Because it’s one of the only functional monopolies that got there by attracting users rather than M&As to quash competitors and regulatory capture. Monopolies shouldn’t just intrinsically make you angry, they just are usually bad because they will have done anticompetitive things in order to become a monopoly.

As the article concludes:

Valve Corporation didn’t win by locking people in. It won by making sure they never really wanted to leave.

itch.io is okay, but they used to be much better back when they first emerged right after Desura collapsed in 2013, and everyone moved their indie titles there, and before Steam had GreenLight and now Early Access. Now they’ve fallen into a weird space where half of their games’ installers aren’t even hosted on their site and you get redirected to the game’s own website. Humble Bundle has really crappy download speeds, so it’s hard to justify using them over Steam for anything larger than a VN, and half the games you buy on HB they actually just give you Steam keys to redeem anyways.

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The conspiracy part that imo is legit is that his ear was not hit. I’ve seen bullet wounds take chunks out of people, and it’s not a clean cut where you can just stitch it back together with minimal scarring. The bullet either removes a chunk wholesale, or the tissue is violently torn and leaves a very noticeable scar. He has no missing chunk or scar on his ear.

The problem is it was campaign gold for him to claim he ‘took a bullet’ for his beliefs, and his followers jumped on that, and now he can’t just say, “I wasn’t actually shot, I just hurt my ear when SS tackled me tee hee sorrrrrryyyyy”, so his followers are running to thinking the entire thing could have been staged. I’m sure some of them who are having buyer’s remorse would love to pivot to claiming they were duped by an elaborate conspiracy, rather than having to own responsibility for electing him because they themselves are shitty people.

It’s more that compositors (picom, xcompmgr) and window managers are extremely complex, and adding that feature in could have much larger impacts than just the functionality itself, e.g. security context implications, task scheduling, rendering pipeline issues, etc. Wayland actually combines the compositor and WM, so it’s more readily extensible than X11.

State-level bills have heretofore only required OSes to ask a user if they are of majority age. A federal bill is likely (based on the groups backing and who proposed it) to require OSes to validate (i.e. have users prove, not just assert) their ages.

Depending on what mechanisms are mandated, and who they target punishment at, it could lock 99% of users (who are not willing or capable to use means to bypass this) into tying all their actions online to a government-run database.

It’s not enough that means to bypass it exist; the government shouldn’t be able to mandate this kind of control, and shouldn’t be propagating the expectation that this behavior and level of control is normal or acceptable.

At this point, “improving lives” is considered socialism by conservatives, and a far-left pipedream by neoliberals.

“Power isn’t given, it’s taken.” - Malcolm xAI

This is something I see my partner’s high school students having to deal with now: the suspicion that competence or intelligence must indicate AI use. It feels like when dumb film writers or directors make non-MC character unbelievably dumb to make the MC look smart (cough BBC Sherlock cough), but applied to real life.

I think the assumption is that buy-to-play MMOs tend to be less microservice-based or ‘cloud native’ than subscription ones, such that they are more likely to already feature a monolithic server application. They’re probably thinking games like ARK: SE, and DayZ, rather than Guild Wars. In reality, some sub-based MMOs have monolithic servers (e.g. Mabinogi), and some buy-to-own MMOs have distributed architectures.

This was probably also an easier sell to politicians, by saying, “hey, they said they sold the whole game for that price, so why can they not deliver the whole game, server included?” With a subscription, it becomes harder from a business ‘rights’ perspective to argue that a player who paid for e.g. 1 month of a subscription immediately before the game is retired should be allowed to then own and operate the full game indefinitely, and then becomes a sort of, “how long paying the sub is long enough to ‘own’ the game?” debate. This is especially important because it could impact a lot of non-game software as well, so politicians are much more likely to quash this out of fear of backlash. So they may just be picking their battles.

WRT market impact, I am sure the shittier companies would use the exemption as a loophole, and just make all their multiplayer games subscription-based. I doubt it will encourage more buy-to-own MMOs in the future as well, but I think SKG cares more about the extant software people paid for already, than the market impact.

If you are saying that you are making long comments without reading the post

I didn’t say that. I read the post, but did not click through to the other post from December to realize it was part of a pattern.

I’m not really interested in getting into an argument around license choice

That’s fine, you are not beholden to respond to me.

Unfortunately, yes.

Facebook v Power Ventures is probably the strongest anti-scraping ruling, because it held that a simple CAPTCHA is sufficient to qualify as “bypassing technical measures” so as to qualify as hacking under CFAA.

YouTube has a number of technical controls to prevent downloading, and it’s always been considered iffy to mass-download YT vids because all the downloader tools (usually) incorporate some kind of means to bypass their protection schemes.

Perhaps you should have titled the post “AI Code Hollowing Out Copyleft Ecosystem”, then, unless you’re intentionally trying to conflate Open Source with Copyleft (you are, based on your other blog posts). But I remember seeing your post about the “social contract” of OSS last December, and you are in fact exactly who my comment is about:

Copyleft is a reactionary movement from people who turned into the beast they hated in trying to fight it. “Permissive” licenses are FOSS. Copyleft is certainly maybe OSS, but it’s not “Free” (as in either “libre” or “gratis”) if some other person can mandate both that you do something, and what you do. If usage of something is contingent on payment (including payment via feel-good attribution), it’s not free.

I’ll add here: FOSS is also not about some one-sided “covenant” where a creator believes the users of said freely-given software owe them something (money, gratitude, or even just ‘reciprocity’ and attribution). If you’re in OSS for the fuzzy feeling you get when someone forks your repo, or the conviction that OSS contribs are intrinsically good in some nebulous way, it’s no wonder you’re hung up on seeing a transactional return on your labor instead of just knowing it’s out there maybe helping someone, somewhere.

This is a fast path to open source irrelevancy, since the US copyright office has deemed LLM outputs to be uncopyrightable.

Open source != copyrighted. Public domain source code is also open source.

I hate this trend I see of the FOSS movement retreating from the foundational principle that it started on: Free Sharing of Software.

Not shareware, not ‘libre but not gratis’, not ‘buy me a coffee to get access to the code on my patreon’, not ‘free to look at but not to use as source code’: free period. Libre and gratis.

These non-lawyers traipsing in to make claims about the effect of AI on open source licensing are giving me big “I release my code but only if I can 1) get paid for it and 2) control who and how it’s used” vibes. That’s what’s ‘hollowing-out’ open source.

value leaks out of the project

What value? Value to whom? The value of source code is what it does, i.e. the program it compiles or is interpreted into. That doesn’t change by someone else using it differently than you. Google taking Linux and spinning off Android doesn’t “hurt” Linux. It doesn’t decrease the ‘value’. There’s no universal counter out there that says, “this GPLv2 attribution appears more than someone else’s, so therefore this project is more valuable”, that is being eroded if a company goes and uses it without reprinting the license notice as well. OSS licenses have never prevented that.

I said it before the last time FOSS came up, and I’ll say it again:

FOSS is about propagating software to as many people as possible, to help as many people as possible. It’s not about creating legal barriers to diminish the power of corporations; making tools available to people that are better and cheaper will do that naturally (and you were never going to beat the corpo lawyers anyways trying to enforce licenses).

If your zeal to prevent corporations from ever misusing FOSS leads you to remove some aspect of it (free, open, or source), then you’ve cut off your nose to spite your face.

Mark my words, their next big brain criminal move will be claiming that any information she has from her time as Attorney General is privileged and classified, and she can’t discuss it with congress because she’s no longer AG.

I wasn’t meaning to direct that towards you, but rather at the content itself. I appreciate you posting it.

Tango was literally a Microsoft studio. They don’t have a platform tax on their own games.

Do these people think the mass layoffs in the broader IT sector are just a coincidence?

This is literally a paid “investigation” by a rival payment processor. It’s propaganda.

Honestly, this depends entirely on person and circumstance. There are people I’ve parted ways with as nigh-enemies that are now close friends after time and distance gave us perspective. Economics and life situations and all the stressors that come and go over time have a bigger effect on relationships than people give them credit for. “Exes are exes for a reason” only holds relevance if those reasons are unchanged.

“I mean, they have to be about to abandon him, right? RIGHT!? And then we can go back to crossing the aisle with the moderate Republicans to shut down the Progressives!”

I have the KZ ZS10 Pros, and they stay in my ear great. The KZ earplugs come with different connectors, and I got the standard 2-pin ones so I could choose the wires I want (I like braided cables).

foot… Searching for it

euro office… searching for it

Whether you like the SEO-driving search engine providers or not, they are still the way that most people find things on the internet, and they prioritize Github results. When you’re not searching for “it”, but just searching them by describing things like it, (of which there are many, mostly on Github), it serves your interest to ‘O’ for the ‘SEs’ by putting it somewhere that will get prioritized higher.

If the goal is digital sovereignty for europe

Sovereignty is exercised and evidenced by a state’s ability to enforce the laws they have created. Microsoft operates within Europe. As long as Europe can enforce their laws upon Microsoft (as they can and do now), that relationship is still an exercise of European sovereignty.

Back to my first comment in the thread, “sovereignty != isolation”. Cutting yourself off from external groups does not make you “more sovereign” or something. If Europe cannot enforce their laws upon foreign business entities operating in their jurisdictions, and thus choose to prioritize Europe-headquartered businesses, that would be evidence of far weaker sovereign control of their jurisdiction.

Now, if it’s just a matter of prioritizing supporting European businesses, (call it, say, “Europe First”, or maybe “Make Europe Gr…” oh wait) that’s fine for them to do, and supporting any smaller business or organization over a large one is almost always preferable, but that isn’t and shouldn’t be about the perception of sovereignty or about nationalism, it should be about fighting back against corporate power by not rewarding these de facto monopolies and political meddlers and manipulators with your business.

But once again, that’s not within the scope (or ability) of a simple Office-alike application.