Truly an xkcd #1172 situation.

Thunderbird’s Calendar supports local, off-line calendars and tasks.

It’s the best FOSS calendar I have used, even if it has its rough edges.

I have been very disappointed that Fedora stopped making changelogs accessible for years. It used to be that you could easily toggle them on in Yum, but with DNF it’s always “no info found”.

Looking again, it seems like more packages are available for the Tumbleweed stream, compared to Leap. I was testing Leap.

Oh, that’s a great idea. The whole concept of immutable OSes passed me by - I’ve read the terms before at some point, but I have no idea how they work and which problems they solve. Definitely ideal candidates for my experiment.

I gave Jami a very extensive go with family, and sadly it didn’t deliver a usable experience if your device is a mobile one or the network is not a fixed, high-speed connection.

Indeed, it appears that the open-core of LanguageTool is the only FOSS option still going. Only a couple more abandoned projects come up.

I’m going to take “favourite” at face value, i.e. that I actually like, not just that I am forced to use because the alternative doesn’t exist (e.g. my bank’s app or the post-office’s app) or isn’t viable (PDF editors on Android).

Libby, the lending library app. I could avoid it and stick to physical media and piracy, but it’s a well-designed app with a decent catalogue and given that it’s a library and not me purchasing DRMed files, I found the ethical proposition there tolerable.

I basically take the position “you need a different, non-confusing term”. Open Code is not such a term.

My view is shaped from the cultural realm more so than the software side, but I think the concern at the centre of it is transferable: it becomes extremely messy to capture the desired acceptable uses in the legal wording of an enforceable license. The outcome is that every use will have to be individually authorised.

I was helping run and occasionally held the editor role of a leftist magazine which we decided to make Free Culture under CC-BY-SA. Content using the Non Commercial clause gave us such headache, while even though we did not charge for the magazine nor we ran adverts, we accepted and strongly encouraged donations from our readers. That money went to pay off the printing costs (the NC clause already has a problem with that, but we assumed that would still be defensible), but the rest was also invested in other endeavours like public events, or eventually helping fund a community centre.

At that point, it didn’t matter if creators with NC works released them under a supposedly free license. Our -in our opinion- non-for-profit use was still so tainted with money changing hands, that we still needed to seek their consent and get a written permission on top of the original license. At the end of the day, it was the same as working with All Rights Reserved works, where we get a special license from a sympathetic creator. The NC clause solved nothing for us.

That part is, I believe, the same with software licenses. We will end up having to get 1:1 license agreements for so many things because the new anti-commercial licenses will not be able to predict all the scenarios which are “false positives” for the anti-capitalist software developer (as in, some desirable re-uses will be blocked by the license, and individual licensing agreements will be needed often).

My focus would be to fix the loopholes that go counter to the copyleft spirit in AGPL, if such loopholes are identified, and perhaps get a more reliable organisation handle the AGPL definition in the future.

What I have to give to XMPP is that it’s one of the easiest federated services to self-host. Running Prosody is super simple.

This will sound very pessimistic, but I think what you are witnessing is a more accentuated version of reality.

It’s more intense for a number of reasons (it takes less dedication to spread hate online, these communities are small so moderation isn’t as effective, the userbase is small so a few users make a bigger splash, communities of this technical nature have a historical lineage that selects for a certain strain of uncritical laissez-faire individualism, etc), but they are nothing that is totally alien to the rest of a given society.

Reality won’t let us catch a break, we are forced to actively maintain the good stuff at any given moment.

undefined> It feels like guilt by association. The actual cause is the behaviour of specific, individual users but the repercussions are equally felt by other users from the same instance.

That’s why I always thought that the ideal scenario for federated web is to have instances that are either single-user or are down to friends-of-friends level of members (say, under 100 users per instance), so that there can be social accountability and if you have a bad actor on your instance, then it’s easy to kick them out and preserve your reputation. Bad actors will concentrate on their own instances and they can be defederated without collateral damage.

So, if Beehaw’s registration model is invite-only (that’s what I gather from this thread), then I think they probably have the right approach to federation; they are vouching for their users and they are responsible for making sure that they won’t be damaging communities across the federation.