Many projects accept donations, for example for server costs or travel expenses (conferences, meetings). You can setup recurring monthly transfers to projects whose software you use most often. Examples are the Free Software Foundation for various GNU tools or the KDE project.
The FSF actively encourages people to do that, and yes their legal team is there. Not sure whether it’s “powerful” but surely better than a single developer
Multiple other news outlets report the same information. Even if this remains unconfirmed for now, it is certainly not unreasonable considering the state of Windows 11.
Pretty much but they claim to be ‘communists’ (though realistically they solely support the Chinese and Russian governments and never actually discuss communism as an economic policy) and isolated themselves from the rest of the fediverse for years. Last year they finally federated with everyone and were quickly defederated by most large instances because they’re absolutely insufferable trolls who do nothing but fling feces and brigade in every post.
One of the bigger communist instances, like Lemmygrad.
They are infamous half because they are a big instance with a shared fringe worldview that is anathems to liberal democracy, so when something pops up in their feed, cultures clash.
The other half is that at least some of their users do like to use alts to “agitate” which is mostly trolling.
Seems like I dodged a bullet by recently deciding for another company. Definitely on my permanent do-not-buy list now, thanks for letting us know that you do not want any customers, Haier 😑
I use a BroadLink infrared blaster, as you can control all sorts of devices with Home Assistant that use infrared remotes: www.amazon.com.au/…/B086VBXSDH?th=1
Compared to what what and at what relative cost? Given the actions of Haier buying into a product eco system seems like a far more expensive and risky proposition!
The IR blasters can usually be flashed with open firmware like tasmota or esphome. I started with IR as well. The downside for me was that IR was one way. You can tell the unit to turn on, but you cant know if it actually did turn on.
Not the person you asked, but i have a mitsubishi electric heatpump, which i have hooked up to homeassistant via an esphome library. It has a header on the controller board that you can connect to.
Normally the header is for their $200 controller and app, i spent $10 on the parts.
I installed this same system a few months ago. It’s been fantastic - responsive and intuitive. The 5V pin in the CN105 connector means no external power or wiring is required. We haven’t touched the remote since it was installed.
I have a Lennox multistage system with a heat pump, and furnace for when it gets too cold. The best way to run those (according to the installer) is at a low level all the time. So it doesn’t benefit much from things like location tracking to turn the system up or down while we’re out. Especially since I work from home.
What it does do is make graphs for tracking how it runs the heat pump and furnace each day.
I went with Daikin 'cause they had local control… Except that they changed it in the meantime, and I had 2 different AC splits connected to the pump, one of them is older and still has local control, while the other is newer and doesn’t. Fuck all of them.
AC is more complex, it has fan speed, air direction (2 of them), temperature settings and so on. I solved with an IR blaster, but that’s not what I wanted, I specifically selected this brand to have local control via wifi.
Good enough for a fan, furnace, and AC setup. What we need going forward, though, is something that can intelligently use heat pumps to take into account electrical costs, current rooftop solar generation (if any), and the heat pump’s efficiency ratings in order to most efficiently balance between the heat pump and a regular furnace. Can choose the balance between either cheapest way to run or the least amount of CO2 (which won’t always match up). May also have to consider multi-stage setups where you can run it at low/medium/high levels.
I don’t think it’s impossible for a FOSS solution to do this, but I don’t think anyone has tackled it, either.
I don’t think it’s impossible for a FOSS solution to do this, but I don’t think anyone has tackled it, either
That’s just a software problem. Not all that difficult, assuming the hardware manufacturers don’t lock you into some bullshit locked down proprietary cloud control thing.
Thanks so much I had not been tracking this case but it pissed me off to no end when I heard that Vizio was refusing to uphold the GPL. They are more than happy to greatly benefit from the labors of open source development but the second they have to do the smallest step in support of the GPL, they fight it. I doubt there is anything overly interesting that they could release. My mind is assuming they don’t want anyone to see the actual level of their data gathering.
The best outcome would be setting a precedent that allows FOSS organisations to send threatening letters to companies that violate the license. An individual dev maintaining a small library may theoretically be able to win a lawsuit, but practically? lmao good luck
It might be worth something for the open source community to consider open funding for a group that would help devs to do just that. It wouldn’t help everyone. But it might help enough to make an impact for everyone.
I think this could even be related to the idea of post-open source that Bruce Perens talked about. An organisation which helps its members handle the business-y parts of running large community projects. They could handle funding, legal representation, marketing and any other support that members may want. A large number of members would make it that much more effective as well.
Should add Reddit. Started out as FOSS, closed down their GitHub, then killed their API which killed dozens of third party integrations impacting hundreds of thousands of users.
How much work is making a Minecraft server from scratch? What things need to be implemented? I saw on the GitHub that placing and destroying blocks was implemented, so I’m guessing it’s a lot of work
Its somewhat intriguing to me. I always thought companies would obfuscate their code so that nobody can just reverse engineer their product. Does mojang not do it or is it not possible to keep people from decompiling it?
In the end it is always assembler. Enough time given and you can translate it to higher languages. A huge modding community and a lot of tooling for the Java language made it possible i guess.
There was a lot of work here. I doubt there were any symbols present in the binary.
Mojang/Microsoft actually releases obfuscation maps for Minecraft: Java since 2019. This maps the decompiled random class names to the official variable/class names used by Mojang devs.
In an effort to help make modding the game easier, we have decided to publish our game obfuscation maps with all future releases of the game, starting today. This means that anyone who is interested may deobfuscate the game and find their way around the code without needing to spend a few months figuring out what’s what. It is our hope that mod authors and mod framework authors use these files to augment their updating processes that they have today. These mappings will always be available, instantly and immediately as part of every newly released version. This does not, however, change the existing restrictions on what you may or may not do with our game code or assets. The links to the obfuscation mappings are included as part of the version manifest json, and may be automatically pulled for any given version.
It’s probably a good idea to have a stronger definition and mission. Here are a few scenarios you should consider.
FSF defines anything that’s not copyleft as hostile. That’s most companies. I personally don’t think I can tell my users what to do with my software other than remove my liability so I vehemently disagree with Stallman.
Mongo wrote the SSPL and MariaDB wrote the BSL. Both licenses are seen as regressions. I personally respect the MariaDB case and have been harassed by too many Mongo salespeople to say the same about them.
Platforms like AWS are the reason companies like CockroachDB and Elastic implemented restrictive licenses.
IBM has been gutting open source through its acquisition of Red Hat. This is a common story; Oracle has been screwing *nix longer.
Protecting trademarks causes a lot of consternation from users. The Rust Foundation is the most recent example of this I remember blowing up the FOSS community.
I like your idea a lot. I think it needs some definition to be very successful!
I personally use Apache 2.0 because it’s been upheld in court. I’m not sure if MPL has been directly challenged in court. Either way, I agree with the sentiment. The legal perspective is why I moved away from MIT/ISC.
you should considwr MPL, if someone found a security vulneravility theyd be legally obligated to tell yoy for example. also, it still allows commerical closed source software. try it!!
FSF defines anything that’s not copyleft as hostile. That’s most companies. I personally don’t think I can tell my users what to do with my software other than remove my liability so I vehemently disagree with Stallman.
I’m not planning on counting that as hostile behavior. Organizations can choose a license for their software (and I can choose not to buy/use it). This collection is mostly focused on companies that hurt existing Open Source software. Such as sending a cease and desist to an unofficial plugin/extension or closing down software that was originally open source.
Maybe your could also add organisations (companies, government agencies, NGOs,…) that create standards in such a way that the standard is hard or impossible to implement in open source implementations?
I was more thinking about things like governments that decide that every implementation of something must be certified to be used, e.g. with wireless technologies. Not so much implementation as specification or legal compliance barriers to open source basically.
You raise a good point though, financial barriers such as per user pricing that are hard to implement for software distributed for free would be quite similar.
From what I read, this project does help integrate with HA to avoid using the Haier app, but still uses Haier’s cloud. Can anyone confirm if this was true?
Based on the documentation on the GitHub, it looks like it does use Haier’s cloud. Which, doesn’t make Haier’s actions any less shitty, but I can understand a company not wanting a bunch of users using their undocumented API, especially if there’s potential to have automations hitting it more frequently than their own app does (not that I have any reason to believe this project was actually being inefficient with API calls).
EDIT: sorry, I read it wrong, I thought the reply says the addon “doesn’t” use the remote API.
I digged a bit on the code, and every command indeed go through the cloud. So even if you use this addon, Haire can still collect a fair bit of data about you, since there is no way to communicate locally and directly to the AC.
But the addon only sends the minimum amount of data to achieve functionality, so definitely not as much data as using Haire’s app.
Can you link to where the documentation that specify they don’t use API?
Because I am looking at pyhOn (dependency of hon, and also being taken down), it seems like when executing a command, they do contact the cloud. Specefically
<span style="color:#323232;">url: str = f"{const.API_URL}/commands/v1/send"
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> async with self._hon.post(url, json=data) as response:
</span><span style="color:#323232;"> ...
</span>
Yeah, so I can kinda understand Haier’s position here though they probably could have just set/quoted some ToC’s on using their cloud services.
It also means that IMO the plugins weren’t offering much other than integration, and this probably would have been a product I’d have avoided even before they started acting like dicks.
Local control or bust (or ability to reprogrammed with FOSS firmware)
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