft is a hack of copyright that ensures rights to users of software that you wouldn’t have if there was no copyright. Software is different from other creative works like music and books in that it does computing. Sharing a binary file freely isn’t enough - you need the source code to keep it maintained or change it to your will (through collaborative efforts). You prevent others withholding the source code via that copyrighted license.
You can reject the unreasonable sentences of copyright infringement, the illegality of breaking locks on your own hardware, or the long copyright terms while still promoting copyright for copyleft’s sake. Companies lobbies for those laws to prevent "stealing’, throwing people in jail or fining them into oblivion - are they going to undo all that? Can I share Disney films without going to jail now?
Trust is 3 parts; authenticity, competance and empathy. Trust is broken if any of those are insufficient.
If others believe AI creation and AI use hurts people then leaving that unaddressed makes one appear to lack empathy.
“Quality of code” ultimately boils down to judging how it may effect people (reading it, changing it, using the software it compiles to). To worry about code quality is only to care about people. Only caring sometimes is inconsistent - it questions their character.
AI companies and AI users either do not care or don’t know/understand the value of software freedom. I only used Debian from Mint [Mint being based on Ubuntu, Ubuntu based on Debian] but they used to appear as a champion of software freedom. It was somewhat understandable when they choose to no longer ~seperate proprietary drivers/codec/software but, whoever runs Debian now, I think their true colors are showing with AI.
I avoided using Debian as I thought it would be too hard to get up to date drivers! Gentoo has binaries for most of what I need and compiles the rest for me. It may not be as difficult to use as you think. However, trying to install Gentoo would definitely be… an experience 🫣


Sections of code written by AI cannot be copyrighted, as such I assume the GPL cannot apply to those. Knowing what is copyrighted, and what it not, may be difficult to tell.
As far as I know.
I’d like to see more software freedom respecting OSs. No unsourced binary blobs.
It’s very bad for me thanks - I either give up increasing more online communication services or risk punishment for circumventing this bull manure.
If you’re a big company you can afford to do it “properly” (whatever the technologically illiterate goverment chooses). It’s undue burden on any tiny selfhosting personal use or fresh starting competition. Your age is information I don’t want to store - I don’t want to store anything about you I don’t need.
I’m not concerned with some random employee looking at an ID card for a few seconds. I don’t trust any proposed online system to do the same. Any government requiring companies use an age system is just asking to dox yourself.
I trust a government to do some tasks well but there are goals people want which I cannot trust. There is no one who can be trusted to choose what you yourself can read/hear/see. Even though people can die from speech I can’t trust a government to censor it.
Even if companies had good intentions, and put a lot of effort into security, I wouldn’t trust an electronic version connected to a network. Like how I wouldn’t trust a government to do electronic voting.
I don’t know how to to convince people but it seems the only answer - to promote the value of privacy and teach people how to avoid having data on them being collected.
Suppose those were not problems - I still wouldn’t want papers please on the internet in principle. “Age” (I.D.) verification online is just a bad attempt at parenting.


I cannot recall needing Reduce while writing in GDscript (imperative language for the Godot game engine). I find use for Filter and Any easily, and use Map when trying to write functional code. I assume using Map is harder to read for fellow Godot users, so Reduce is probably a total unknown - it’s not the normal way to code in that enviroment.


Invert the gravity value and then all the dice will be floating point 🫣


Are you implying “exempt from the service” means Linux gets blocked?
https://www.conventionalcommits.org/en/v1.0.0/