OpenAI’s notion of “fair use”: military and weapons

Those type of companies are getting so f*****g disgusting.

https://techcrunch.com/2024/01/12/openai-changes-policy-to-allow-military-applications/ https://www.theverge.com/2024/1/12/24036397/openai-is-softening-its-stance-on-military-use

Google loves open source likely for another reason than you do.

Google loves open source when they can capitalize on it.

That is, when a big community works on code that Google can use for free to build their monopolistic infrastructure. They love a global community which works for them for free. They might even foster this community as far as it serves their purpose or for image reasons.

However, if they’d truly love open-source, they could open the source code to their core services. But they’d never ever do that. For this reason they also ban the AGPL license internally (https://opensource.google/documentation/reference/using/agpl-policy). The AGPL license would force Google to open their code which relies on AGPL licensed projects. Google hates that.

Google does clearly not stand for the ethical values people usually have in mind when talking about open source. For example when something is competing with them, they’ll hate it. Like ad-blockers or browsers which don’t block ad-blockers like Google chrome does. The core business of Google is about surveillance and advertising. To maximize the profitability of this, then need to violate freedoms of their users (like the freedom to use their service while blocking ads). This is in direct conflict with the ethical values often implied by free and open-source software.

So if somebody tells you “Google loves open-source and contributes a lot”, think about what it really means.

gitlab.com is a for profit service/company. They have an open-source community edition of Gitlab which you can run on your own server. Codeberg is a non-profit association running the open-source software “forgejo” for you. At Codeberg you can become a member and then you can vote for important decisions and make proposals. People also care about ethics there. Nobody cares about profit. Codeberg runs on donations from members. I think some people feel more respected at Codeberg because the governing body of Codeberg is a subset of its users. If Gitlab cares about you, then probably because a bad user experience would be bad for business.

According to the experience of a friend, eating 1kg carrots a day makes your skin go slightly orange. You’ll likely notice only in places where the skin is thin and white. For example around your knuckles when you form your hand into a fist.

Selling railway infrastructure to car manufacturers is generally a bad idea. That’s how the car industry contributed to killing public transportation in the US.

Public transport is their competition. Killing it brings profit. Very simple logic.

It is completely creepy. Think about who is behind Open AI. That’s a mixture of Elon Musk, Peter Thiel (Palantir), Microsoft and others. A right-wing, anti democratic, anti-human and purely profit oriented group. The name “Tools for Humanity” is complete sarcasm. What they do with Worldcoin smells like a modern attempt of colonization. Collecting biometry, subverting critical infrastructure (financial systems), making fake promises, blinding poor people with shiny metal balls and a little bit of money in some cases.

This can be stopped though! The Kenyan government apparently banned the project - for good.

Yeah sorry, confused things. It’s comes closer to a Mastodon thing. The point is that a big corporation like Facebook does not need to use AGPL code as long as they can just re-implement it. Compared to the total codebase used at Facebook, re-implementing something like lemmy or mastodon does not sound like a big deal. (That’s not an argument against using the AGPL)

Unfortunately it’s still possible to rewrite a VC-backed clone and start making incompatible changes. Think about Facebook’s “threads.net”. They sure did not take Lemmy source code.

Also fun to read this (by Google employee): https://blog.yoav.ws/posts/web_platform_change_you_do_not_like/ I literally snacked popcorn.

In general, that’s definitely a problem too. Just look at Windows 11. Now M$ wants you to buy a new laptop such that their OS can run at all. I use a >10y old laptop with Linux. No performance issues for everyday use.

Going from Google-Android to LineageOS boosted the battery life of my old Smartphone by a factor 3 roughly. There where some Google-things consuming battery in the background, probably spying on me. Also using simple Apps from F-Droid helps to get a smooth experience.

Those sympathies with a fascists are alarming and should make people worry much more than the Reddit-drama itself. Anybody cares about that?

Couple years ago a Youtube-Googler told me that adblockers are their big worry. Suckers.

Did not notice yet because use Piped XD

They can remove it from their repository but once you have a copy with a GPL license (maybe also MIT but not sure) they cannot revoke it. The GPL license says explicitly that it cannot be revoked just like this.

From the GPLv3:

2. Basic Permissions.

All rights granted under this License are granted for the term of copyright on the Program, and are irrevocable provided the stated conditions are met.

And as you say, the further additions might then be proprietary.

Note that there might be licenses around which can be revoked or terminated. Many proprietary licenses can be terminated. Also common open-source licenses have clauses which allows to be terminated them under certain conditions. For if you violate the license terms, the GPLv3 is terminated for you (but not for others):

8. Termination.

You may not propagate or modify a covered work except as expressly provided under this License. Any attempt otherwise to propagate or modify it is void, and will automatically terminate your rights under this License [...]

What if all the effort needed to terraform Mars would be invested in fixing the disaster we started on Earth… I bet the effort would be better invested here. Not even talking about how much of resources will be needed to bootstrap the Mars project. Terraforming Mars will sacrifice Earth.

Works because the other instances don’t learn your mail address. More generally, the account management is the business of the local instance. This way you can use somewhat different identities and/or explore other instances.

Often, the contributor license agreement says that you - the contributor - transfer the copyright of your contribution to the project/company.

This is used to get the community contributing to the project while making sure that the project can be turned into a proprietary project at anytime.

The copyright holder can decide about the license. As long as only one entity holds the copyright, this entity is free to change the license. This even works if the project is licensed under a copyleft license like the GNU Public License (GPL). Such projects might look like “open-source”. Fine, the source is open at the moment. But it might not be open anymore tomorrow.

Alone the sponsors of the Rust Foundation I find very questionable (Amazon, Google, Huawei, Meta, Microsoft, https://foundation.rust-lang.org/ on the bottom). Unfortunately, corporatism is what you get from corporations. Happy to hear about the crab-lang fork.