meditate

The solution is to support single-sign-on and to allow data importing/export. These are solved problems, but companies don't receive enough pressure to do them because they are more interested in building moats.

That is exactly the problem I was addressing, which is that the reason monopoly looks good is because the current systems we're looking are so entrenched and require DRM, which is a tool that actively and deliberately prevents platforms from innovating. Following this, it's no surprise that Netflix and Amazon are turning to making their own films, and that Origin only exists because Steam's monopoly means that EA couldn't negotiate acceptable licensing terms with Valve. Get rid of the DRM and there is plenty of reason to compete in ways that help customers. Then give them a way to easily transfer ownership between supporting platforms and everybody wins.

You don't want that. The end result is a system that looks a lot like youtube where bots rule the platform and the numbers are constantly gamed.

The issue I have is not that the vendor (Steam, Netflix, etc) is imposing DRM, but that the copyright holders demand it, and that there are cases where the vendor gives into these demands. You're right that Steam doesn't do this in all cases, but in some they do.

>Pirating games has never been as unattractive as it has been today due to Steam's monopoly and ubiquity.

This is a cop out to me. I have never been a fan of DRM for this reason, because it requires an unassailable monopoly for customers not to notice that it's a problem. I am probably in the minority because I've never been happy with Steam's service because of this, but as long as they are the 800 pound gorilla in the room then they obviously never will listen to any of my complaints.

If you take this line of thinking to movies, it leads to dangerous ideas like "everyone but my favorite streaming service should just close down" which is totally ridiculous, but still when I talk to friends about this issue they are quick to propose that as the solution! It really makes me try to avoid contact with the digital publishing industry as much as possible. What we see now is the movie studios' response to that which is:

- To increase the size of the data dramatically (4K+ video) so that casual sharing requires hardware investment and thus remains difficult

- To make things highly dependent on a very specialized backend to work correctly (Netflix's recent experiment with branching narratives)

- To start bundling it with other things (Amazon Prime)

- To offer streaming analytics as a better data platform than the traditional Nielsen ratings

- And probably more I can't think of right now

The thing is that these are all real value adds which I am glad to see them competing on. Right now all the downstream vendors are forced to invest in rolling their own DRM. I would rather see copyright holders offering a system where a proof of purchase can be transferred between services, but they would need to band together to actually do it and start putting that into their contracts. Can you imagine if we had that instead of DRM?

If the moral aspect of it is really important to you then I hope you can find the path to trying again in a different capacity that doesn't compromise on your health. If not then forget I said anything.

The AGPL does have traction, just not in the places you might expect to look. I think that's a red herring anyway because it is indeed a niche license, useful specifically for free software communities where growth and development focused around a network API is happening actively and rapidly, and there is active worry that a bad actor could move in and try to take over the network. This is absolutely not the only issue threatening free software communities currently because not all of them fit that description, so I see why it is quite common for people to dismiss the AGPL. But know that it may just not be what is correct for your use case, and that for many communities a lot of other licenses are still adequate, including the non-copyleft licenses that you have mentioned are gaining a lot of traction due to their popularity within proprietary, closed-source companies.

I have heard a lot of rambling recently about "post-open source" and "post-free software" movements lately but I still think it's jumping the gun. The fact that it's still so difficult to find working libre drivers for wifi chips (and a lot of other pieces of hardware) is proof to me that we still have a lot of work to do, not a convenient excuse to dismiss things entirely and stop caring.

Of course they don't care, why would they be given a chance to? The anti-features, inconveniences and limitations are not advertised and are downplayed whenever anyone mentions them.

Veganism might have been a fad for you, but for others it is a necessary undertaking to remain healthy. I can't blame you for finding some choices difficult to make, but at the same time it's disheartening to see these "anti-religion" arguments brought out to dismiss the very real need of people (and companies) to be able to retain control of their own devices, for their own purposes which are not explicitly approved by the vendor.

I can't speak for the person you're responding to, but it doesn't seem like much of a mystery why non-techies don't know about the specific details of why they can't save a streamed movie to watch it offline, or in a non-approved open source video player. That glib attitude of captive audiences is exactly what DRM vendors prey upon. They know exactly how much they can get away with at this point.

I won't deny that. With the exception of long-distance running, all of those are cost-prohibitive luxury activities, just like gaming.

I only speak from personal experiences with the business side of things. It's a combination of despotic upstream vendors, highly addictive products aimed towards children, lack of regulations, abusive working environments, and a general contentedness with profiting directly from the misfortunes of others. I do not believe any corners of the industry are safe from this attitude at the moment, despite the marketing veneer they may put on. And yes, if I sound cynical, it's because I am suffering from burnout at the moment.

I agree with you, but I still am highly disturbed by "whale hunting" aka certain entities manipulating those types of people into spending as much money as possible in exchange for being able to withdraw even further from productive society.

I personally reject "hours of enjoyment" as a metric for value and depth of a purchased game. It's good to hear that you've had positive experiences, but the dark side is that for many it drifts towards being an addictive time-suck that eats money for nothing in return.

The common uses of AGPL I've seen are in direct response to the big players trying to swallow things up into their cloud platforms while not giving back to the community. So you can blame those entities for the toxicity.

Believe it or not, but that type of community management is enjoyable for some and is incentivized to convey real benefits in both the social and financial sense. Also, even if you don't open source things you will still get users begging you for free handouts and unrealistic features. It's part of the business.

A lot of companies do. I've actually found it's pretty difficult to get mobile apps deployed inside bigger companies WITHOUT delivering a custom build that enterprise IT rolls out on their own, even on iOS.

I am not surprised at this and I am not sure why the Construct developer was either. Protocols like this during the initial growth phase have a ton of churn on the backend and because of that, reluctance to finalize any spec -- it's understood to be a moving standard. So presumably this person knew the risks.

I don't see much of a difference. There still is a popularity game and it's played with corporations, not people. Though I agree that it's not necessarily a bad thing in comparison.

Why not use a restricted subreddit and have submitters simply email links to you?

Those kind of corporate bullying tactics are not particularly welcome in open-source communities.

I see it covering the same use case as CC0, which is trivial bits of code that benefit mostly from mass adoption. In the case of this license it would be useful for code fitting that description which also may be covered by patents.

The attribution relaxation in this is a nice step forward for trivial bits of code. I've seen too many Javascript applications that use 100+ small MIT-licensed dependencies, so the copyright statements end up being a significant portion of the minified code!

It doesn't make it inherently safe, but if you are attempting to prove your builds are safe then it is impossible for anyone else to verify that without the source. See the thread on Debian reproducible builds from earlier this week for more discussion on this topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19310638

Code signing is something you can do on both open-source or closed-source, but it doesn't prove anything other than that a particular build was made by a certain person.

I don't see this as an incentive specific to FOSS. Most customers of any software tend to demand increasingly complex featuresets as time goes on.

I still chalk this behavior up to the walled-garden nature of the publisher platforms (mobile, consoles, Steam, etc). When customers have no recourse against companies doing things they don't like, they resort to mob behavior. Remove the friction from customers moving from one clone to another and you will see this disappear. However, I have no idea how you would get there.

There is currently no kernel interface that I know of to do that, and I don't think it would be too hard to hook into an open() on an invalid path and try to do something (mount a network fs, call out to GVfs or KIO, etc), but I can tell you you will meet resistance if you try to because things like "//stuff" and "smb://stuff" are already valid local file paths in Linux. So I leave it up to you to figure out how to do this without breaking things.

All that has been doable for quite some time, you could mount SMB shares like that with smbfs since early releases of Samba, and later with the CIFS fs driver. You do need root to mount things that way, so it isn't ideal.

For the more complicated stuff it can be done but not everything is available via a simple GUI. GNOME and KDE have their own virtual filesystem layers in userspace, GVfs and KIO, I don't know what KIO does but GVfs supports a bunch of network backends and has a FUSE driver that can mount its own virtual filesystems and expose them to outside applications. So the features are there but I don't think they are well-presented right now, maybe someone can prove me wrong though.

It would have been nice if the kernel had better support for fine-grained control over filesystems like HURD or Plan 9 do. But instead it was decided that it was better to handle those things with userspace daemons, so that's where we are now.

>someone to make a decision about the one true way to do things.

Things don't really work this way in free and open source development. There is no one person to make decisions, consensus is reached when the quality of something raises "above the bar" and actually improves things for all involved parties. If someone wants there to be an über-library that serves everyone's use case then it's up to them to go and do the work to build that.

And it has been getting better in this regard. For example KDE and GNOME used to have their own IPC, multimedia & audio mixing backends, but now both have converged on DBus, GStreamer and PulseAudio, in part because these were intentionally built to be flexible low-level solutions. I'm sure there are more examples of this too but those are the first that come to mind.

I don't understand, there are still lots of companies that fund FOSS. Publishing FOSS doesn't mean you can't go out of business, it means customers get an additional layer of protection from you going out of business or deciding you don't want to be in a certain market anymore, as Redis Labs has clearly done here.

If all their users are threatening to switch to some AWS managed service because it is better for them, then perhaps the software should fall into disrepair and the developers should get other jobs. There isn't anything wrong with this, it happens all the time.

It's probably true that Amazon is able to accomplish this only through strong-arm tactics, but it also seems unfortunate that Redis Labs feels the need to resort to similar strong-arm tactics in retaliation. It doesn't invite anything besides more pressure from Amazon and companies like it. Nobody wins in this in this scenario, especially not the customers who now have no refuge because both competitive offerings are trying to rope them into participating in a turf war.