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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • For somewhat larger projects, I think the OS Haiku is a perfect example. It isn’t a benevolent dictatorship, there is no single leader — there are just long-time contributors. If you send in contributions substantive or regular enough, there’s a good chance you’ll get push access. Patches generally are accepted with open arms, and devs with push access give constructive criticism on patches kindly. The OS is better for it!





  • want censorship of not allowing any proprietary software to be mentioned

    I personally haven’t run into this, though I have seen people immediately hop into a conversation to say, “You shouldn’t use X! It’s proprietary!” Worst-case scenario, I’ve seen social shaming for using proprietary software. Which I think is to some degree OK? Encouraging and advertising proprietary software is unethical, and I think it’s fine to annoy people into not advertising things like Discord. That’s not censorship, it’s just how relationships work, it’s how people associate.

    don’t allow any critiques of the software they use because it’s libre software so there are no faults or bad designs.

    Again, I haven’t run into this. I have seen people defend even garbage libre software on the basis that half-broken free code is better (ethically) than wonderful non-free code — which is true!

    My attitude is if someone changes my code and doesn’t give back, it does not harm me or injury me in any way.

    It only hurts the people that use the proprietary software that was made; now they don’t have control over their PC, and are at the mercy of the developer. Really, all they can do is cross their fingers and hope the dev is friendly and not up to anything unscrupulous. Speaking of which…

    I also believe libre software can be used for the surveillance of other people, libre software does not be default mean privacy

    Not inherently, obviously! No one actually thinks that free software is a magical silver bullet that vanquishes any possibility of malware, spyware, or anything of the sort. The argument is that these sorts of things are, compared to proprietary software, significantly easier to identify and remedy.

    For instance, let’s say you find through some network analysis that a program phones home with suspiciously large payloads. You can’t actually see the contents of the packets as they’re encrypted in some weird format you can’t make heads or tails of. With a proprietary program, you’ve hit a brick wall that’s very hard to climb — you can’t find out what the program is sending, not easily. Your only hope is some back-breaking reverse-engineering work, which probably isn’t feasible unless you’re a professional security researcher. With a libre program, though, you could snoop through the code for anything net-related, and discover much more easily that it’s sending your private keys to the project’s server. Heck, with the libre program you could even remove the malware code and use the program again!

    One is leaps and bounds more amicable to privacy and security.