I have read so many posts like this, that try to explain why their company is a special case and why it could never happen to them, only to see the same thing happen again and again.

Tailscale are trying to insert themselves into the stack and become the go-to choice for this kind of networking. When their customers are dependent on it, of course they’ll start extracting rent and capturing as much as they can.

That’s their right, but it’s also a little condescending to pretend otherwise.

I for one would love to throw money at Mozilla, or any alternative, that has experienced developers behind it, doesn’t have conflicts of interest and acts on behalf of its users. This is why I donate to Servo, Ladybird and Dillo too (I know one of these is not like the others 😄).

I don’t think they’d reach their current levels of funding through donations, but it might be possible to get enough together to keep it on life support.

I know this wouldn’t be perfect, but surely better than losing it completely.

Tony Blair goes to bed clutching his driving license every night, but wishes it could be so much more. When he dreams, he dreams of a beautiful world of compulsory ID cards. When he wakes up, he remembers “ID cards are the answer!”, but seems to have forgotten the question.

Who funds the Tony Blair Institute again? Oh, it’s Oracle. Now, I wonder who would be administering the scheme.

I do think it is possible to implement ID cards in a way that respects democracy and privacy of its citizens. Unfortunately, knowing the record of our government with both parties in power, I just know it will be implemented in the worst possible way. Therefore, I think we should steer clear completely.

Do you think the government will get these questions right?

• Will this app support old phones that people can’t afford or don’t want to upgrade?
• What about rooted phones?
• What about phones that don’t run Android or iOS?
• Will people have the option of a physical hard copy? Would they have to pay for the privilege?
• Will it be optional (for now…) or forced on everyone? If optional, will some be excluded from many parts of society?
• Will it work offline?
• Will there be numerous bugs that prevent people from proving their right to be here, as there has been with the eVisa scheme?
• Will the amount of data it both collects and provides be the absolute minimum needed to prove your age or right to work?
• Will you have the right to both see, challenge and delete all the data that the government has linked to your ID?
• Will it be available in an open format, so that it is available to all and can be stored and verified using free software?
• Will the government spend money wisely on this project or syphon off millions to corrupt contractors?
• Will people be required to carry it at all times?
• Will storing all this information in a central location make it easy for to illegally share data between departments, as Musk did in the US?
• Will it start off just being used to verify your age and right to work, and gradually expand to all other areas of life including the ability to access content online?
• Will the scheme be administered in such a way, that you would be comfortable with Reform being in control of it?

Ultimately, they are not trying to solve problems, they are deciding they want ID cards, and flailing around trying to find ways to sell it to us.

This was a good watch. I liked the emphasis that you’re not paying for code per se, but paying to support a specific maintainer who is developing some code. In that context, already having a community around you, and doing a bit of self-promotion is important.

The same authour has another interesting video about the weird incentives around feature request bounties, which I enjoyed as well.

I host Synapse using this playbook. I can highly recommend it - the instructions are very clear and detailed and ongoing maintenance is straightforward too (just git pull and redeploy, and 5% of the time modify a deprecated variable).

As for how to delegate to a subdomain - that’s covered here. Basically - you set it up on matrix.example.eu and then have a “well known” file hosted at example.eu that tells other clients/servers where to look.

The only way to get people to switch from Adobe is to wait for Adobe to make the life unbearable for their own customers

Completely agree with this! The big opportunities to get mindshare will come completely out of the blue, and likely as a result of massive blunders on Adobe’s side.

We never know when the blunders will come, we just have to be ready and provide the next best user experience so that the free software is the “obvious” place to switch to.

As we saw from the twitter/reddit migrations, the fediverse did get a large amount of traction, but bluesky became the obvious alternative because its UI was basically the same.

And that’s fine - the fediverse is it’s own thing and many people (myself included) don’t want “adoption at all costs” - but I think it’s worth pointing out that it does hinder adoption in these big moments.

I have a lot of respect for free software projects that deliberately replicate the UI of an existing proprietary project. They make it so easy to recommend for people to switch when those moments come.

What I have seen is that once people get a taste of free software that really easily solves their problem, it makes the benefits “real” to them and they start to look for other alternatives on their own.

I agree with parts about entitlement. The expectation of support and treatment of open source software as if it was proprietary is a real problem.

But, the authour makes a similar mistake - they conflate open source software with source-available (proprietary) software. As an example, I strongly disagree with this part:

When software is open-source, it is open-source, not necessarily free and open-source (FOSS), and even if it is FOSS, it might still have a restrictive licence. The code being available in and of itself does not give you a right to take it, modify it, or redistribute it.

If you replace it with this version, I am happy:

When software is source-available, it is source-available, not necessarily open source or free and open-source (FOSS). The code being distributed under a source available license does not give you a right to take it, modify it, or redistribute it.

I think it’s really important that we keep a clear delineation between free/open source software on one side, and source-available (proprietary software) on the other.

A lot of companies are trying to co-opt and blur the meaning of the term so they can say “seeing the source was always the point, none of the other freedoms mattered”, in order to sell you proprietary licenses.

Open source gives you the right to take, modify and redistribute it. Source available does not. And that’s ok, just please don’t blur the terms together.

even if it is FOSS, it might still have a restrictive license

Likewise, this is definitionally untrue. The whole purpose of FOSS is to give you the four freedoms.

For services only I depend on, I have production-only. Since I can only inflict damage on myself, and can often work around problems.

For the XMPP server my friends and family also depend on, I have a dedicated nonprod VPS. My services are driven by ansible playbooks, so I’ll tweak the playbook with whatever change I want to make works in nonprod, before running the same playbook against prod.

Whenever there’s a new Debian Stable release, I’ll rebuild the servers completely, to try and prevent “drift” between the nonprod and prod versions (not that I change things often enough for this to become a big problem). This is also the big test of my backups, which so far haven’t been needed in a “real” emergency 🤞

Distributions handle this for you. Installing your software through a distro, instead of getting it from each individual software authour, means that you trust one organisation instead of hundreds of individuals.

For instance, Debian has a strict set of guidelines for Debian developers (who have the right to upload packages). They will be familiar with the software they are packaging, are often independent from the upstream authours, and are expected to check the package for various issues, including licensing, security, version incompatibilities etc. In addition, every upload is signed, so you can see who is responsible for everything.

And when something slips through, as almost happened with xz, the analysis and recovery all happens completely in the open. There may not have been enough eyes on xz to prevent the vulnerability in the first place, but once it was discovered, there were at at least hundreds of people dealing with the aftermath, all in the open.

Compare this with proprietary software, where you’d be lucky if such a vulnerability was even disclosed, vs just silently patched.

Yep

I can highly recommend Mythic Beasts (UK).

There is no upsell or variable pricing and they make money by charging a flat rate on top of the cost from their supplier. See this blog post for more info

I would love for such a fund to invest very liberally in these companies, on the condition that anything it funds must be free and open source - public money, public code! The only way to take down these giant US companies is to work together, and the most effective way to work together is to release everything in the open in such a way that anyone can build on top of it.

If the money just gets funneled into these companies so they can build their own lock-in, the EU would be recreating the same dependency on a few small companies that happened in the US. It wouldn’t increase productivity in the long run, it would instead substitute dependency on a few US companies for a few EU companies.

But, if they invest in open source software, it could spur innovation not only in the companies that are directly funded, but also thousands of other companies throughout the EU that would now have common infrastructure that they can build on top of.

That’s good news, in my opinion. If they’re allowed to just completely disregard copyright when training, then I should be able to completely disregard any attempted copyright on the output too.

Yes, me too! But, only if I have the autonomy to improve things where I can. Otherwise, I just find it demotivating

The frontends provide other benefits on top of just privacy - e.g. invidious lets you watch youtube videos without javascript, download videos directly on some instances, etc.

On iPhone, I recommend Monal.

Monal comes close.

To be honest, I think the above clients and services like Snikket fit that description.

Now, I wouldn’t say they’re all on the same level UX-wise as WhatsApp, Telegram etc. But I do think they are 90%-95% of the way there, and in my experience that’s enough to convince friends and family to switch over.

In my experience, when people haven’t wanted to switch, it’s normally not been because of the clients, but because they don’t want to install yet another app to talk to someone.

How do you define modern? I would call these modern clients personally:

• Android: Conversations
• iOS / MacOS: Monal
• Linux: Dino
• Windows: Gajim

Perfect, now you just have to wrap your program inside a debugger in production!