nickwitha_k (he/him)

That’s the beautiful thing about gifting software with permissive licenses (when one wants to): it’s a gift and anyone can do whatever they want with it for free.

ETA: I DO think that it is important for one who chooses to license software permissively to be informed about their decision and its implications. But, just like consent in other areas, as long as one enters into it intentionally and with the understanding of what the license means, it’s noone’s place to judge (and, like consent in other interpersonal areas, the license can be revoked/modified at any time - with a new version). Honestly, really weird of those that take issue with individuals choosing to gift their software to humanity - there’s way more interesting and useful things to engage in in the FLOSS landscape.

…People who wanted to donate their software to the public with no strings attached could see an uptick in the number of users?

Exactly. Bad actors are going to act badly. Unfortunately, something that we have to accept as reality (and something that some political philosophies fail to plan for). Bad actors will break the rules and, if they are wealthy, they will more often than not get away with it in the current state of affairs.

However, I would say that you bring an interesting point. It would be worthwhile, philosophically to have a “Pacifist MIT” license, being permissive but explicitly denying legal use to MIC.

what would you do if someone used it to hurt people instead? I’d personally feel like shit if my software were used for that, and as others said in this post, they’d prefer to have entities request an exemption rather than have their code used in ways they don’t approve of. So what say you?

I’ve a few thoughts on this:

• Anyone who wants to use anything that I release for harm, will probably do so regardless of license. Bad actors are going to act badly. Plus, chances are that they’d see no legal repercussions as underdogs winning in court is the exception, not the rule. The legal system is heavily stacked against the little guy.
• I tend to specifically avoid working on things that are weaponizable to reduce the chance of ethical conflict.
• The projects that I’ve released or plan to release tend to be pretty esoteric. The one that saw the most interest was years ago and it was an adapter between abandoned gallery plugin and an abandoned social media CMS thing. It would take some great creativity to hurt people with that, other than making them read my horrible code from that era. My current projects are more about FPGA and mixed reality stuff.
• Once I’ve created something and shared it freely, it is no longer wholely mine. I cannot dictate how one uses it, anymore than a musician can dictate how someone listens to the radio. As long as one abstains from creating tools intended to harm (or that can be predictably turned to harm), I don’t see legitimate ethical culpability. We only have control over ourselves.

Really?..

Just about every FOSS and Source-Available license that I’ve seen is perfectly valid. As a software developer, one has the option to choose how they wish to license their software. This can be based upon one’s personal philosophical view or what seems most appropriate for the piece of software.

Not everyone is motivated by profit. Most software that I develop personally is permissively licensed because IDGAF as long as I have enough to get by. If I write some code that makes someone else’s life better or easier, that’s more than enough for me.

Wait. What am I saying? This is the Internet and, according to the rules of corpo social media, we’re all supposed to be dicks to each other to further “engagement”. WHICH ONE OF YOU SAVAGES IS USING TAB INDENTATION INSTEAD OF BLOCKS IN YOUR LICENSE FILES?!?;!!!111one

That’s their prerogative. FLOSS is a communal effort of equals. Users are not customers; not entitled to anything as it’s donated freely. If you want to be bannied and not contribute, there’s proprietary software out there but they’ll exact a price (currently more than just financial).

Just explained this to my Irish wife. To “run a train on someone” in American slang would mean having group sex with that person, potentially consecutively.

Oh absolutely. Some people are just unpleasant (and as you say, sometimes it’s down to a bad day). And sometimes, it’s just personality clash/philosophy on OSS (ex. the former “benevolent dictator” of vim, RIP).

I’ll second this. Maybe they’re coming from Reddit? I’ve seen some pretty awful screenshots from there. And I’ll also second the helpfulness of the FOSS devs - I’ve reached out to the OpenSSH maillist to try to better understand the functionality of cert auth and they were super helpful.

You could probably use a Python script to handle any missing compression methods. Gimp is more readily extensible.

Reject rejection, embrace all distros.

Currently on Fedora Silverblue. I think I’m settling there for a base system/local hypervisor. Tried NixOS but, as someone who has been Linuxing and programming for over a decade, I don’t think it is for me (I don’t like the syntax or need for a DSL - give me a tool that uses a standardized language like JSON or YAML, not one that forces me to use a language that is of no use anywhere else - not to mention the garbage documentation; if the Getting Started docs don’t result in a system that is functional including a networking stack, it is insufficient and no, Discord is not documentation).

I’m going to have to come back to Nix/NixOS in a bit. I tried setting it up as a baremetal OS but clearly didn’t have sufficient understanding of the Nix DSL to get it to do what I want. Following the instructions in the manual led to a functional system missing the network stack. I’ll probably wait until the official docs catch up as it appears that they are quite a bit behind. That and I’m not sure how I feel about a DSL for package management. I’d much rather use JSON or YAML, or even INI or TOML. Maybe if I were a LISP or Haskell guy.

So, after a few hours sunk there, I switched to Fedora Silverblue, which worked out of the box and added Incus via rpm-os-tree. Just need to get the UI setup and I can start moving through my distro list.

For myself, it’s ADHD and keeping things open that I intend to get back to but rarely do.

I just use “dir” about 90% of the time.

It’s set for release in H2 of this year. This should be an actual desktop-class processor, performance-wise. Mini-ITX form factor too! The RISC-V processors are going through generations blazingly fast. Probably partly because we hobbyists get to do some QA.

I would caution though that this is still likely in the territory of “dev board”. Probably not going to be mainstream-ready and will have plenty of quirks. But, it’s a really big step forward.

I’m intending to use an Oasis for a NAS and virtualization host. If it plays nice, maybe put together a cluster.

I’ve been using some much smaller CH32V305 based keyboard controllers for a while, recently built a fightstick aroubd the platform. Now if only I fidn’t suck at joystick games, having grown up on gamepads.

Right there with you. I didn’t have a console as a kid so, I’m pretty bad at fighting games. Have been holding back a bit in the MCUs as well but, mainly due to time constraints and waiting for my new hobby dev system to arrive. But, have a good number of plans for MCUs and other things - hopefully the SG2380 gets a bare chip release, like the SG2000/2002 because I want to try making a motherboard/SOM to move towards a fully FOSHW computer (pretty sure that the SG2380 isn’t going to be OSHW initially but, being fully-compliant should be a good place to start).

Currently, waiting for the Milk-V Oasis. Looking forward to a fully-compliant implementation in the SG2380. Should make for better mainline support.

Try a traceroute to something like 9.9.9.9 and google’s IP. You’re able to resolve things ok. So, not DNS. Need to find out where the traffic is going to die.

Also, try a curl https://google.com -vvv. This should give some more info on what is happening to TCP traffic.

Nicely done.