I have a minor health problem, and I'd like to look it up. Going to a corporate health clinic just results in some tests to determine which other tests they'll hand out next so that they can make a menu, and ask the patient to pick. Since I'd have to pick from a menu of tests, I may as well look things up myself now, …

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An anti-open-source narrative has become louder lately. It doesn't say 'down with open source', it begins with 'I understand', and 'listen, we need to talk', 'we must be realistic'. Soon after (but never from the outset) 'you know what I mean, if you understand business'. People want to understand business. More than …

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I see a standard story, repeated in FOSS spaces. It starts with an exchange. Open source projects are not actually as anarchic as people think. They work very much like a corporation, with a single person in charge, in a pyramid structure. I hear these repeated gripes that people do not understand open source …

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Could you drive the car over to my sister's place? Then she'll give you the KEYS once you're there. What a confusing request! What keys could this person mean? The car KEYS, for the car that she needs. You'll get the KEYS once you're there. Now you have found the confusion - this person is not thinking clearly. You …

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We - the open source zealots - talk a lot about corporations with unkind interests quashing the movement, pushing their proprietary code, and violating everyone's 'privacy'. We don't talk much about push-back from coders, but it exists, because writing in the open is scary. We can say to engineers, 'your users will be …

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A direct comparison between the FDroid store and Google's PlayStore isn't possible. When you open the FDroid store, you see all recent apps. You can see everything, and even search in alphabetical order; start to finish. Google will never let you see everything, because of the unfiltered garbage on their platform. They …

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When coders use the GNU Public Licence, they have no obligation to give anyone credit for anything.1 Despite this, coders almost always receive credit for everything they do, down to the exact line-changes.2 Meanwhile, the Creative Commons licences - far more popular with artists - have explicit stipulations, but don't …

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Feature-comparisons always turn into a murky mess when people compare proprietary software to FOSS. The proprietary software tends to try to do everything, while the FOSS-tools try to do everything by doing nothing. Office 365 vs Libreoffice Office 365 advertises a chonky list of features: Powerpoint Word Processing …

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Software licences neatly fall into three categories - open, closed, and the uncertain - a kind of Schrödinger's licence, which must become one of the other two types in time. Ignorance can only end with knowledge or death. Once someone fixes a mistake in their thinking, by understanding the truth, and how they made …

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