With the wording of “data producers”, it feels more aimed at multimedia than software.
Which seems a reasonable idea. Streaming is a large use on bandwith and charging a tax for it does make sense.
What would make even more sense is the law being properly defined and not overly borad, abd giving small platforms either an exemption or a discount by making the tax progressive. Currently though, the proposal seems overly broad and not at all thought through.
Yeah, let’s make a super smart AI to detect AI. That’ll fix all our Linux maintenance problem. Any AI taints the kernel, so using it is inadmissible in every instance.
Open source is all about moving fast. Much, much more innovations happen in the oss space than in proprietary land.
Linux is a serious project.
As such, it has serious quality control.
Torvals already allowed AI-helped commits. And Linux didn’t break over it.
Bad pull requests rutinely get thrown out. And unfortunately for thode categorically against AI as a thing that exists, AI use doesn’t automatically make every PR bad. In the right hands it’s a great tool with a lot of potential.
And if Torvalds feels Linux is a project too big to be brought down by an onslaught of bad PRs made by wannabe script kiddies, so be it.
If that does become a crippling problem, the policy can be undone as easily as it was made. If not, competent contributors are free to use AI responsibly as a tool and not a magic wand.
A hard “no AI anywhere in any way, shape or form” stance is like the ostrich digging its head into the ground. Not trying a softer approach beforehand which allows responsible use (may also mean using approved environmentally friendly setups and open-weight models) is a bad idea for everyone involved.
Technology moves forward and we as individuals can choose to move with it or not. That being said, the foss moral imperative is: democratize any tech you can. This is especially true of when it’s a dangerous technology, which LLM-powered chatbots are.
If you instead move fast to burrow your head like an ostrich and deny the reality of the predator growing right beside you, the little lion cub that play hunted you just a while ago may very well soon grow into the lion that will devour you whole.
I mean, GoPros are a thing. Perv glasses aren’t the only way to mount a camera on your head.
If you’re not doing 101% of what you could and then some, why even bother in the first place?
I’d like to hijack your comment for a quick PSA for today’s lucky 10000, even though I doubt many of them hang around these parts of the web.
The compatibility issues aren’t the alternative’s faults. Rather, the cause is Microsoft playing dirty.
Microsoft Office silently breaks compatibility with its own self-made document format (the so-called “Open Office XML”). They made the public standard and switched to it around 2010, and yet they still sometimes just… stray from the standard.
Since most everyone uses MS Office, people’s first instinct is to doubt the small player for being bad, underfunded, low quality or whatever else instead of doubting MS for playing dirty. The entire tactic reads like a slightly modified Embrace, Extend, Extinguish.
I sincerely doubt that. So much critical infrastructure is running on antiquated hardware and requires human involvement, not just supervision.
How is AI supposed to function when it kills the data center power grid people making sure the data center hosting it runs smoothly?
There’s not a chance of an awakened ai genocide happening in the next 20 years. And anything short of a genocidal awakening will most definitely not kill all humans.
I have little against the local translation feature, especially given the fact it isn’t bundled but a seperate download.
That being said, there are higher priorities, like better history and bookmarks, because the current sidebars are 20+ years old and it shows. Chrome has had it figured out for 10 years straight now.
The right way for AI features would be to partner with outside orgs and projects. As you said, they’re a waste of development time. And given how much low hanging fruit there is, there’s no justification for following AI trends instead of doing basic UX hygiene.
Of course they din’t call you fantastic, because you’re not drinking Fantast.
Since you drink Fanta, you’re fantaic.
I’d say it just means socially worse for those folks, because a bad social net clearly corresponds 1:1 with corporate friendliness.
Honestly, as bad as it is, there might be one good effect: apps and software will get less bloated and spec-hungry.
It is like replacing an aggressive cancer with a congenital heart issue though. Both are terrible in their own and unique ways and choosing the worse option isn’t all that sensible of an ask.
Well, most people should. I already do, for one.
That’s nice to have. For both GIMP and the industry’s sake, priorities should be:
GIMP is an alternative to Photoshop. It isn’t a psd reader.
Being the format jack of all trades yet master of none isn’t too great of an idea. It’ll just exacerbate GIMP’s main current problem: an ancient UI Photoshop enthusiasts dread. A lot might consider switching if the bad GIMP UX was better than the also-bad Photoshop UX.
If I had to say what my main design gripe with gimp is, that’d be modularity. Seperate the ui (skins) from the tools, effects and rendering (formats). The UI is especially egregious in its hard-codedness while effects are pretty well-supported.
A few more apis would go a long way. Hell, even the closed Photoshop has open(ish) apis, since even Adobe know the value of an ecosystem and not just their internal r&d department!
Maybe that’s what it was. It doesn’t necessarily need to be that going forward, as project putlooks anf goals change with time.
Also editing is quite a lot of more work to support than mere viewing. As all tools and actions need to behave correctly - not jusbt the renderer.
And something proprietary can hadly be a “industry standard”. It can be “most common” or a “de facto standard”. But all “industry standards” are by definition open as any industry worth its weight doesn’t rely on or include a single point of failure anywhere within itself.
Not only that. Travel time should count as work time, with full reimbursement of all travel costs: gas, tickets,…
If they really feel that added cost is worth it? Let them.
Takes you three hours of travel time to get to work and back? That counts into your 8h workday, so you’ll both be paid full salary for it and get to work “only” 5h at the office.
Most should quickly turn away from the idea.
It’s as Tantacrul (the new head designer of the app) would put it
A lot of little things that all add up
The app was taken over by the Musescore team, owned (as in, paid a salary by) a Russian private enterprise called UltimateGuitar.
They’ve already made a lot of really, really bad decisions in regards to Musescore itself.
If you don’t know, Musescore is an app not too dissimilar to Audacity that UltimateGuitar took over some years before they did Audacity. And they did a bunch of moves the FOSS community dislikes.
They’re bound to do the same to Audacity. They just had a lot less time to do it and a lot more pushback from the much larger (and as such more healthy) Audacity community.
As for Audacity, they’ve added a bunch of features. They also fixed core faults with the app: included nondestructive editing and fixed some UX issues.
Which is great.
However, these positive things are just the tip of the “changes” iceberg. And the bottom gets dark, fast.
To start off at the tip with the most pet-peevy thing ever, the new team tends to make bloat. In Musescore’s case, Musescore 2 and 3 ran much faster than Musescore 4. It isn’t even comparable, and Audacity is bound to follow the same path.
Then the new Audacity UI looks great, but it introduces its own issues. Such as turning the app’s UI into a generic modern one, which some people dislike. With Musescore the changes were relatively contained, but Audacity’s UI, UX and workflow was changed as fundamentally as it could have. Old Audacity and New Audacity are pretty much different tools to learn because of it (Old was a simle editor as they were way back when, and New is a DAW - a fundamentally different workflow with a vastly different UX philosophy).
Aa such, the switch to New Audacity is easier for users from any other DAW (such as Protools, Logic, Ableton) than for Old Audacity users. Because Old Audacity was never a traditional DAW.
Then there’s the deeper layers: all the changes a for-profit overtake means for a FOSS project.
Still tame, but slightly underwater: Musescore was changed from a fully offline app to one tightly integrated into an online ecosystem. Musescore (the UltimateGuitar brand) really wants you not to save your files to your computer, but to their online score sharing platform musescore.com.
They also added telemetry and tracking to Musescore.
They also did a logo redesign for Musescore. At first it was the old logo, objectively fixed.
But after not even five years of new management, the old Musescore logo was fully scrapped “to be moved in line with other UltimateGuitar products” (to paraphrase the lead designer). In other words, it was stripped of its personality.
All of the same is bound to happen to Audacity.
In fact, the logo thing already has. Audacity’s logo was also “brought in line.”
And this new Audacity logo is especially abhorrent. Tantacrul (aforementioned head designer) adressed it in a video, but the explanation is very shallow to the point of being downright insulting. The community hates it since it quite literally removed all elements of the original.
The only resemblance of an element retained is the general “headphone” concept. But that’s a very long strech. The new headphone looks more like a sperm than a headphone. If no one told you it was supposed to be one and not the other, you probably wouldn’t even know.
Not even the colors were spared. The old logo featured navy blue headphones worn by a waveform with an orange core and yellow outer parts, resembling a flame. It’s a genius concept for a logo (although the execution for the official renders of the logo was always admittedly very shabby).
The New Audacity logo is, again, a pinkish-purplish sperm. It’s supposed to be a pair of headphones, but it’s really not. It got rid of the genius concept combining three distinct elements: headphones (listening), a waveform (seeing) and flame (feeling). The new one posesses none. It’s pure corporate soullessness. And an insult to anyone having any feeling for Audacity.
Afterwards they did revise their new logo by adding back the waveform as well. The improvement is marginal, and an insult is still an insult. And this one especially is as painful as they get.
With Audacity being a very popular and a communaly dear FOSS project, there have been a lot of community renders on the original Audacity logo. No one would have faulted UltimateGuitar for taking one directly or using multiple as inspiration to make their own minimalist version in line with their current brand identity and style (if only their style wasn’t to kill the original that is).
It’s not an impossible ask to achieve. Retaining essence and soul while giving the logo a new spin and incorporating it into a few simple (yet flexible enough) design rules is an enjoyable professional challenge for most designers. But that’s most likely not the corporate goal and as such off-limits.
Instead the corporate goal is to throw everything out and replace it with a purple sperm. It wouldn’t have been much worse had they chosen a brown poop emoji instead. It really is (and was) that terrible. And the entire community feels the same.
Perhaps this is a good opportunity for me to talk a bit about myself: Admittedly, I’m not too avid of an Audacity user. In fact, I learned of Tantacrul via Musescore and have seen the UltimateGuitar playbook play out on Musescore with my own eyes and felt its consequences on my own skin. It’s a terrible feeling.
I’ve seen Tantacrul’s Musescore video 2 weeks after it first aired. A few videos later, Tabtacrul announced that he’d become the head designer for the app. I was extatic and had high hopes for the app which were very much met. At first.
Things turned south quickly with new management. It’s a terrible feeling. In fact, Musescore is a large part of the reason why I became such a vocal FOSS advocate. I wouldn’t wish what happened to Musescore and its users to my worst enemies.
To move away from me and olback onto Audacity, there’s also the “CLA thing”. You can see the drama firsthand on GitHub (link). But what I’d specifically like to point out is not the main post (read the first paragraph and skim the rest, it isn’t worth reading), but rather the comments under it which do a good job at disspelling the talking points used in the post itself. The commenters over there are much more competent at linking good sources than me, so please feel free to click on some.
That being said, this entire situation with both Audacity and MuseScore is part of a larger trend of “corporate FOSS takeovers” where FOSS projects get taken over by new management, a bunch of work gets done in a few years and then the projects stop being FOSS via various nefarious means.
A nice example of past corporate FOSS takeovers is listed quite nicely here, but it doesn’t give any nuance nor list the common strategies used, or how both the app and its users are harmed by that.
There’s also a nice discussion over on lemmy.ca (this one), but it requires quite a bit of background in FOSS terminology to be fully graspable.
Some more info on the Audacity situation is also listed here, and a more lenghty discussion is available on the forum “Hacker News” (link).
Hope these links feed at least some inquisitive minds.
Another thorny legal issue for republicans:
It’s basically the same fucking question. And it’s such a thorny and contentious one finding a balance must be hard.
Because in a sane society, basic human rights clearly do not have precedence over any other rights, right?