Mastodawn

i wish that YouTube had a parental controls category for Linux distro content (and wide market programming content, the "c++ is so much better" stuff) that is on by default.

no seriously. it rots the brain and creates a factional mindset and leads people to think that the point of it is having the Cool things without an actual use case, rather than being a tool to get things done. the part that should be cool is how it helps people using it to create things they're proud of.

i don't care what editor you use. i don't care what distro you use. it doesn't matter as long as it's helping you achieve your goals. i can have frustrations with the systemic social effects of some things (Microsoft monopolizing language servers or whatever) but that's not on the people using it! i can think that a distro does many things poorly without it being a value judgement on anyone using it.

i should not be able to notice that someone watches this stuff by talking to them and noticing their attitudes; the contempt culture and machoism in all of it has such nasty externalities to people who work on or use the subjects of it. we shouldn't teach new people like this!

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Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 3d ago

@leftpaddotpy this ties into my long-running distaste for the way free software has largely turned into a weird cliquey dogmatic vision of prescriptive computing, the dominance of the reductionist philosophy that open software inherently has positive value simply because it is open (by the specific definitions of an ordained group), the resulting zealous self-delusion about the fitness of the systems for purpose as tools, and the outwardly user-hostile behaviour it engenders.

Gaelan Steele 3d ago

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Graham Sutherland / Polynomial

@leftpaddotpy I have a lot of complicated feelings about the whole thing, but to distil it down into a soundbite: it feels weird to have a culture of free software that doesn't unconditionally respect the user's freedom to choose what software they want to use.

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n0toose 3d ago

@gsuberland @leftpaddotpy +1. Hope I can represent something different than that, though. :)

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systemd-jaded 3d ago

@gsuberland yes exactly. i dislike the behaviour of the gnu project in restricting what people can do with their computer by making it deliberately a user hostile pain in the ass to run proprietary software. the point of all of this is that people can do what they want with their computer.

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systemd-jaded 3d ago

@gsuberland also, that doing something more restrictive but trying to achieve ethical goals with the license like disallowing militaries from using it or whatever (not that it works but that's a separate issue) makes it the same as closed source that is contemptuous towards its users is bananas. libertarian ass philosophy and it shows.

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Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 3d ago

@leftpaddotpy my personal view on software licensing is that licenses have no benefit at all for individual developers and users, because all enforcement is fundamentally tied to capital and legal frameworks that are designed to protect the rich from the poor. the sensible response is the anarchist one: ignore licenses entirely and do what you want.

literally the only reason I MIT license my code instead of no license at all is that it makes tedious reply guys leave me alone.

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srxl 3d ago

@gsuberland @leftpaddotpy this is precisely why my website's source code is licensed as follows

srxl.me/LICENSE at main

srxl.me - Source code and associated content for my personal homepage.

Code is incredibly gay.

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Ryan Castellucci

2d ago

@gsuberland @leftpaddotpy I have started triple licensing some of the stuff I release as MIT-0/0BSD/CC0.

GPL only really ever worked well for the Linux kernel, and generally provides advantages to unscrupulous companies who don't care about complying. So many u-boot GPL violations.

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Ryan Castellucci

2d ago

Using this to fuck with the software heritage foundation (they're assholes to trans people) was a delight.

Also nice for getting versions with malware taken down, and preventing people from posting binaries.

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maybeanerd 2d ago

@ryanc @gsuberland @leftpaddotpy I license everything I do AGPL
If it works, great
If it's ignored, it's just MIT with some extra things one could do if it gets entirely out of hand (idk, a company reselling it without opening source will still have a hard time pretending it's different software If somebody cares enough to start a legal battle with them, or something along those lines)

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tshepang 2d ago

@ryanc what are the advantages
@gsuberland @leftpaddotpy

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jpl8 3d ago

@leftpaddotpy @gsuberland that’s always turned me off a bit too. It feels a bit too prescriptive and holier-than-thou. I really like how the gentoo people handle it by just letting users select exactly what licenses software is allowed to have on their install[1], from FSF-approved licenses to whatever they want. It is fundamental pillar of the gentoo philosophy to just let users do what they want to do[2].

(It’s kind of why gentoo is no longer a source-only distro, by adding convenient support for binary packages. Users didn’t want to compile, and so the devs didn’t force it.)

Your machine, your choice.

License groups - Gentoo wiki

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demize 2d ago

@gsuberland honestly this is one of the things I really like about certain Advanced Distributions

if I wanted, I could theoretically rebuild @world on my desktop to use openrc, or runit, or whatever other init system I want; switch from Plasma to Gnome, or ditch the DEs and set up a WM… overhaul critical parts of my system without having to reinstall it, because it’s all just supported and provided

it would be a pain and I don’t want do do it (I’m happy with Plasma/systemd!) but I really like that I could. and that you could set up the distro however you want, if you switched to it, and we’d be running the same thing even though it’s completely different!

(it’s also why I don’t like a lot of the… anger at popular solutions; sure you don’t have to like systemd but I wish people would stop acting like I had to hate it too)