Red Hat, the world’s largest provider of open source software, would begin to reserve the source code of its flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to paying customers only.

I think they should have done that in the first place. You can sell open source software just fine; you shouldn’t be expected to make the sources public—only to those with a binary copy of your software who ask for it. Organizations that write and maintain open source software should be paid for their work.

In 1984, a researcher named Richard Stallman released a software project called GNU. Stallman licensed GNU for free, with his only stipulation that users sign an agreement called the GNU General Public License. […] To Stallman, freedom meant no restrictions — not necessarily no costs. “Think free as in free speech, not free beer,” he is quoted as saying.

Yes. Stallman sold copies of GNU Emacs on physical media back in the day.

This article doesn’t touch on the contentious issue, which is that RHEL’s terms say, if you share the Red hat sources as a customer to a non-customer, Red Hat may stop serving you as a customer. The controversy isn’t about cost. It’s about being punished for exercising the freedoms Red Hat gives you.

Of course, SUSE and Ubuntu Enterprise have had the same terms for years. Red Hat was the outlier until now.

I don’t try explaining this stuff anymore. I’m extremely bad at it and I know most people will either not care or not care enough. And that’s fine. It’s easier to let people think I’m a luddite. I prefer to wait for them to ask me why I use technology differently than to preach to them, and most of the time, they don’t ask. It’s always easier to let people convince themselves than to try to convince them.

I tell them to install Signal and message me there, and if they don’t want to do that, they can SMS me. Signal is a better idea if they want faster responses as I rarely check my phone but do check Signal Desktop fairly regularly. I have tried to get KDE Connect working so I can respond to SMS more timely but it was annoying and I gave up.

So how else would you combat malicious forks like what happened to new pipe?

Trademarks. Anyone malicious can take your source-available code anyway, but if they infringe on your trademark by calling it “Firefox” or “Newpipe”, you are legally in your right to take it down. Trademarks deal with fraud; copyright doesn’t.

Iceweasel is a classic example of what happens when free software projects like Firefox seek to defend their trademark. They didn’t want to allow Debian to use the Firefox name, as that may cause users to attribute quality problems to Mozilla when Debian is actually responsible because of the patches they had made.

Want to remove an app using the GrayJay name without your permission if it’s a registered trademark? Here’s a link to report it to Google Play.

Honestly I laugh at the people whining about password sharing getting shut down. It was never really intended to be used that way

To quote Netflix, “Love is sharing a password”: https://twitter.com/netflix/status/840276073040371712?ref_src=twsrc^tfw

I haven’t been subscribed to a streaming service for about five years. Well, sometimes I pay for a month of Hidive. I usually just buy the show/film on disc and rip it. A decent amount of the shows I want to watch are old and not even on a streaming service.

It’s a good movie, but I find myself completely confused by the driving part at the end. The people who were in the van manage to catch up to him almost immediately, suggesting that the other guy could have just run across the distance to get to the van in the first place, saving everyone all the drama and hilarity.

I thought Wargames was a pretty good one too (mostly). It’s by the same writers.

The NET is…fun…

That’s a nice piece of hardware you’ve got there.

You’ve got Firefox and Brave. Edge + Chrome are based on the free software Blink engine, while Webkit is one of the only free software projects Apple develops and maintains. Who doesn’t use VLC? Bitwarden is a popular password manager. About 50% of the world uses Android, which is nominally free software with some proprietary components. Blender is the world’s most successful free software project. A surprising amount of mainstream artists use Krita. People who download torrents are probably using a free software BitTorrent client like qbittorrent, Deluge, or Transmission, rather than uTorrent. A lot of people use the uBlock Origin extension, which is a free software content blocker.

And hey, everyone who has played DOOM was playing a game released under the GPLv2 in 1999, minus the game data.

File hosting isn’t really an issue of free software, because very few people will host their own cloud storage server. It’s more about relying on servers to provide a service rather than software, which is a good and bad thing.

This is kind of a neutral point, but a lot of software has become services accessed through a web client (browser). This means anyone on any operating system can access the service so long as they have a browser, which evens the playing field for us SerenityOS and Haiku users :^).

I’m assuming uralsolo is talking about free software as in, software which gives users the four freedoms.

I don’t think all software needs to be free, but in some ways, it’s no longer the issue of the day. In this day and age, a lot of what we’re using is no longer really software. We’re using services with client-side Javascript which is nominally free software (but not really). Most of the actual software is sitting behind a server. I see this as good and bad. It means users of less popular operating systems get access to the same services as users of popular operating systems so long as they have browsers, and the negatives are, well…I’m sure you don’t need my help to think of some.

It’s hard to make money with free software because everyone has the right to commercially exploit it. For this reason alone, I don’t think it’s necessary for all software to be free, but I’ll be there to celebrate the programs that are free.

I learn something new every week about subjects I was decided on for a long time, forcing me to re-evaluate. It seems like there are more knowledgeable people here than on Reddit. I do wish our visualnovels community was more active, but alas, it’s a more niche subject that’s bound to grow slowly.

Japanese visual novels, because there are more of them.

Cool project! I’m always on the lookout for more search services. It works without Javascript, which is great! It’s very clean and focused.

The Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) for Google are embarrassingly large. Here’s a comparison from Kagi: https://help.kagi.com/kagi/search-details/search-speed.html

It’s a little surprising that Duckduckgo’s SERPs are even bigger…

I know of a few others that fit this use case, if anyone’s interested.

Kagi’s interface works entirely without Javascript and is a meta-search engine with results from Google, Bing, and its own indexes, and I think it has some of the best results (paid search though).

Mojeek is another search engine which uses its own index and is accessible without Javascript.

Another cool, fast search engine with its own index (though smaller) is Marginalia: https://search.marginalia.nu/

This one is free software, and you can view the sources here: https://git.marginalia.nu/marginalia/marginalia.nu

And there’s also Searx, which is a fairly lightweight (but nowhere near as much as Blaze is) metasearch engine released as free software: https://github.com/searxng/searxng

You can build visual novels in Ren’Py, which uses only Python, but that might not be what you’re looking for.

However, there are independent engines out there. The first one that pops to mind is Gigablast, which does it’s own indexing/crawling.

Gigablast went down 2 months ago. The crawler is available as free software, though.

Mojeek’s Search Engine Map gives you a good picture of the search engines out there. You can also see Seirdy’s very informative post on all the different search engines out there, which is fairly regularly updated: https://seirdy.one/posts/2021/03/10/search-engines-with-own-indexes/