jpetso

If you pay for beach accommodation instead of a dwelling in some higher-priced metropolitan area, sure. As an add-on though, still more expensive.

I'd wager that most people are working towards a home base in the lands they're used to, then go on trips every now and then. Selling your metropolitan home base gets you the permanent beach lifestyle for sure, but permanently removing oneself from more densely populated areas is not for everyone.

Apparently it's possible to download a whole load of books illegally, but still train AI models on them without those getting pulled after you get found out.

The same reasoning may apply here :P

That's not even the most recent iteration, there's also Deskflow now which is maintained by the main Synergy developer and a very active independent dev. Works fine on Wayland afaik. Also has a wiki page with the history of all the forks!

https://github.com/deskflow/deskflow

To put a positive conspiratorial spin on the recent Wayland push: maybe they think that taking away the option to fall back to X11 will finally get enough eyes on Wayland to fix its remaining issues.

Yes, and I also think it's important to focus on that part in particular: X11 is not a feature, it's not a user story, it's an implementation detail of the desktop environment / window manager.

There are certainly historical architectural choices that imply many aspects of what X11 can or can't do for the user, likewise with desktops' implementation of the Wayland protocol. The differences between these approaches is real, and substantial.

But in the end, X11 is not a cause unto its own. It's a component in service of the user experience at large. People criticize the removal of X11 support either because their use cases have been affected in some inconvenient way, or because they're afraid of future consequences one way or another.

It's important that desktop environments work on providing the features/UX/quality that users need and expect. It's also important that users tell their DE developers what their needs are, in terms of what problems they are trying to solve, not in terms of which components to use underneath. Choice of component stack is a developer issue and should remain this way.

In the end, the DEs/WMs that solve their users' problems to a high degree of satisfaction are the ones who will retain and gain the most users. Approaches will differ across the Linux desktop space regarding what problems to solve specifically, which problems to prioritize, and how best to implement solutions for them. Dependencies like X11 shape the ultimate user experience one way or another, in terms of features, constraints, development effort, and continuity.

And so do many other implementation choices that need to be made or revised along the way. Ideally most users will end up with DEs/WMs whose development philosophy is aligned with their personal priorities. Friendly bug reporters can help out with the awareness part at least :)

Free books for you as an individual, not free for the library and the city backing it. What's in your library still ends up paying authors (and their publishers).

But humans have evolved to socialize thinking, haven't we?

An overwhelmingly large number of people keep saying that socialism is bad, individualism is where it's at. I trust they're right.

A not-so-insignificant number of FOSS developers are well able to make quality UIs, but decide to charge for their more polished creations.

Between having to make a living somehow, and not reaping a whole lot of other personal benefits from open source audio development, it takes a very special kind of person to publish these contributions in the first place. Once they're published, generally with its UI defined in code by a developer person, they're not necessarily easy for a designer to edit.

Nor is there much of a steady community around most of the plugins. So many are "publish, feature-complete enough, move on" kind of projects.

As always, be the change you want to see in the world.

Zynthian (a RPi-based synth collection & groovebox) lists some of the most prominent ones on its website: https://zynthian.org/engines

Its install recipes directory may yield a less fancy, but probably more comprehensive list: https://github.com/zynthian/zynthian-sys/tree/oram/scripts/r...

With Zynthian OS up and running, the full list of plugins shows in its webconf page, it's so long that they have to hide basically most of the plugins from the main on-device UI.

Roughly speaking, if it's open source, most likely it will work. If it's proprietary, assume that only Pianoteq and a small number of u-he plugins will work. Most commercial products with binary-only distribution don't feel like RPi devices are a large enough market for them to build binaries for it. Even if they otherwise offer ARM builds for Apple Silicon and Linux builds for x86.

The Steam client has to restart in order to pick up the newly added external titles, at least last time I tried. In gaming mode, restarting the client means restarting the system, which is ever so slightly annoying.

Apart from that though, it works just fine on the Steam Deck.

You don't feel like the Steam Deck does a pretty good job with suspend and resume, even while playing games?

It's a little more nuanced than that. Software and gained freedoms survive not because they exist, but because they are being actively maintained. If your original, never-taken-away software does not get continually maintained, then:

* It will slowly go stale, for example, it may not get ported to newer, increasingly expected desktop APIs. * It will lose users to competing software (such as your proprietary fork) which are better maintained.

As a result, it loses its relevance and utility over time. People that never update their systems can continue using it as they always have, assuming no online-only restrictions or time-limited licenses. But to new use cases and new users, the open software is now less desirable and the proprietary fork accumulates ever more power to screw over people with anti-consumer moves. Regulators ignore the open variant due to its niche marketshare, increasing the likelihood of things going south.

Harm can be done to people who don't have alternatives. In order to have alternatives, you need either a functioning free market or a working, relevant, sufficiently usable product that can be forked if worse comes to worst. Free software can of course help in establishing a free market, it isn't one or the other.

If a proprietary product takes over from one controlled by the community, much of the time it's not a problem. It can be replaced or done without.

If a proprietary platform takes over from one controlled by the community, something that determines not only how you go about your business but what other people expect from you, everyone gets harmed. The problem with a lot of proprietary software is that every company and their dog wants their product to become a platform and reshape the market to discourage alternatives.

MIT by itself does no harm. If it works like LLVM and everyone contributes because it makes more sense than developing a closed-off platform, then great! If it helps to bootstrap a proprietary market leader while the originally useful open original shrivels away into irrelevance, not as great.

Another take, from a more recent Blue Systems / Techpaladin developer: https://akselmo.dev/posts/bluesystems-to-techpaladin/

No. Jonathan was co-maintaining KDE neon, which now has one developer left and is about to be joined by KDE Linux, another take on a Plasma-based distro. He also handled release manager duties, which have been transferred and running smoothly for a few months now.

He may have contributed in other ways that I'm not aware of, but overall KDE is in a very good spot with many more developers working on stuff.

It's not open source anymore once you add this; open source is defined as having equal terms for everyone.

That said, a few entities are advocating for something like this, e.g. Bruce Perens with Post Open (https://postopen.org) or FUTO with "source first" (https://www.futo.org/about/futo-statement-on-opensource/).

A big hangup with all of this is, who is "us"? Whom do you owe money to?

The original author? What if I end up forking the software without the original authors involved, am I going to do it for free with all the proceeds going to people who aren't working on it anymore?

Or all future contributors? Using which formula to divvy up that money? Lines of code, useful bug reports written, number of tasks triaged, number of tasks resolved, documentation authored, users supported - what determines the relative amount of your contribution? Who receives the payment(s) from $megacorp, can they be trusted to redistribute it among contributors? What happens when the original maintainer / payment receiver steps back or scales back their contributions? How to avoid the divvy-up metric being gamed by people who care more about the money than the quality of the software?

Yes, it's possible; no, "just add to the license" doesn't cut it. This is a much bigger question. How you answer these questions determines whether your project even preserves open source's main (user-side) benefit of forkability.

Phabricator had its task tracker open to everyone, but the company behind it would charge for prioritization of tasks being tackled. If you want your bug fixed or feature implemented before whatever else is on the maintainer's inherent priority list, pay up. IIRC, they also did all development in-house without accepting merge requests from the outside, but I may misremember.

It's unclear how successful they were with this. Phabricator lasted for about a decade before announcing the end of its development, not all of which was as a stand-alone company. The announcement didn't say why they stopped.

Until monopoly, or until 15-20% when companies start offering widespread Linux support for applications and peripheral management, and retail stores start selling some devices with a Linux desktop preloaded?

I'd do the math, but it really depends on whether the recent growth holds, accelerates, or slows down again. So, hard to tell.

About 4-6% in US and other Western countries, depending on analytics source. Increases in the past year or so by a full percentage point or so. More in India, less in South America, barely any in China.

The increased visibility due to SteamOS/Proton, coverage by various prominent TechTubers, end of Windows 10 support, availability of image-based OS upgrades and Flatpak/Snap to supercede package dependencies, all seem to combine into an actual breakout year comparatively. We'll see if the trend holds or was just a one-off.

Bookworm stayed on Plasma 5.27.5 when Plasma shipped bugfix releases up to 5.27.12. Debian may have cherry-picked a handful of patches from there, but that's a lot of bugfixes missed on a release that was already super old.

Even at this point, Plasma 6.4 has been out for almost two months and 6.3 will not get any more updates ever. While everyone else is upgrading, Debian is going to be stuck on an already unsupported version for another two years or however much.

Debian is great for what it is, but you better hope you don't run into issues with your desktop environment because they will not be addressed.

All of the cloud providers are already in on BSD-licensed Valkey, so which community is realistically going to take over AGPL Redis next time around? The much smaller group of Redict proponents?

There's only so much manpower to go around and much of it is otherwise preoccupied now.

There is no end goal. It's just a bunch of independent actors who are all trying to get ahead of their competitors a step at a time. Two steps if they're lucky.

The collective system steers into whichever direction was determined by the previous set of steps, with very little potential for any individual actor to turn it around.

Qt hasn't been terrible in terms of upgradeability between major versions for many use cases, but Krita got the short end of the stick.

Krita's scope and architecture requires both cross-platform compatibility and deep integration with the OS. For the latter, they need some degree of going past Qt's cross-platform abstractions, and Qt happens to have made some substantial changes to the way they build on the platform's graphics APIs.

As long as you're sticking with Qt's cross-platform API, you're good; if you ignore it and go full OpenGL or Vulkan for all UI, you're good; it's when you try to mix both that things get hairy.

He added an edit that the tablet software in Plasma 6 still works as it did before when run in X11. Only if you switch to Wayland, or your distro does it for you by removing X11 packages, will you get the (for the time being) less capable version.

Imagine you have a portable laptop that works for 95% of all your use cases except those days when you need a cluster of GPUs training a ML model or doing some large-scale scientific calculation.

Imagine having a fridge that isn't cold enough for storing ice cream and frozen veggies.

And yes, none of my shoes are even remotely close to covering 95% of floors. Some are good for hiking, some are good for running, some are warm in the winter.

The issue is not the lack of 100% coverage. The issue is that there is no sufficiently appealing option for a large number of people to get access to the 5% of cases when you do need it. Apparently rentals and other sharing options aren't quite up to snuff, so everybody overprovisions like crazy.

I am an owner if I can exercise control over the software at hand. That's entirely my point - there is open source that a rando like me can hop in and improve, sometimes requiring difficult discussions about how to go about it exactly, but always with the experience of the user as a priority. (User can be an end user, but also a developer who's using an open source library/framework.)

And then there's "open source" where the code is accessible but the user experience takes a backseat to corporate interests, CLA requirements provide a one-sided transfer of copyrights, hobbyist contributions are systematically steamrolled by optimizing build pipelines and development processes for internal company use, and large-scale directions are decided in a private meeting room without involving community contributors.

If an inventor reserves some rights to control their invention for their own benefit, I have no problem with that. There's plenty of commercial software out there, people are working hard to provide value to customers, and I've been part of this system too.

Where I take issue is when we ask for special treatment of "open source" whose main purpose is to benefit commercial entities in doing business. Companies should figure out on their own how to keep their mission-critical software alive, that's their business. If Django suffers because lots of profitable outfits can't figure out a way to finance what they build upon, let them eat dust. They'll figure it out eventually when their services start falling behind on all fronts.

As a charitable coder, I'm going to invest my time into providing value for end users, not companies. That's the kind of open source we as a community/society should focus on supporting and financing. Imho.

If we're going to ignore the "official" meaning of open source, then let's take a step back to consider why open source is worth supporting in the first place.

Open source guarantees to me, the user, that competition among vendors will be possible and fair in the future. This is exactly the point that many "fake OSS" licenses try to take away. Okay, maybe it's possible to fork for personal on-prem use, but god forbid someone creates a competing hosted solution that gives any customer more choice. Furthermore, these pieces of software are fucked the day that the company folds, or gets acquired by a malevolent buyer.

Open source guarantees a baseline level of respect towards me, the end user. By letting anyone fork a project that's gone too far in the wrong direction, I know that my software will continue working in the short run and of it's important enough, a competing alternative will emerge that continues without one-sided money or data grabs.

There's nothing inherently wrong with having someone from Microsoft or Google work on open source software, or any VC-funded company that will without fail turn against their users sooner or later. However, if a controlling majority of developers is employed this way, it provides an opportunity for what elsewhere is known as regulatory capture. If Microsoft's goal is to make people dependent on proprietary GitLab and VS Code Marketplace offerings, and Google's goal is to provide the greatest possible amount of ads and tracking to the largest possible user base, it does not matter if the software is open source or not. The end result is the same, I'm left without viable alternatives and big business gets to do with us whatever the hell they please.

Especially when this software becomes ubiquitous and entrenched, paying developers to work on company-controlled OSS instead of community-driven, user-respecting OSS is a net negative for everyone in the long run.

I'm only interested in OSS in so far as it protects my interests as an end user, and/or our common interests as a society, now and in the future. The collaborative aspect is nice, but that's not the reason that we should ask for better compensation for maintainers.

The "Open Source" label as such is indeed meaningless per se, and it doesn't always protect me either, as seen with BSD+MIT software allowing cryptographically-enabled control of devices that I nominally own, or GPL being useless when there is no actual distribution of software involved. That said, I have yet to see a case of non-OSI "open source" that doesn't try to tilt the playing field in biased, controlling and long-term unsustainable or user-hostile ways.

If you can't build a business on a level playing field, perhaps it's in everyone's interest that your business and software dies, or retreats into lower-intensity hobbyist maintainership, instead of leading everyone into a hard dependency on your oh so well-intended monetization of originally useful software. Then at least someone else can take a shot at doing it better.

Inflation isn't great for people with stocks, and high interest rates are the main thing that can apply downward pressure to housing prices.

People with lots of debt have it rough right now. The little guy with no house or stocks, but no debt, however, has more of a chance to catch up when hard-earned assets depreciate via inflation and high interest.

KDE is not going Wayland only with the upcoming Plasma 6.0. It's merely switching the default selection, while continuing to support X11 for much longer (no end date announced at this point).

I agree with the remainder of the parent comment, and prominent distributions dropping X11 in 2024 will definitely accelerate the quest for the last bunch of Wayland features that common users feel on a day-to-day basis.

This angle makes me think that we're going about the whole inheritance tax thing the wrong way.

It's not the parent's estate that should be taxed. They have indeed earned all the money fair and square, and should be able to pass it on as they see fit.

Instead, let's think about a tax on receiving inheritances. Limiting the money hose where the inequality actually happens, at the person that hasn't worked for the money and through pure happenstance comes into riches while others are not getting remotely equal opportunities. That person should be the one to consider when proposing an inheritance tax.

Maybe a lifetime tax-free limit on receiving inheritances, cumulatively, from any source.

[Edit: This way, we can also elegantly solve the "can't pass down the family business" problem: Allow the inheritance tax to be paid in long-term installments by the recipient, with interest, allowing the inheriting child to keep the asset but make them work for part of the value they got out of it. Remaining tax debt at the time of the child's death would be due immediately at the time of their own death.]

My big concern with large companies is cross-selling. For the sake of argument, let's assume that Google rightfully won the Internet, Apple rightfully won smartphones, Microsoft rightfully (?) won operating systems, etc.

All of them tried, competition was hot, the market picked a winner.

But what's next is a market distortion. Google uses their front page to push Chrome over Firefox, Apple doesn't care to make any of their other devices (e.g. Watch, HomePod) interoperate with other platforms, Microsoft packs Windows with ads for Office 365, OneDrive, and so on. All of Big Tech is perpetually obsessed with owning platforms as opposed to products, because once you control a platform, it gives you the leverage/"moat" to continue profiting without the corresponding investment into competing fairly. Thriving competition would be to have to compete independently in each market, rather than winning one and then extending that win to other markets by tilting the playing field.

Activision Blizzard falls nicely into this category as it's explicitly designed to gain an edge over Sony in gaming. Cloud gaming or not, it's clear to everyone that the general idea is improve the standing of Xbox products and Windows PCs by using the leverage of CoD as an existing market winner. As opposed to making the platform compete on its own terms. That's a market distortion.

The fact that large companies put large amounts of resources into startups and developing new markets doesn't mean that they compete fairly, or that it's a better outcome for society/consumers than an alternative reality where each product by itself would compete on its own merits, and companies could win markets independently rather than having to sell to existing market leaders for extra leverage.

It seems like on PC one would want to use Opus instead of the older MP3 or Ogg Vorbis. It has a number of performance-related improvements in addition to better audio per bitrate, although the higher-quality codec out of its two internal modes is still conceptually similar to MP3 & Co. so I figure it wouldn't necessarily solve all performance issues either.