• 4 Posts
  • 30 Comments
Joined 11 months ago
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Cake day: December 1st, 2023

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  • Ok, so I heard a thing a long time ago about information density in languages, and that there’s a specific amount of information conveyed per second which is pretty consistent across languages, even when the number of sounds is higher or lower.

    This is true.

    Which means that a single word in English, for instance, would convey more information than a single word in Hindi.

    I don’t think that’s the right interpretation. There are words in English that would require sentences to be made for each if conveyed in a different language. But the same is true vice-versa.

    Have a look at subtitles for movies from one language to any other. Translators struggle conveying what should be paragraph long sentences of context behind a single word for one language. Do not get me started on double speak.




  • I don’t think Lemmy or Mastodon would be a good place to start necessarily. Don’t be discouraged, I just mean that I think this should be something separate, like a library,

    True. I meant suggesting this idea for generally any website that uses tagging. Will update post to show this better.

    As a code library it could be maintained elsewhere and let these folks keep working on their projects.

    We would need a group like the Wiki Foundation to set this up. Though I wouldn’t know how to pitch this.




  • That is more of an argument involving the implementation of tags in general within the federation. But to answer your question:

    Let’s say a group of people were to make a post on Mastodon with the tag #girls_night. How will all instances agree on the tag being correct?

    The simple answer is they won’t. If a tag is contentious, it will be like any other drama between instances.

    It’s the same for implementing tag hierarchy. Let’s say there is a default setup. Then if a tag or a tree of tags is contentious, each instance can include or exclude as they see fit.







  • they only use Linux because it’s free. Companies create hardware on Linux because it’s free

    Companies use open source software because it’s the cheapest option. It’s all about margins.

    Nearly all of FOSS is funded by corporations whether you like it or not

    Yes, and FOSS can get a lot more funding if they charged companies even a little bit.

    So as long as it’s cheaper to pay a fee to continue to use an open-source software than it is to hire a group of developers to produce and maintain the same thing, the idea is viable.


  • In my opinion, the issue is that a cell phone is such a free-software-hostile environment that arguably GPL software shouldn’t “be allowed to” come into contact with it in any capacity if the spirit of the GPL were being upheld.

    How are phones free-software-hostile? I know IOS is, but Android not really. There’s a list of open source Android distributions. Although not very good, they are viable.

    Actually, maybe making it a realistic possibility to drop in a recompiled replacement should be a part of the GPL. I remember people were talking about this decades ago

    It does feel out of place how that isn’t in the GPL.


  • If current licenses have the problem that big companies just ignore the terms set out in the license, I wouldn’t imagine making a new sort of license with different terms like “big companies have to pay to get the benefit of using Pots-Open Source software” is really going to work.

    It’s more that they avoid the spirit of the licensing, not the terms (except Red Hat of course).

    I suppose you can split this into two separate arguments:

    • Swap from licenses to more enforceable contracts

    • Have companies pay open source devs



  • If you had also read the article BTW you would have realized that spoilers: it’s not about source code availability.

    You saw the first few paragraphs about the Red Hat drama and didn’t read further.

    Reading the whole thing you’d realize it’s a list of reasons why open source software hasn’t become popular with the wider public, and his proposed solution to this.

    I just included the idea he is proposing, others can read the article to see his reasoning.