Fice

This is not about how hard or easy it is to move from GitHub. What scares me is that it is increasingly hard to participate in the open source/free software community without using GitHub, and it is increasingly hard to find contributors for your own project if you are not willing to host it there.

This is scary. For increasingly many potential contributors a project effectively does not exist if it is not on GitHub. And, being a huge centralized service, GitHub is very susceptible to censorship (e.g. repos being taken down via DMCA or Russia blocking GitHub until they started to cooperate with the censors). I see this dependence as very bad and dangerous for the free software movement. Should we even consider convenience of a service that has serious ethical issues?

But it works. Somehow the free software movement survives and still makes influence in the modern IT world where it seems everyone holds convenience above ethics (how many people believe that privacy is good and mass surveillance is evil and yet use things like Facebook, it's absurd).

You can use an RSS feed to email converter. I use Feed2imap (https://github.com/feed2imap/feed2imap/) to collect feeds from many sites and Notmuch (https://notmuchmail.org/) to sort and index the mess.

Because Emacs is an OS the way it should be — an extensible system with a unified UI instead of a pile of separate and hardly interoperable applications.

They do not love or hate Linux, open source, or anything, they just do whatever makes more money. It's business.

Federation does not solve the problem. Eventually most users will flock towards single most popular instance of a federated service. Email is federated, but most users betray it by choosing the most popular provider (Gmail). And Google will happily drop email federation "to protect users from spam" when they get enough user share as they did with XMPP.

Centralization really is a social problem. Among alternatives, most people will mindlessly choose the most popular one, while extreme popularity of something should instead be a reason to avoid it or at least to be very cautious about it.

No decentralized technology is immune to this herd behavior. Even Bitcoin is probably doomed to become dominated and effectively controlled by some popular mining pool or online wallet provider. This will not change until new ethics of decentralization forms in the society. And that will happen eventually, but it could take a lot of time.

Removing net neutrality is like allowing supermarkets to buy separate lanes on crowded city roads exclusively for use by their customers.

There is no "New Kinder Gentler Microsoft". Corporations just do what they see as more profitable. They do not make decisions based on morality per se, but they try to maintain a certain public image when it helps profits.

Emacs can transparently edit remote files: https://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/TrampMode

All you need is a machine accessible via ssh, and you won't have to trust centralized proprietary services.

The comment I replied to was about Cloudflare. But what really concerns me are the website owners who betray their users by allowing their HTTPS traffic to be MITMd, no matter if they use Cloudflare or something else. Also it is not acceptable to let one entity (be it Cloudflare or anyone else) control a significant portion of the worlds web traffic.

Cloudflare is MITM. It is unacceptable for any website that respects its users' privacy.

1. ipfs.io is not a critical part of the system. If it becomes unavailable, the information can still be retrieved via a local node or another public gateway.

2. With a decentralized system like IPFS, availability of the data does not depend on a single provider. Also, there are no artificial limits on data size and storage time.

Why depend on a centralized service when there are easy-to-use decentralized alternatives?

  $ ipfs add myfile.txt
  added QmeeLUVdiSTTKQqhWqsffYDtNvvvcTfJdotkNyi1KDEJtQ myfile.txt
  # Access via a public gateway
  $ curl https://ipfs.io/ipfs/QmeeLUVdiSTTKQqhWqsffYDtNvvvcTfJdotkNyi1KDEJtQ
  # or via a local node
  $ curl http://127.0.0.1:8080/ipfs/QmeeLUVdiSTTKQqhWqsffYDtNvvvcTfJdotkNyi1KDEJtQ

And Apple will probably be all right with this, they may even cooperate secretly.

> Quickly slapping up a counterfeit and selling it as a brand-name thing won't work.

Wouldn't it be enough to just display an UEFI boot message to notify users when non-original battery is detected?

Don't know if it's already usable, but I really like the idea.

In a content-addressable network your computer seeds the content rather than serves it. You do not need a properly managed server for that. It does not matter whether the original node is accessible, information can be retrieved as long as it is available somewhere in the network.

In IPFS, if you need to immediately ensure availability of your content, you can request it via a public gateway to force it into the gateways cache. Then the gateway will continue to seed your data even if your node goes offline.

Another problem is why we at all need to rely on any third-party hosting services while we have our own computers connected to the Internet. In this regard, I have high hopes for content-addressable distributed systems.

Currently, IPFS [1] looks most promising to me. It's easy to publish a static website to it [2], and public gateways are available to make the site accessible to readers who do not run their own nodes. While IPNS (the naming system) does not seem to work reliably yet, hash of the current version of the web site can be published in a special DNS TXT record, and if that same domain points to IP address of a public gateway, the web site will be simply accessible via that domain.

[1] https://ipfs.io/ [2] https://github.com/ipfs/examples/tree/master/examples/websit...

I do not use ad blockers because I want to see how the owners of a website I'm interacting with really treat their users. I do not want to help some crappy web site to look better and more trustable to me than it really is. Don't like ads on a website — just go elsewhere.

> What is the analogous workflow in fossil?

Private branches: https://www.fossil-scm.org/xfer/doc/trunk/www/private.wiki

Looks similar to IPFS (https://ipfs.io/) but with less ambitious goals. And the IPFS team is also working on JS implementation that will run in browser: https://github.com/ipfs/js-ipfs.

Shampoo project (http://dmitrymatveev.co.uk/shampoo/) might be useful. It's an Emacs mode for remote Smalltalk development that support GNU Smalltalk and Pharo.

Yes, and the presentation I linked to shows how this can benefit the end users.

One interesting feature of HURD is userland device drivers: https://archive.fosdem.org/2014/schedule/event/07_uk_dde_on_...

«...programming new editing commands was so convenient that even the secretaries in his office started learning how to use it. They used a manual someone had written which showed how to extend Emacs, but didn't say it was a programming. So the secretaries, who believed they couldn't do programming, weren't scared off.»

Also there is LyX (http://www.lyx.org/), which tries to combine the advantages of both worlds.

Emacs is currently my preferred operating system, and I wish I could use it for everything. One problem is the Web. A modern browser is also an operating system of it's own, and while it is possible to embed a full-featured browser into Emacs, it can't be fully integrated. We need an Emacs-based alternative to the Web, something decentralized, maybe Xanadu-like! Just dreaming.

Yes. And it's a shame that in the modern world convenience appears to be more important than ethics.