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Joined 5 years ago
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Cake day: May 31st, 2020

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  • Ephera@lemmy.mlOPtoOpen Source@lemmy.mlWhat's up with FUTO?
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    2 days ago

    From a communication viewpoint, that is fair, but to my knowledge (from being a professional software developer), effectively any license that is not ‘open-source’ or ‘free’ is by definition proprietary.

    Because those two terms describe licensing standards (the only established ones that I know of). Whereas I believe, “proprietary license” uses this meaning of proprietary:

    Nonstandard and controlled by one particular organization.

    So, they wrote that license themselves is the point. What it says in there is secondary in meaning.

    This is so highly relevant because in legal disputes, there is certain license compatibilities which are known to be possible.
    You can take a library licensed under the MIT license and use it in a project that uses the Apache-2.0 license and you’re perfectly fine. This is the foundation of why the open-source ecosystem exists at all.

    But you cannot take the source code from FUTO and use it in a differently licensed project, because no legal precedents exist to support this. (I believe, the FUTO license also actively prohibits this in some way, but that’s beside the point.)
    This has massive implications. Like, yeah, you can look at the code, but it is useless. If FUTO closes shop or enshittifies, you cannot fork their projects.
    And because you cannot legally re-use their source code in other projects, likely no one looks at it in depth either.







  • There’s no way they actually checked that it works. It includes code for:

    • XDG
    • GNOME
    • “GNOME_old”
    • KDE

    Verifying this would mean logging into several different desktop environments.

    It’s also extremely fragile code, running external commands and filtering through various files. There just is no good API on Linux for querying whether the desktop environment is using a dark theme, so it’s doing absolutely inane shit that no sane developer would type out.

    Because it’s a maintenance nightmare. Because they almost certainly don’t actually need to solve this. That’s software development 101, to not write code that you don’t actually need. But apparently some devs never got the memo that this is because of the maintenance cost, not because you weren’t able to generate the code up until now.











  • somewhat logical, but entirely in practice verb-noun command structure.

    That’s supposed to be “impractical”, not “in practice”, for others reading along.

    For example, the “proper” command to list a directory is: Get-ChildItem
    The “proper” command to fetch a webpage is: Invoke-WebRequest https://example.com/

    In these particular cases, they do have aliases defined, so you can use ls, dir and curl instead, but …yeah, that’s still generally what the command names are like.

    It’s partially more verbose than C#, which is one of the most verbose programming languages out there. I genuinely feel like this kind of defeats the point of having a scripting language in the first place, when it isn’t succinct.
    Like, you’re hardly going to use it interactively, because it is so verbose, so you won’t know the commands very well. Which means, if you go to write a script with Powershell, you’ll need to look up how to do everything just as much as with a full-fledged programming language. And I do typically prefer the better tooling of a full-fledged programming language…


  • Ephera@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.mlLinux security
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    1 month ago

    I just want to say that you’re probably worrying too much about it. Of course, there is lots of things one can do to improve security (which the others here are listing dutifully) and it is foolish to just assume that one’s computer is entirely secure, because as a user, you will always have the ability to bypass that.

    But there’s a pretty firm consensus in the IT industry that Linux is more secure than Windows. And that the popular Linux distributions are more trustworthy organizations than Microsoft.

    So, it’s good to inform yourself, but if you survived on Windows, you at least should not worry about the Linux side of things. It’s more than fine.