Caretaker of Sunhillow/DS8.ZONE. Free (Libre) Software enthusiast and promoter. Pronouns: any
Also /u/CaptainBeyondDS8 on reddit and CaptainBeyond on libera.chat.
Note that “source available on github” doesn’t necessarily mean it’s free software. You have to look at the license to make sure.
That said I believe Stremio’s repos are licensed freely (the web app looks like it’s GPLv2), but as OP noted their application(s) are proprietary.
Like any company offering “exclusive deals only in the app” the catch is you have to sign up for an account and install an app. That’s one more account and one more app that you would have not normally installed but for the “deal.”
This might be a hot take but the best way to avoid or “bypass” onerous things like the “integrity API” is to opt out of the proprietary world as much as possible. Use exclusively free (Libre) software and technology where you can.
We should not be thinking in terms of how do we get proprietary crapware onto our free systems, because that defeats the purpose of a free system. The idea is to build an alternative to the proprietary world.
This doesn’t even make sense. If the spell falls apart without Kier’s symbol, then Kier’s symbol absolutely is “actually necessary.”
From a technical or legal perspective, copyright infringement is not theft. The relationship a copyright holder has with a work is of a completely different character than actual ownership. See Dowling v. United States (1985).
Whether or not “AI” training constitutes copyright infringement is, as far as I know, still up in the air. And, while I believe most of us can agree that actual theft is unethical, the ethics of copyright infringement are as far as I know also very debatable.
Disclaimer - not an uncritical supporter of “AI.”
I think F-droid is woefully misunderstood especially in privacy circles.
The main benefit of F-Droid is that it works (as best it can) to guarantee software freedom. This means, for each app, you can be assured it is under a free software license, built from corresponding source code, and contains no proprietary components. F-droid has an inclusion policy that forbids proprietary blobs and they have to build everything from source in order to ensure that - however, if the app is reproducible, F-droid can actually verify that the already built app from the developer satisfies the inclusion policy without needing to sign its own builds, which is ideal. It’s important to note that without building from source, there is no way to guarantee that the source corresponds to the binary, which is important for exercising the four freedoms.
I don’t agree with everything F-droid does and I don’t think F-droid is perfect. The security folks have a few valid points, I think, but they fail to offer a solution that solves the same problem that F-droid does, either because they misunderstand what problem that is, or simply do not care about it. F-droid is not an app store, it’s a community-maintained distribution like a GNU/Linux distribution. App stores are not alternatives to F-droid and serve different problems. There is, as far as I know, no other project that attempts to serve the same purpose as F-droid.
No. This isn’t a thing. Don’t try to make it a thing.
Once something leaves your computer you lose control of it. The recipient can do whatever they want with the message. If you don’t trust the recipient not to be malicious then don’t send them anything sensitive. You can’t untell a secret.
From my point of view switching from a proprietary application to a free application is always a gain. You can’t control what other people use, but you can take steps to reclaim your own freedom and control.
It’s unfortunate there’s no way to use RCS from a free application, though.
Ironically a Linux-derived OS.
Nothing ironic about it. There’s nothing mystical about Linux, it’s just a kernel. The guy who made it says he doesn’t care about anything but code.
Personally, I only care about the code. When I say maybe there are people who worry about walled gardens and cloud providers who take ownership of your data, I am not one of those people. That’s not what I actually care about. That’s not what I do. What I do is code. What I care about is code.
I feel like there’s a lot of FUD around this subject, because people bring it up as if it’s purely a negative without talking about the reasons why it’s done the way it is. The whole point of F-Droid is that it’s a repository (not a store) of free software applications. They have an inclusion policy forbidding proprietary code and dependencies, and in order to enforce this policy they have to build from publicly available source code, and in order to do so they need to sign the builds themselves. This means, yes, you are trusting F-Droid instead of the upstream developer - but given F-Droid has higher standards than upstream developers this is a tradeoff I am willing to make.
Reproducible builds solves this in a way that preserves the standards of F-Droid, however, “security peoples’” favored “alternatives” (such as Accrescent, Obtainium, and Google Play Store/Aurora Store) forego this entirely, showing they don’t either have a viable solution to offer or that they don’t really care about the problem that F-Droid is addressing to begin with.
Same reason anyone would use a dedicated provider-independent client instead of a proprietary web application locked into a single provider: less vendor lock-in, more local control, and so on.
There is, I believe, a fundamental misunderstanding as to what exactly a site like Stack Overflow is. It’s not a forum; there’s no such thing as “your posts.” It’s more like Wikipedia, as in a collaborative question-and-answer site, or a knowledgebase. Each question and answer can be edited like a mini wiki page. They aren’t “yours” any more than the Wikipedia page you created ten years ago is; you contributed it to the commons, so (at least in theory) you don’t have the right to take it back.
Whether whatever "Open"AI is doing is right is another question, of course. But, I don’t think destroying or poisoning the commons to strike back at it is any helpful either; it feels like “destroying it to save it.”
I would certainly hope so. Stack Overflow content is Creative Commons licensed, so the argument is basically that the GDPR would take precedence over the CC license grant. It’d be scary if GDPR could be weaponized against forks of free software projects in this manner.
Software freedom is about what you, the user, run on your own hardware. Different concerns apply to server software. The client side is what matters as that’s what you run on your hardware, but if the server side is free as well then you are not tied to the service provider and can use a different service provider or run your own instance.
With server software, the main concern is “Service as a Software Substitute” - doing your computing on “cloud” (someone else’s computer). See Who does that server really serve?.
NFT Bros 🤝 Twitter Artists
Seething about their jpegs being stolen
You don’t need windows. Remove all your windows and adopt a gnu and a penguin. They’ll keep you safe and private.
Not an endorsement of ExpressVPN, I’ve learned to avoid companies that sponsor on youtube. However, I believe you don’t need the proprietary app to use the service, you could use a free software OpenVPN client such as this one.
They do offer support for OpenVPN although, unsurprisingly, they heavily push their proprietary client as the preferred way to use the service. This alone would be enough to discourage me from using it or recommending it.
Not a copypasta, although given the average community member’s understanding of this issue comes from memes and copypastas, maybe it should become one.
That’s at the core of the myth (and thus the myths surrounding the myth) - that the discussion is about “what to call Linux” when in fact it’s always been about separating Linux from the userland that is often paired with it. Linux is Linux, no matter what compiler you use to build it - but the stuff that runs on top of Linux is not Linux.
HAL 9000 has entered the chat