jraph

Indeed, you are right, my phrasing "but the GPL only speaks about the shape of the source code itself" is somewhat wrong or at least incomplete. I should have been more careful. It does force some stuff about how to convey the corresponding source; and it seems the GPLv3 tries to close some loopholes or address some situations more explicitly. You cited the parts of the GPLv2 and GPLv3 I should have.

I stand by the position that all this doesn't seem very restrictive though. I don't think the GPL could have been without a risk of making some legitimate cases litigious or something.

> There might be some merit to a claim that Google Drive isn't a medium customarily used for software distribution these days

I suppose forcing a means to share the source code could have been too restrictive, but the GPL only speaks about the shape of the source code itself (it should be "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it"), not how it is shared, so indeed, not a violation of the letter of the GPL I think.

It's like what we had in France and the Hadopi, which requested ISPs to share the IP addresses of people torrenting a defined set of files. One of them sent them printed on paper... (But the malicious compliance was cool in this case).

Open source doesn't imply open to contributions. And you could imagine source available software that's not open source but takes contributions (and this is not theoretical, I've seen this in the wild).

(However, that's quite orthogonal to being a dick about making the source code that you must share available)

I had an automated reply that pretended I didn't receive mails there anymore.

I would receive some messages twice for some time, as people resent their mails to the new address

Things sorted themselves out without much effort. But indeed, it took at least a year or two.

Not at all, the problem is with the apps that are carefully designed to create that in users.

Thanks for the interesting discussion!

Ah, by "reason", you meant the grandmother's reason!

Yeah, I don't think that's a good reason neither. Now, it not being a good reason is not a pass to act against her will either.

I think OP needs to convince her that it's a bad reason first.

> That's because 'I want to die' is a valid reason. Or at least it should be

That's a very reasonable reason not to want to take a pill, but that's not even necessarily the actual reason. Often the reason is completely unknown. Possibly the person refusing the pills doesn't really know why they are refusing it / doesn't even have good reasons. The actual reasons behind the refusal doesn't theoretically matter much in whether they should be forced to take the pills. They should only matter to convince them that they should take the pill for their own good. (the reality is probably more "dirty" than that though)

> simply acting against autonomy is itself bad within their framework, but this is inconsistent with society's behaviour at large.

Possibly, but, depending on what you mean:

* society at large acting against autonomy isn't necessarily a good thing / a good justification for doing it. Society at large needs a fix.

* fighting fire with fire is not necessarily the right approach

> I disagree on the reason given being good.

Okay, that's what you probably implied in your first reply, and I think that's what's actually interesting to discuss.

I don't think not acting against someone's will is a question of mere politeness. In social care, it's often considered mistreatment to do so.

For instance if it is not considered that an adult who's not otherwise autonomous can't express consent and doesn't want to take their pills, social workers normally shouldn't (and legally can't) force them to take them, even if it's good for them.

At least where I live.

Not all act against someone's will is mistreatment, but it definitely goes beyond politeness.

Ah, I see! I was a bit annoyed by you seemingly pointlessly correcting the parent, but now I understand your PoV.

> In context, me saying 'You can just do that' means 'You should do that'

That's not very consistent. You wrote that whether they should was another question.

> (barring there being good reason, which I haven't seen so far)

I disagree with you. Someone being autonomous is a good reason for not wanting to take a decision for them against their will.

It follows that:

> It's still used by some people to close doors and remove options without good reason

This didn't happen here. No doors were closed without a good reason, because there is one.

In context, "I can't just do that" means "I shouldn't do that".

It has always seemed weird that companies are happy to use proprietary software but avoid AGPL software like plague. AGPL being a free software license, usage is not restricted. There's nothing forbidden. If you only intend to use the software, then the situation is trivial. You have unrestricted right to use it. There's absolutely no complexity there. Proprietary software has strictly more restrictions on usage and is more legally complex.

> because they are stupid and evil

Yes, that was the intended meaning (evil, not stupid - on the contrary, I think that's very clever). With this I'm not qualifying small companies that bought into the FUD, but big corps that don't like that they cannot just take AGPL code and make others scared of the AGPL for no good reasons.

This is not at all what is usually held against him.

You can totally make profits by selling services based on AGPL code btw, it's completely fine. As long as you redistribute your derivative work as AGPL too.

There's nothing toxic in the AGPL for you as long as you don't want to make that code proprietary (even without making profits)

No. There's no restriction of usage in the (A)GPL. Anyone, including big corps, can use AGPL software. Preventing them to use the software is not the point neither. The point is trying to ensure end user freedom.

They just choose avoid agpl software. Their loss. Unfortunately they also spread FUD on this and many commenters here happily convey it.

> unless you can't physically use a smartphone

Like, because of a disability, or because you don't have a smartphone? In the latter case, would it work to just go to the bank with a dumb phone?

I live in Europe and I can use my bank just fine without their app.

I've read somewhere that some banks will let you use their SMS 2FA as long as you haven't already used their mobile app.

Google AMP might have enforced stripped down HTML, but I think you were also supposed to embed their JS as well, probably making a page that was lightweight from the start heavier…

Yeah, "We are looking for a developer specialized in critical Java code following idiomatic COBOL which hasn't been tested in production yet and which nobody is sure about whether the exact behavior matches what's been running in production. You will enjoy meaningful work in an environment which has been considering engaging in environmental concerns for decades and which caries the well-being and social condition of fellow human beings as a core values, directly addressing your middle age existential crisis. Extra bonus points if you like using LLMs. The pay is good, but remember you are a Java developer, not a COBOL developer, and also remember we are already paying for tokens to do your job. Those are also possibly getting more and more expensive so we'll see about the raises. Job starts as soon as possible."

This extension gives consent, and cookies are not the only technical way of tracking.

Using uBlock Origin with cookie consent modal filters is way better (but causes breakage at times).

The author's website design is insufferable, here's a fix for the horrible font and scrolljacking that's worse than the reader mode of your browser in case you are reading comments before the article:

    document.body.style.color = "pink";

You've made a shortcut that's subtly wrong in some very obscure way concerning some yet to be actually seen obscure edge case and you should feel bad.

This rewrite is showcased by Anthropic to sell AI rewrites to other companies.

If it turns out the rewrite cost stupid amounts of money and leads to a bad outcome, it's just a misleading ad.

We developers now need to explain that to illuminated management and colleagues.

On Linux, ncdu is really good in the terminal. Filelight on KDE and Baobab on Gnome are really nice GUIs.

> People like computers to work fast.

People don't like to wait for their computer. The nuance is quite important.

> They don't like when their computer sounds like a jet engine. Especially among other people whose computers don't do that. People like not having to worry too much charging their computer.

But the 2012 Mac I'm talking about does all that for what it's used for: completely silent (and trust me, I'm quite sensitive to that), lasts on battery long enough, as fast as possible (of course a new machine would be faster, but it would not be meaningful for the use case).

> The environmental cost is less than ordering a pizza. A product that someone uses for years is not going to be an environmental issue.

That's completely wrong.

I'm not sure why you are pushing here.

Depends. I'm surrounded by people who just need light web browsing and emails. They don't really like computers, they want to use them only when absolutely necessary. A Mac from 2012 with a 256-512 GiB SSD and 8 GiB of RAM is plenty.

Hell, last week I was on holidays without my computer, and I have borrowed such a machine. The battery has been replaced so it still has a long battery time. It was as fast as I could hope (and I'm quite sensitive to this stuff!), the only thing slowing me down was the keyboard layout, the window management of the OS, and the touchpad gestures not responding as well as what I have on Linux (notably swipe for back in Firefox, I was quite surprised).

This thing can't be updated anymore though and even Firefox gave up, so I advised switching to Linux to keep things safe.

Aside from the OS, this thing does 100% the job it needs to do. Recent hardware won't do better because that's not the limiting factor.

Even if money is not an issue, replacing hardware has environmental costs, and that's in this spirit that I answered no, not necessarily better.

Not if the hardware still works and still does the job.

Well if I had to install something and knew their authors were in favor of genocides, I would look elsewhere.

> they don't have a position on Palestine so I don't know if I should leverage the JPEG XL format?

This is a strawman. You go from "they are in favor of something horrible, should I use them?" to "they haven't expressed a position on stuff, should I use them?".

Again, Codeberg is not involved in anything related to Russian war in Ukraine, and is not responsible for Germany building their economy on cheap Russian oil and gas, so they could not possibly be assumed to be in favor of Russian agression unless they made a statement towards this.

Yet,

> I don't see them taking a stance in the Russian war in Ukraine

that's because you didn't bother to check, you just assumed they didn't.

https://blog.codeberg.org/one-year-into-the-war-your-help-is...

> I guess by ops logic

I don't think so. Them being involved or not in the thing makes all the difference.

Until proven otherwise, Codeberg's operations have nothing to do with the uyghur genocide though.

> We now even have people like Linus Torvalds making the fairly reasonable argument that an LLM is just a tool, and “clearly a useful one”

I don't think this argument is reasonable at all. Many are concerned about the environmental and societal impacts of LLMs, there are many ethical concerns around them as well, there are concerns that they could cause a bubble burst / a major economical crisis. Regardless your opinion on all these things, that's quite the undertaking for "just a tool"! This is unheard of for something like a hammer, for instance.

> If the maintainer of the largest and most consequential open-source project on the planet can treat LLMs as a tool to be judged on its results rather than a category to be banned on sight, a backyard code forge can manage the same

Linus Torvalds can be wrong at times, like anyone else.

It's a shame an authority like Linus Torvalds shared this opinion, now people are taking it even more seriously.

He considers technical merit above all else, even above what allows "technique" to exist in the first place. He always have. It might have helped a lot in the success of Linux, but I still think this is deeply flawed.

Whether you love, or hate, or don't care about LLMs, they are not "just a tool".