The most efficacious piece of Philosophy written this century was buried in a software licensing agreement, and the Philosophy faculties of every major university have missed it. While clicking 'I agree', to all those licences, everyone will have come across this piece at some point. 1## Preamble 2 3The GNU General …

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We're all going to die, so we have to share passwords. When family die, we already have a mountain of nonsense to deal with, and I have no doubt that we'll see a growing number of people wrestling with American corporations, attempting to regain access to Coinbase accounts, banking apps, et c. Clearly, we would all …

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The GPL states that any users can use the source code under the GPL, or any later version released by the Free Software Foundation. So the entire FOSS movement hinges on the continued sanity of the Free Software Foundation. Theoretically, a GPLv4 could come out, allowing people to not release the source code, which …

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Games I hear Linux podcasts and bloggers pulling themselves back, with an eye to keeping things realistic, and too many end up with unwarranted pessimism. 'You have to admit that computer games are just better on Windows'. And I won't disagree, but I don't see why they phrase the situation like that. Linux is the …

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My phone bings three times, and I really want to tell it 'listen, matey, if I haven't answered the first three bings, I won't answer the next'. I wander over and tell it to shut up. Of course if I forget to turn off silent mode, I could miss something important in a few hours. The entire approach here misunderstands …

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Ella the Cat posted up their i3-gaps configuration to help with Parkinson's, and it got me thinking a lot about how FOSS software typically views disability. Briefly, they have Parkinson's Disease, which causes tremors, which makes the mouse a pain to use. The i3-gaps desktop is keyboard based, so it doesn't require …

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The FOSS community have generally grown a kind of tacit acceptance of proprietary computer games. Everyone loves them, so nobody wants to make too much of a fuss, but I think we have good reasons to treat them differently. Computer games do not - by default - require environment interaction. They can (mostly) operate …

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A lot of people who see the Gemini protocol for the first time come up with the same criticism: If you hate the modern web's bloat, why not just use minimal html? Gemini has a number of advantages over a series of small html websites. Unity When people say 'minimal html', they all have different ideas about what that …

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People often talk in terms of the false dichotomy between pragmatic software use, and ethical software use. 'Us pragmatic folks', they begin, 'just want to use what works'. We should understand of course that they have nothing against people who have principles, but would prefer functioning to non-functioning …

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I love LaTeX because it can do things nothing else can. I have to use it, because it can do things nothing else can. But it has some deep problems. Packages I think the biggest root of problems is having packages, rather than just having people submit a pull request on a central repository and add whatever feature …

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