embik

I'm not involved with Caddy, but in my understanding the author has had some bad times with his previous project. Sounds like - although it was popular among companies and government - he had open bills caused by his work on it. That certainly is a rather frustrating experience.

> I learned a lesson from my last project, Papa Parse. That project, like Caddy, experienced a very successful reception on Hacker News. It was picked up by numerous companies to enhance their product offering; government departments around the world use it, and even the United Nations and Wikimedia integrate it. But now I have to pay the bills, and inevitably, work goes where the money does.

https://caddyserver.com/download#payment says

> Funds are used to pay the author and some developers so they can continue to actively develop the project and provide support to you.

> After each fiscal year, funds permitting, we'll hire an external CPA to verify the expenditure on the account. Audit results will be made available for you to view.

Caddy sounds great but I'm a bit worried by the fact it does not offer repositories for major Linux distributions. Shouldn't a component that important for public facing servers be included in standard software updating processes?

It's fascinating to compare the comment sections under both videos. The first one is full of loathing and mockery for Microsoft and the features they simply did not deliver, the second one boils down to "this is the future, Microsoft is building the future". I wonder how the Hololens comments will look a few years from today.

Which is exactly how FOSS is supposed to work. You give away something free of charge and available to everyone and you're getting something back from your users.

That doesn't make the software's user "the product" though. In your case the developer is making himself the product he tries to sell, not the users. This is really not comparable to advertisement and data collection.

No they are not (as outlined aboved). Death threats are not part of any public discourse nor political statements. People are able to oppose the government's policies without being silenced.

On a related note, the hate speech laws have not been introduced by the Merkel government.

This is not true at all. The German Government is asking Facebook to delete comments which could be categorized as hate speech ("Volksverhetzung" in German). These comments are not "negative of her policies", they are calling on people to kill, gas or otherwise attack refugees, politicans or journalists. They are simply asking Facebook to comply with German law.

Some comments comparable to those in question are curated at a tumblr blog (https://perlen-aus-freital.tumblr.com/). Those comments are anything but a political statement against Merkel's policies. They are born out of pure hatred.

Oh, Linux Mint mixes Debian and Ubuntu packages by default? I was under the impression that there is Linux Mint based on Ubuntu and Linux Mint Debian Edition based on Debian.

> Secondly, they are mixing their own binary packages with binary packages from Debian and Ubuntu without rebuilding the latter. This creates something that we in Debian call a "FrankenDebian" which results in system updates becoming unpredictable

This is interesting because Debian itself encourages derivative projects to use their binary packages[1]:

> For those derivatives that re-use Debian binary packages, add some source packages and modify some source packages, where possible we encourage them to use standard Debian mirrors and add a second repository containing only the source and binary packages that have been added or modified.

Or maybe they don't encourage that behaviour but still give guidelines in case you want your derivative to work that way? I'm not 100% sure.

[1] https://wiki.debian.org/Derivatives/Guidelines

That Wikipedia article definitely reads like straight out of "White Collar".

Yeah, the port detection seems to be a bit funky. It says my smtp port is open and I panicked a little bit, but everything is pointing out it's not open to the public.

That's a rather wild insinuation of the "Dear GitHub" authors' motivation. If your constructive feedback is ignored you have to start a public discussion to get the thing rolling again. That's not necessarily as selfish as you imply. There are a lot of people who would benefit from the addressed issues being resolved.

> I own you no shit

GitHub might owe them nothing, but it's in their own interest to address and resolve those issues and not just stash them away somewhere. Their biggest selling point is the great UI and the userbase. If the later becomes frustrated because issues with the former don't get resolved, that might be a huge problem for GitHub in the future. Today, there are viable alternatives after all.

I'm not sure why we would need GitHub's source code either. It's their business model and they're able to run this behemoth of a service with that. For free. I think that's amazing and shouldn't be taken for granted.

Interesting, I'm pretty sure it has the little "Netflix" logo for being a Netflix Original series on Netflix Germany.

Follow up: Yes it has.

It's very interesting that we perceive this (public) shutdown as "dictator-like" behaviour while the US uses gag orders, laws and secret courts to force (tech) companies into complying. If you don't want to, you have to shut down your company (see Lavabit). Yet Brasilia is "anti-technology" (sic) because they're not abusing their power in secret.

I think you confused WhatsApp and Telegram now. WhatsApp does not have open source code, Telegram has. WhatsApp is blocking the links though.

> Redhat with their own flavor of Linux

I wonder what you have in mind here (and for god's sake, please don't let it be systemd). The Red Hat ecosystem has become incredibly good in the last few years (and let's not talk about how their contributions pushed the whole Linux ecosystem ahead). Fedora is an amazing distro and GNOME has never been better for me.

Well to be honest, you're not completely wrong. elementary OS _is_ trying to make as much decisions as possible for the user - To make it "just work". I agree that this is annoying to people accustomed to tweaking their system or desktop. No doubt. elementary OS is - at least partially - targetted at people with minimal technical knowledge. And there _are_ some design decisions I might not really agree with. The minize button, well, uhh ... I didn't get it back via elementary-tweaks on my machines, but I understand people missing and re-activating it.

Now here's the thing though: There's a different between Apple's walled-garden and elementary OS. You are very much able to tweak your elementary OS setup in any way you want. It's Linux after all. It's your system. We try to discourage tweaking a newcomer's system via commands learned on a blog post because they're old, outdated or plain wrong / bad. elementary-tweaks was not maintained at all for a long time as well. And there are quite a bit customizability options out there hidden in dconf. That's what elementary-tweaks is a frontend to after all, basically.

I understand it's a bit frustrating to not see the customizability in a Linux distribution you're used to from others. You're not exactly the target audience for elementary OS and I'm sorry for that.

And to be honest, there's another spin to it: More customizability means more features maintained in the source code. And quite frankly, sometimes we're really short of developers (I'm not contributing anything at all currently as I'm kind of busy with my apprenticeship). If nobody is going to maintain a new feature, it's not going to be in the code because it will break one fine day and it's adding work to the "to-fix" list.

To be fair, GNOME is heading the same direction. And I love it! A lot of Linux users are unhappy with this trend because it takes away features they use. But it's great to click through very intuitive and easy-use applications to do common tasks and everyday use. I don't need any manuals for GUI applications because their UX is so great! If I need to do something more complex, I'm just switching to Terminal. It's a symbiosis I really enjoy, even as an "power user".

As an elementary OS contributor _and_ Fedora user, I guess this is my time to shine, hu?

It really depends on your use case. I've heard quite a bit positive feedback about elementary OS for "computer illiterate" (parents, old people, etc). It seems to "just work" for them after installation (bear with me I really can't judge about "ease of use" after years with Linux) and it's running on Ubuntu LTS versions. You're running apt-get to install security fixes, the current version of Firefox/Chrome and fixes provided by the elementary OS team, and that's basically it.

Fedora on the other hand is "the latest hot thing". It has by far the best GNOME3 integration and it previews technical features worked on by Red Hat and GNOME. It also features recent kernel versions which might be important for new-ish hardware. All that is quite awesome for technical-minded people like me. I'd like to say "it's unstable", but in my experience, it's not. I did not do the 22 -> 23 transition yet though. You have to do some additional work for the frequent new versions (backup everything in case it breaks, try the transition, etc). You also have to fiddle around with GNOME addons, font rendering and media codecs (RPMFusion as third-party provider) to make it usable as "personal computer" IMHO.

In the end it's up to you. I do believe your mom will be able to work with both (you'll need to tweak GNOME a bit IMHO, but that's up to discussion I guess), but you'll have to deal with different administrative workloads.

> It may well be that the pace have now gotten to the point where hobbyists have a hard time keeping up, as they have things they need to do besides stare at code all day.

Totally agree. The needs of modern computing (server-, desktop- and security-wise) have drastically increased IMHO. You need to read so much documentation and existing code before you can even start coding. That's just not feasible in your free time after work if you're having an active social life or another computer-unrelated hobby.

Although I have to admit I might be biased about this topic. I'm contributing to a FOSS project which got a lot of flak for trying to raise money for employees in a ... well, more aggressive way. While not necessarily agreeing with everything that happened, I do believe you need to work full-time on modern FOSS projects to push ahead.

> Probably the worst part is that none of this is planned, there is likely no grand conspiracy. Its just that so many of the people involved walk in the same halls, share the same cafeteria tables, and sit in on the same meetings that a internal consensus ends up formed about what is the "right" way to do things.

This. The whole Linux community seems to be paranoid. It has to be a grand scheme, a plot to take over Linux, a conspiracy to kill "the UNIX way". Maybe it's just a group of guys solving their problems.

I don't see how anything of this is really Red Hat's "fault". Seriously. They develop a piece of software which solves their problems. They also incorporate projects they already maintain to improve functionality and make developing things easier. It's their projects, they're allowed to do that. The code is still open. It's not like everybody (Debian, Ubuntu, SUSE, etc) didn't have the ability to fork udev.

Yet all these projects chose not to fork the projects incorporated by systemd. Reason (1) might be it solves problems for them as well. There's no need to fork something that perfectly works for you. Reason (2) might be they don't have the resources. But that's a declaration of bankruptcy for the whole "Linux is built by community volunteers" thing. The people advising against "corporate influence" are not able to do anything of value in modern computing anymore (I'm well aware this is over-simplification, please bear with me). Requirements for software have changed. It's not 1970 anymore. And while the "old-school" users and devs are complaining about systemd & co, the "youngsters" are busy changing the ecosystem.

Well, it _is_ the same thing as in the post you linked. The user is /u/nnkd and the development log is located at nnkd.org ... One might jump to conclusions here :)

/r/linux is schizophrenic. On the one hand, posts about new game releases for Steam are voted up and (Steam) gaming posts are quite active. On the other hand, they're badgering every single FOSS project which is trying to make money without begging their users for it (see the recent posts about Firefox). It's crazy.

I can only speak for myself, but I love GitHub because it's easy accessible for me. When I was learning how to use git and code in general (well, I'm still in that process to be fair), it's great to have a visualitation of what you're actually doing. It's even better when that interface is well-designed (at least I consider GitHub to be great UX), so you don't have to learn using another UI on top of all the new stuff you already learn as well. I think that's a factor you underestimate when you've been working with revision control and code for a long time.

Additionally, the collaboration aspect of GitHub is great as well - As it's a big plattform, a lot of developers already have a GitHub account and it's very easy to contribute with forks and pull requests. Submitting patches via mailing lists isn't everyone's cup of tea.

It feels like reddit management totally forgot AMA is not operated by them at all. That's worrying - They do not pay the content creators and moderators in any way (and that's fine as long as they can rule their communities), but if there is the possibility of profit, they just assume it belongs to them and not to anyone else. I cannot explain what happened (absolutely no communication with the AMA mods) but with that kind of attitude. They just screw themselves over with that IMHO.

> The shutdowns of the other subreddits were petulant moves by power mods to treat their users as pawns and hockey pucks. They were punishing their users because they were in a power struggle with the admins. That's wrong.

That's not how I observed the situation honestly. A lot of subreddit mods got flooded with "shut down"-requests and some decided against it, some followed the mass. It wasn't really a hostage-taking, the shutdown has / had widespread support among the user base.

What really baffles me is the way reddit management handled this situation. There were many things they simply fucked up - They did not install the new AMA team properly (hell, the subreddit mods did not know about it), they reacted childish to the shutdown (something along the lines of "popcorn tastes good" - one of your biggest communities just shut down because you failed to do basic management, in what universe is this a proper response?) and they won't address the real issues, it's all PR speech (take a look at the "we' sorry" post, a lot of important questions raised are not answered).

This is just horrible - You cannot anger your community in such a "business model". reddit depends 100% on their users and especially the content creators and moderators. They do very little by themselves, and most of it is stuff around the core functionality only a small percentage is even using.

What kind of people orders such a raid? What's the mindset behind that decision? Their own team wasn't good enough to catch the breach (hell, the whole thing sounds like a train wreck) and now they try to silence people who reveal their incompetence?

Yes, I agree that this isn't related to Microsoft at all. I was merely responding to the aspect of "hey guys, look, Microsoft got better".

> It has to lobby governments for commercial interests and at the same time, it has to seduce developpers by open sourcing (and leading technical innovation).

Well, that's the very problem for me. As long as it is only PR to catch devs, I don't care. Opening .NET was great, but honestly I'm accustomed to open languages (or open compilers), such as Go, Rust and C (including the whole GObject ecosystem). It didn't make .NET better, it made it equal to things I'm used to. And in contrast to .NET, these languages are truly governed / developed by a multitude of developers.

To me it's more important to stop ambushing Open Source / Free Software (like the blackmailing I linked above). If Microsoft's products are better, they won't have to fear Open Source at all. Fair play is all I want.