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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The xz fiasco has made fascinating reading, and brought up some real questions about open source development and overall safety. It's also brought up a slightly malformed thoughts on 'open source vs proprietary'. If comparisons were to juxtapose operating system safety, then it seems misplaced, given that Windows, OSX, …

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I regularly see indie artists posting some great images, and encouraging open-source-adjacent use, but messing up the latter completely. Just to clarify: Professional artists probably understand art licences well enough, and likely don't care about 'open source'. This isn't a post for them. Other artists don't care …

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XMPP can be a nightmare to operate, but I still think it provides better long-term benefits than Signal, because XMPP without any encryption gives all the benefits of distribution, which grant better protection than encryption, overall. XMPP is a Nightmare My journey with XMPP so far has been: Use OTR encryption. Ask …

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Every time Adobe does something horrible, hordes of Adobe Photoshop users attempt to migrate - generally to either GIMP or Inkscape. They arrive and start a standard string of complaints: This UI is bad (it should be like Photoshop, but it's not) GIMP can't do vector graphics properly. Inkscape can't do bitmaps …

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