I just watched this, it was a very good video, experienced a lot of the same things he did/does, thx. Was really interesting learning about the history of some these “alienated loner with god-complex” that was cultivated in early tech. Also good stuff about how the purpose for a given space shapes the discussion and interactions.
A lot of us understand the problem: that silicon-valley, in pursuit of profits and engagement, has wrecked peoples brains with traumatizing ragebait for years, and how stressful it makes all of our lives. We have to do everything we can to make these spaces the opposite: enjoyable, fun, and at the same time not addictive.
If you want that, you’ll get fewer contributors, but just make that explicitly clear in your pull request template.
Personally, I would never contribute to a project where the maintainer demanded I transfer copyright ownership of my contributions. I also wouldn’t use a project that did that, and would advise other people to not use that project either.
I understand the philosophy of not wanting to transfer your rights, but I don’t understand what’s bad about contributing to a project and having your code given to the community (as-in copyright transfer to the organisation). Would this be because the org/owner can just start selling the code or is there something that I’m missing?
It would mean that the owner could take that code and make it closed source. They could do literally anything they wanted with it, because they would own the copyright.
They can’t make it closed source retroactively (well, technically you can design a license like that but that’s a different discussion and the most widely used open source licenses aren’t made like that). They can relicense at some point going forward, but all the code up to that point would still be available under the old license and contributors could fork and continue without batting an eye.
It depends on what license the project is using. Some licenses are very permissive, meaning there’s lots of ways they can be abused. For example with MIT/BSD licenses there’s no provision to share the code with the final product so they could drag their feet releasing parts of the code or hide them altogether. They could also resort to tivoization, NDAs, commercial plugins and all kinds of shenanigans.
Look for example to the Plex and Emby projects which were originally open and went commercial later. The way they did it is why there’s a lot of bad blood in the community to this day.
I’ve also personally been involved with other projects where someone tried to take them commercial in a less than graceful way, shall we say. It’s never pretty.
Desktop: Qownnotes and/or vim (or any texteditor of choice)
Mobile: Nextcloud Notes
Main advantage of this software stack over other solutions like joplin is the handling of the notes. Everthing is stored in a simple folder structure in plain markdown text files (*.md). This means if anything breaks, you are always able to read and edit with any text editor on any system! I switched away from joplin because it stores the notes in a database and notes file names are a cryptic string, so if you are not able to load joplin it’s very hard to find anything.
Most of these problems are literally just capitalism. This solution is just a band aid, and even then is unlikely to be implemented in a way that will help the problem.
I agree. Either use a business source license like Elastic and others, or fight for the installation of a third party that audits proprietary code for license use and sues if the rules haven’t been followed. It’s why I like the creative commons. They are quite realistic. Most of their licenses say: if you use this commercially, you have to pay. If not, then it’s free.
People who claim business source licenses are “not opensource” sound like such capitalist shills to me. It’s as if they’re shouting from the rooftops “it’s OK to fuck over opensource developers because principles matter more than reality”.
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