aspensmonster

"Leaking." Yeah. Sure.

Edit: alt text below. The OCRbot would (understandably) have trouble with this one. @CannotSleep420@lemmygrad.ml

Virgin vs Chad meme.

On the left, virgin, captioned "Virgin API consumer," wearing a blue long sleeve shirt and black pants and shoes, and holding a mac book. There is a collar and chain around his neck, and a ball and chains attached to his feet. Numerous text bubbles and logos surround him: "JSON", "Fears HTML," "Limited to what the API can do," "Has to identify himself even for read-only APIs," "A slave to the API provider," "Json," "Tokens," "has to agree to Terms of Service and follow the the rules," "API keys," "Thinks that he is making his life easier," "Has to worry about quota."

On the right, chad, captioned "Chad Independent Scraper," wearing an orange tank-top (with the HTML 5 logo on it), blue pants, and brown shoes, and holding two different types of paint scrapers, one in each (outstretched) hand. Numerous text bubbles and logos surround him: "follows no rules, doesn't agree to any terms of service," Selenium logo, "has no limitations can access any data he wants," cURL logo, "His software is always independent," "Doesn't care about changes in policies," unknown logo, Python Requests library logo, "Websites can do nothing to stop him," "Can do whatever he wants," "handles HTML like a real Chad," "Doesn't fear HTML," "can work anonymously," Python Requests-HTML library logo, "Even Javascript can't stop him."

antagonism towards our allies in the open source movement

The "open source movement" splintered from Free Software specifically to circumvent the ethical ramifications that those "pages and pages of dense philosophical essays" are about. That movement has never been an "ally" to Free Software. It was an antagonistic relationship from the start.

And hip new software isn’t using copyleft

That's not an accident. And it's not because people don't know about the GPL or copyleft. It's because the vast majority of programmers earn their (substantial) bread and butter from companies that want nothing to do with copyleft. Programmers don't get paid to write copyleft code, and any code that they do write off-the-clock, they also want to be able to use on-the-clock, leaving only "open source" licenses for that code too.

This isn't something that the FSF can "fix." This is something that boils down to each and every individual programmer deciding whether or not to prioritize Freedom over money.

leaving us vulnerable to exploitation from growing movements like open core and commercial attacks on the free and open source software brand.

...

the relationship between free software and open source needs to be reformed so that the FSF and OSI stand together as the pillars at the foundations of our ecosystem

"Open Source" is the exploitative "growing movement." Never forget: Open Source Misses the Point. This was always the point of "open source," and the FSF has been clear about that forever. Drew is complaining about the exploitation as if it's a bug. It's not! It's the killer feature! The call is coming from inside the house. The FSF and the OSI cannot "stand together" because they are built upon mutually exclusive ideologies and priorities.

The FSF fails to understand its place in the world as a whole, or its relationship to the progressive movements taking place in the ecosystem and beyond.

...

If the FSF still wants to be involved in the movement, they need to recognize and empower the leaders who are pushing the cause forward.

The FSF knows its place perfectly well. It is the bulwark against the so-called "progress" of "open source." The FSF may be on the losing side currently. But it's not on the wrong one. "Open source" isn't "pushing the cause forward." It is the principle driver of the cause's decline, leeching energy from Free Software in the name of placating industry.

We've had 20+ years of that arrangement. And it's gone about as well as the FSF said it would.

Note that Support for incoming content (e.g. posts on Mastodon etc being imported into Discourse) is intentionally excluded. It will be possible to add this in a later version.

Support for following users (as opposed to categories) is also intentionally excluded.

Sees an excerpt of the first post of all FDC topics (posted after they subscribe) in their Mastodon feed, each with a link back to the associated topic, e.g. “Discuss on our forum”.

Any action related to the post in Mastodon does not appear in Discourse.

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Oh. So it's Embrace, Extend, and Extinguish.

No thanks.

Vulpix.

ActivityPub for me.

Wouldn't want the patient sleeping at night now would we? That's what the daytime is for!

What can Mozilla do about it? In my opinion, they sunk their own ship two years ago by either completely axing, or substantially reducing, some of their most important teams:

• Servo
• Wasmtime
• Rust
• MDN
• DevTools

The video's suggestion --developing an in-browser financial tool similar to Patreon so that they can cut themselves off from Google's annual 400 million dollar check-- is a good one. But people have been screaming at Mozilla for a decade now to sever themselves from Google. It's not going to happen. And it's understandable why the YouTuber in the video, Gardiner Bryant, does not understand why it will not happen: he explicitly calls himself a "capitalist but not a corporatist" in this very video, and so he misses the obvious contradiction at the heart of Mozilla.

That contradiction is that Mozilla's leadership holds the same class interests as Google's leadership. We're talking about a leadership that views a 500k USD annual salary as a "financial burden." At the end of the day, the people leading Firefox are every bit as capitalist as their surveillance capitalist peers at the FAANGs of Silicon Valley. At the end of the day, they have more in common than they do in difference. In this predicable story, Firefox is the "good-natured, good-hearted, capitalism-with-a-human-face" liberal fox in the mix of a land full of brutal surveillance capitalist wolves. How truly poetic then that they chose a fox for their mascot.

If Firefox is not only to "live," but to thrive as a counter-weight to the hegemony of the surveillance capitalists, then its workers need to seize the means of production. They must sever themselves entirely from their leadership, form a collective socialist co-op, move away from high cost of living areas like San Francisco (or California or even any city in the US), work entirely remotely across the globe (believe it or not, there is talent to be found outside the valley), and focus entirely on developing a browser that works for the workers of the world, with no concern given for the thoughts or feelings of their capitalist adversaries in industry. Their only boss can be the workers of the world. Their only revenue can come from those workers.

Ultimately, Mozilla is a textbook example of how you cannot serve two bosses. When push comes to shove, the interests of the capitalist ruling class supercede the interests of the workers/users. And so long as they want to have their cake and eat it too, that quo will not change.

I think it'd be great if they did. As it stands, hexbear is dead to me until they start federating.

What the fuck