Basically a deer with a human face. Despite probably being some sort of magical nature spirit, his interests are primarily in technology and politics and science fiction.

Spent many years on Reddit and is now exploring new vistas in social media.

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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2023

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  • FaceDeer@kbin.socialtoTechnology@lemmy.mlGitHub Is Not Open Source, A Rant
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    7 months ago

    So we’ve moved from “GitHub is not open source” to “GitHub has some support software for peripheral features that is not open-source?” I’m definitely failing to see the rant-worthiness of it at this point. It’s certainly not monopolistic, platforms like GitLab and Bitbucket also provide these features. And I’d bet that some of them have their own proprietary software to support these things too.


  • There’s quite a series of leaps of logic here.

    Because Google (not Microsoft) released a project under the BSD license (an open source license) but “everyone on Lemmy” doesn’t think it’s open source, therefore a hosting site owned by Microsoft (not Google) is not “open source.”

    I’m not even sure what is meant by GitHub being “open source.” It’s a hosting provider, not an actual piece of software. The site itself doesn’t have a source license. The individual repositories can have licenses, which can be whatever the user who created the repository sets it to be - including open source licenses. Do you mean GitHub Desktop? Microsoft released that under the MIT license. And you don’t need GitHub Desktop to use GitHub anyway.







  • Content warning: this is a rant from a teenager who has strong opinions.

    Okay…

    However, it holds a monopoly on software.

    You don’t know what a “monopoly” is.

    they could just go “Boop! You’re gone!” and there’s nothing I could do about it other than move forges.

    Yeah, nothing you could do about it, other than moving to one of the many other git hosts. Monopoly!

    And then after listing off a whole bunch of alternative git hosts…

    Centralization is not bad by itself but it’s bad when there’s no other option. There just needs to be ways to contribute to code without having to use Github.

    You have plenty of ways to do that, and you know that because you just listed them. Github is not a monopoly.

    Also, I don’t see the concept of open source mentioned at any point in this rant.



  • I’m just venting, really. I know it’s not going to make a real difference.

    I suppose if you go waaaay back it was different, true. Back in the days of Usenet (as a discussion forum rather than as the piracy filesharing system it’s mostly used for nowadays) there weren’t these sorts of ToS on it and everything got freely archived in numerous different places because that’s just how it was. It was the first Fediverse, I suppose.

    The ironic thing is that kbin.social’s ToS has no “ownership” stuff in it either. For now, at least, the new ActivityPub-based Fediverse is in the same position that Usenet was - I assume a lot of the other instances also don’t bother with much of a ToS and the posts get shared around beyond any one instance’s control anyway. So maybe this grumpy old-timer may get to see a bit of the good old days return, for a little while. That’ll be nice.


  • Well, a large part of my frustration stems from the “I’ve seen this for decades” part - longer than many of the people who are now raising a ruckus have been alive. So IMO it’s always been this way and the “social contract we’ve adapted to” is “the social contract that we imagined existed despite there being ample evidence there was no such thing.” I’m so tired of the surprised-pikachu reactions.

    Combined with the selfish “wait a minute, the stuff I gave away for fun is worth money to someone else now? I want money too! Or I’m going to destroy my stuff so that nobody gets any value out of it!” Reactions, I find myself bizarrely ambivalent and not exactly on the side of the common man vs. the big evil corporations this time.


  • Hardly. They earn money by being paid by their users, but they can earn more money by being paid by their users and also selling their users’ data. The goal is more money, so it makes sense for them to do that. It’s not crazy.

    From the WordPress Terms of Service:

    License. By uploading or sharing Content, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, transferable, sub-licensable, and non-exclusive license to use, reproduce, modify, distribute, adapt, publicly display, and publish the Content solely for the purpose of providing and improving our products and Services and promoting your website. This license also allows us to make any publicly-posted Content available to select third parties (through Firehose, for example) so that these third parties can analyze and distribute (but not publicly display) the Content through their services.

    Emphasis added. They told you what they could do with the content you gave them, you just didn’t listen.

    I’m sorry if I’m coming across harsh here, but I’m seeing this same error being made over and over again. It’s being made frequently right now thanks to the big shakeups happening in social media and the sudden rise of AI, but I’ve seen it sporadically over the decades that I’ve been online. So it bears driving home:

    • If you are about to give your content to a website, check their terms of service before you do to see if you’re willing to agree to their terms, and if you don’t agree to their terms then don’t give your content to a website. It’s true that some ToS clauses may not be legally enforceable, but are you willing to fight that in court? If you didn’t consider your content valuable enough to spend the time checking the ToS when you posted it, that’s not WordPress’s fault.
    • If you give someone something and they later find a way to make the thing you gave them valuable, it’s too late. You gave it to them. They don’t owe you a “cut.” Check the terms of service.