Spectacle8011

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

They do say that:

Usually combined with the kernel Linux, GNU forms the backbone of the Internet and powers millions of servers, desktops, and embedded computing devices.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I’m just quoting the Free Software Foundation themselves. I didn’t say I agree with them. It’s a deceptive use of language that is rather unbecoming of an organization normally so careful with its words.

Edit: For the record, I think the GNU Project’s biggest contributions have been to the desktop, not the server world.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

I’m familiar with the history of GNOME, and somewhat with Xamarin and Mono. While I have made that argument in the past, it was pointed out to me that the GNOME name was used to ride off the coattails of the popularity the GNU project had in the '90s, and they ended the association when it stopped being convenient for them.

(A GNOME developer pointed this out to me using this language; I could link you to the interaction, but it was on reddit)

I mean, both RHEL and Debian use Glibc which means the vast majority of the Linux applications running outside the cloud are calling into GNU code.

This also includes the proprietary NVIDIA driver, which only works with glibc.

Unlike GNU, his vision of the Linux desktop was populated by music players, spreadsheets, email / calendar programs, PDF viewers, and video editors.

I think this is a strange characterization of the GNU Project’s goals. This is the Initial Announcement for the GNU Project:

To begin with, GNU will be a kernel plus all the utilities needed to write and run C programs: editor, shell, C compiler, linker, assembler, and a few other things. After this we will add a text formatter, a YACC, an Empire game, a spreadsheet, and hundreds of other things. We hope to supply, eventually, everything useful that normally comes with a Unix system, and anything else useful, including on-line and hardcopy documentation.

and eventually a Lisp-based window system through which several Lisp programs and ordinary Unix programs can share a screen.

Do you know something I don’t? I don’t think the GNU Project was against multimedia software; they were just focusing on the more fundamental stuff first.

---

The GNU Project’s biggest contributions were when the kernel was in its infancy. The most major contribution is undoubtedly the GPL. Without it, Linux would not be where it is today. I think enough has been said on that subject, but it’s what made RHEL billions. It’s the philosophy of free software that has made so much of the programs today possible. It’s incredibly important.

Obviously, we also have the GNU Project financially backing Debian GNU/Linux in its infancy. And while you say GNU wasn’t involved in the GUI layer, that’s not true. They worked on the free Harmony toolkit as a matter of high priority, and would have kept working on it if GNOME had not been so successful. Thanks to the success of another GNU project, GIMP, the GTK toolkit was able to be repurposed for general usage.

I don’t think it’s fair to discard contributions that never panned out like HURD and Harmony, because it shows GNU was actively involved in making the desktop better for everyone, which has really been its mission from the start. Maybe they’re not “the backbone” of the desktop, but I think it’s fair to say their biggest/most notable contributions have been to the desktop, not the server.

I don’t contribute to the GNU Project because frankly, they don’t do anything I consider worthwhile at the moment. I don’t contribute to the Linux Foundation, either. I contribute to user-facing software I’m interested in, like Lutris, GIMP, and Kdenlive.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

It’s a good movie, but I find myself completely confused by the driving part at the end. The people who were in the van manage to catch up to him almost immediately, suggesting that the other guy could have just run across the distance to get to the van in the first place, saving everyone all the drama and hilarity.

I thought Wargames was a pretty good one too (mostly). It’s by the same writers.

The NET is…fun…

That’s a nice piece of hardware you’ve got there.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

You’ve got Firefox and Brave. Edge + Chrome are based on the free software Blink engine, while Webkit is one of the only free software projects Apple develops and maintains. Who doesn’t use VLC? Bitwarden is a popular password manager. About 50% of the world uses Android, which is nominally free software with some proprietary components. Blender is the world’s most successful free software project. A surprising amount of mainstream artists use Krita. People who download torrents are probably using a free software BitTorrent client like qbittorrent, Deluge, or Transmission, rather than uTorrent. A lot of people use the uBlock Origin extension, which is a free software content blocker.

And hey, everyone who has played DOOM was playing a game released under the GPLv2 in 1999, minus the game data.

File hosting isn’t really an issue of free software, because very few people will host their own cloud storage server. It’s more about relying on servers to provide a service rather than software, which is a good and bad thing.

This is kind of a neutral point, but a lot of software has become services accessed through a web client (browser). This means anyone on any operating system can access the service so long as they have a browser, which evens the playing field for us SerenityOS and Haiku users :^).

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

As the OSI says in the post linked above:

This is not to say that Elastic, or any company, shouldn’t adopt whatever license is appropriate for its own business needs. That may be a proprietary license, whether closed source or with source available. […] What a company may not do is claim or imply that software under a license that has not been approved by the Open Source Initiative, much less a license that does not meet the Open Source Definition, is open source software. It’s deception, plain and simple, to claim that the software has all the benefits and promises of open source when it does not.

A lot of companies are trying to redefine what “open source” means. And regrettably, this is probably something that was inevitable with a name as open to interpretation as “open source”, but it’s unfortunate that the OSI was denied the trademark for the term. If they owned the trademark, nobody would believe projects like ElasticSearch and MongoDB are open source when they do not meet the Open Source Definition (OSD), because those companies wouldn’t be able to claim they are.

Open source was never about preventing people from making a profit. That sounds more like the original Linux license, where Linus Torvalds didn’t want money to change any hands in the process of conveying the software. I can’t imagine how much worse things would be if Linus never transitioned to a license that met the OSD. My belief is that there is nothing wrong with making money so long as the software meets the OSD. I know at least the GNU Project actively encourages people to sell free software.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

The gaming performance issues you were facing might be related to Vulkan support for the card, if it works better on Windows, as apparently Kepler cards don’t have great support for Vulkan: bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=273935

I see Vulkan 1.2 is actually the latest version of Vulkan that supported Kepler architecture GPUs like the GT 730, which stopped receiving non-security updates after October 2021: …custhelp.com/…/support-plan-for-kepler-series-ge…

On Windows, games probably used OpenGL. If you were playing games with Proton, it prefers DXVK because it offers better compatibility and performance than wined3d’s OpenGL translation layer. DXVK 2.0 and onwards have used Vulkan 1.3, which requires a GPU newer than yours. I don’t know whether Steam (and Proton 8+) falls back to using DXVK 1.10 or falls back to OpenGL/wined3d.

Either way, that means you haven’t been getting the latest performance improvement updates in DXVK since late 2022. So force-enabling wined3d’s OpenGL translation layer with PROTON_USE_WINED3D might help, if it’s not doing that already? I don’t know if OpenGL would actually perform better, so this is kind of a long shot…

If you were playing Native GNU/Linux games, it might be different.

I second the openSUSE recommendation. My brief experience with it was really nice.

Edit: Ah, I see you’ve quit gaming, lol. Well, either way, if you use Wine with DXVK, maybe the above will help.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

I keep wanting to buy it because of the amazing sales pitch, except it provides zero value to me. I already use my laptop in bed, lol… and if I’m going outside, I’m not going to be playing games. It doesn’t even make sense to pack for going overseas because my laptop works great for that. And it doesn’t work very well as a new computer because it’s likely far more underpowered than my other computers for video editing and other work I need to do, but is nonetheless a cool feature.

Not that it matters at all. Valve still don’t sell it in my country.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

You won’t get anything as useful as RDP or plain old Teamviewer

Is there something I’m missing? Teamviewer is available for Linux and I’ve done remote support with it: www.teamviewer.com/en/download/linux/

I…assume it also works as the machine being remoted into?

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

Ah, I see. I only used it once, so it’s not something I do often, but it worked perfectly for me as a client to a Windows computer.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

It’s now on my wishlist! I’ve been thinking about buying this title for quite some time, since Scraft161 mentioned it to me. Happy to see it retains the Japanese script.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

I’m always on the lookout for cool new visual novels 😎

A native desktop release also makes it a lot easier to tamper with the game files

Yeah, it probably won’t even be DRM’d, with any luck. I don’t see myself doing any of that myself, but I’m happy about the Steam release!

I was sort of afraid they wouldn’t port the HD version to PC, but it’s good type moon (and I think aniplex) are going through with it.

Sounds like it’s going to be a good release then! It’s interesting that Aniplex appears to be the localizer. This is only the second game they’ve ever published on Steam, and I don’t think they’ve localized VNs before. But hey, it’s not Moenovel, and they’re retaining the Japanese script, so I can’t complain.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

Oh, good to hear the KiriKiri2 engine has limited support for DRM. I’ve got DRACU-RIOT here with plaintext archives, so that might be part of the reason why they’re plaintext. I wonder if Ren’Py supports DRM very well…I don’t think I know of a Ren’Py game encumbered with DRM.

I don’t use emotes enough to go to that effort, but yeah, that’s definitely a good way to get them.

Aniplex is the only western company publicly listed for the visual novel in the ANN post and on the Steam page, so I have to believe they’re responsible for the localization. Otherwise, why wouldn’t the Japanese company just publish their own localization? That’s something that’s been happening more and more lately; Japanese companies directly publishing their games without going through a middle-man. Good and bad, I think. Western companies are far less likely to ship a game with DRM these days, but Japanese developers tend to have no such compunctions with digital releases.

That said, I’m happy to see more Western localizers who retain the original Japanese text. If Moenovel did that, I would buy their localizations…

It’s good to hear you thought the localization was good overall! I tend to hear bad things about localizations lately, though I don’t read them myself.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

Oh right, interesting stuff. Yeah, I’m kinda glad most visual novel developers are so small that DRM is often out of reach, except for digital editions (DMM makes it easy). I thought Mirror Moon required proof of ownership before you could run their patches? I haven’t read any TYPE-MOON stuff, but that was my impression.

I don’t read ANN regularly but that was the source OP posted. And I corroborated it with several other news sources for the PS4/Switch game, as it’s the same localization. That being said…yeah, you’d expect them to have someone who knows Japanese on staff.

While I would love to buy Japanese visual novels directly from Japanese publishers, they’re often encumbered by DRM. The digital edition usually is. With physical editions, you just don’t know (hopefully the new VNDB DRM tag will change that; it’s now in Beta). Western visual novels that retain the Japanese text are often the best way to buy visual novels in Japanese. They are always clearly labelled as containing DRM or not and they rarely do these days.

Oh, well…even if you are biased, hey, at least it’s an improvement! One thing I’m glad about after deciding to learn Japanese is that I don’t need to worry about translation quality. Nonetheless, I’m grateful to fan translations because they were how I got into Japanese media in the first place. Even if most of them weren’t great (and filled with translation notes). I’ve yet to come across a VN writer who can write a good H-Scene…

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

Ah, so Mirror Moon themselves haven’t dropped that requirement, but another fan group intervened. I’m probably just going to wait until the 2024 version is out since I have such a big backlog anyway, but it’s cool that fans are preserving this stuff, putting copyright law aside. I could probably argue about this particular aspect of copyright law for hours, but I’m sure nobody is interested in that :P

I’ll definitely be reading Witch on the Holy Night first, though. I’ve been wanting to read it since watching Garden of the Sinners, which was years ago now.

Counter-point, though: is there anyone better at Japanese media reporting than ANN?

Thanks for the advice on learning Japanese! I’ve actually been at for about a decade now, though not consistently. I only started getting serious about it ~3 years ago (and I’ve been far too busy this year to give it the attention it deserves). I’ve got a decent understanding of the language now and can approach most media with a dictionary (and watch a lot of anime without). And yeah, production was never a priority for me. I don’t think there’s an easier language to immerse in. There are so many great options, and there are so many tools out there by all these different people you won’t see for other languages.

I’ve never had trouble with Kanji. I just learn words and get a feel for the Kanji as a byproduct. It’s not difficult to remember Kanji after you’ve seen them a few times, especially if you know some radicals. One thing I need to properly learn, though, is pitch accent. I’ve been very lazy about not learning it, but it’s pretty important to do so as early as you can, or you end up needing to correct a lot of misunderstandings about pronunciation, as you say.

And I have actually gone through the Duolingo Japanese course (right around release)! It’s pretty bad. I’ve also tried Wanikani, Jalup, Tae Kim, Imabi, Sakubi, iKnow, FluentU, Lingualift, KKLC, Genki, Tobira, various Memrise and Anki vocabulary decks, japaneseclass.jp, and Maggie-Sensei (this list is not exhaustive). Some of it helped; some of it not, but all of that adds up to still not enough to purchase Rosetta Stone. After all of this, I think the best way is:

1. Learn Kana
2. Read Tae Kim’s Grammar Guide (or Sakubi if you can handle it)
3. Do a Core 1-2k deck while immersing
4. Mine new words from native material

Everything else is unnecessary or inefficient.

I already know enough grammar to immerse nowadays (I guess I’m around N3?) so I only learn new words from native material. I consider this a general success because I’ve read lots of great stuff (my favourite is Munou na Nana) in Japanese and felt I had a better experience than I would have reading the localization.

Yeah, I definitely should not be this bad at Japanese after so long, but that’s what happens when you leave it for a year or two at a time. Key to learning anything is consistency, and every day, it gets easier. If I wasn’t so easily distracted, I’m sure I’d be almost fluent by now. My biggest regret is not committing harder and sooner. I made a lot of good progress when I committed every day from 2019 to the end of 2020, and I want to do that again! Alas, whether it’s programming, writing or video production…there’s always something!

I haven’t read too many visual novels either! I also still have lots of kamige to read, and I’m glad for it. I never used to be much of a reader, but things changed when I started getting into isekai web novels, haha.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

being able to read a 20 year old VN (on linux natively) is something that Type Moon would probably never concern themselves about.

That’s definitely true. I don’t know of a Japanese company that has released a visual novel with a native GNU/Linux binary.

Type Moon has also been very lax when it comes to derivative works (I probably don’t need to mention that with all the fate spin-offs and doujins floating around).

I’m aware of how uh, interesting, copyright law is in Japan, but I don’t think I’ve seen anyone get raked over the coals for a doujin. Is that something that actually happens? And, aren’t the Fate spin-offs authorized by TYPE-MOON?

Mahoyo is the indirect prequel to that (get used to not having any direct sequels in the nasuverse)

Sounds like it’s just up my alley, then! I’m excited! I’ve been wanting to read Fate for a long time, too. I’ve seen the DEEN anime, UBW series and movie, but I haven’t touched Heaven’s Feel. I want my first experience to be with the visual novel. I think I mentioned I’m a fan of slice of life and not much of a fan of action, but a blend of the two is a nice cocktail. I like the “dramedy” genre for similar reasons; I can’t watch a pure comedy for too long but drama makes it feel grounded. BoJack Horseman comes to mind.

Anyway, it sounds like a good time. Animations are a plus too, because most VNs don’t have that kind of budget :)

although I have a couple youtube channels that cover anime news really well

I have a confession to make: I’m not too interested in keeping up with the latest anime. I don’t even have a Crunchyroll subscription. The only anime I watch tend to be 10-20 years old, though I was thinking of watching Kimagure Orange Road the other day…

That said, I am interested in VN news. Particularly localizations, because as I said earlier, they’re easier to get my hands on when I want the Japanese script. Thanks for providing invidious links though!

but every time I start my free time gets eaten up by something else and I end up having to put it off.

Feels like my life this year. Unfortunately, certain things have had to take a much higher priority, but about half of it was just me getting distracted by something else, lol. You don’t need to spend hours learning Japanese every day, though. Half an hour is good enough to form a habit and get acclimated. But I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you that, since this isn’t your first rodeo :)

if I would seriously start immersing myself I bet I could form a pretty decent understanding of Japanese in no time

I bet you would! Take this as my encouragement to do so when you have the time! I never had any formal classes on Japanese, don’t know any Japanese people, and only really interacted with Japanese media, so I’m self-taught, you could say. I only knew English beforehand. It took a while to wrap my head around some fundamental stuff, but it feels natural now. It’d probably be easier for you, haha.

Mushoku Tensei

I have not. The kind of web novels I was interested in were the villainess kind. You know, Destruction Flag Otome (or Bakarina, whatever), Reika-sama, Evil God Average, Eliza, stuff like that. I prefer female protagonists (and somehow Saga of Tanya the Evil counts as that). I liked Ascendance of a Bookworm and really liked So I’m a Spider, So What? but have only seen the anime adaptations in any great detail at the moment. I’ve transitioned to reading the light novel adaptations of the web novels, mostly, but because Syosetu novels are free, I’ve downloaded a fair few. Mushoku Tensei was one of the few stories with a male protagonist I was interested in reading at some point.

I just remembered that the story that got me into reading was actually HakoMari. I think I read all 7 volumes in 3 days… I have no idea how I managed that and I have never read that fast again, haha!

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

ONScripter

Yeah, I’m happy ONScripter exists, although I haven’t gotten it to work perfectly for a VN yet. TRianThology doesn’t work in Wine, actually displays in ONScripter natively but flashes green twice a second due to some image decoding issue, and works properly when running the game through a Windows ONScripter binary over Wine. Riddle me that one, lmao. I installed the patched AUR version, for what it’s worth.

Still need to get around to playing TRianThology properly…

really helps to highlight how resilient OSS can be when put in the hands of weebs.

I remember someone saying something similar about mpv. I thought ONScripter was dead when I visited the page when I was writing pages for the wiki. Good to know it’s still alive. Hell, it outlived NScripter!

KiriKiri and TYPE MOON

I get the impression most visual novels are not going to make it mainstream, which is why the presentation is usually budget-constrained. And the length, of course. It makes me wonder if TYPE MOON is going to make their money back on the remakes—I hope they do! It means more pretty animations. I guess if anyone can do it, it’s them, lol.

I remember reading Muv-Luv Alternative, and while the animations were pretty primitive, they did a good job of conveying the action. Sometimes you don’t need much, but I always love to see visual novels go above and beyond. Age are probably doing pretty well for themselves too…

Anime streaming services

It’s not too bad over here. Obviously, if you’re not American, you’re going to miss out on a lot of series, but aside from the Monogatari Series, I don’t run across series I can’t access in my region that often. Then again, I watch anime from 1980-2010 mostly. HiDive is nice, though.

I refuse to use services that require me to install a DRM module in my browser like Netflix. Fuck Amazon too, but for different and more personal reasons.

I’ve bought some anime, but being a GNU/Linux user, that means I either need to check the decrypted AACS keys carefully before purchase, or I need to avoid buying Blu-Ray editions. I wonder if MakeMKV is more reliable. It seems silly to spend any significant amount of money on DVDs that tap out at 480p when there are 720p/1080p editions that treat me like a criminal because I don’t have an authorized software Blu-Ray player in addition to an actual Blu-Ray player. From memory, the 1080p editions of some anime are actually scaled up by the studio anyway. And usually poorly.

I remember reading about that when I was learning about encoding…

So, yes, I am kind of bitter about the choices I’ve been left to make. I spend more money on manga and visual novels these days. At least there are actually a significant number of visual novels not encumbered by DRM…can’t say the same for most Blu-Ray editions of anime. Region codes, disk encryption…this is crazy stuff. I’m just glad they haven’t figured out a way to encumber physical books with DRM yet.

That being said, I’m happy to purchase older anime because the highest quality you can get a lot of them is on DVD, so I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything :)

FreeTube

Thanks for recommending it. I installed the Flatpak. It seems more reliable than going to an Invidious instance in my browser. It’s not like I watch YouTube much, but I guess it ought to be comfortable when I do.

Mushoku Tensei

Well, you’ve done a good job selling it to me! I don’t know too much about it, but that’s enough to pique my interest. A lot of isekai with male protagonists are very transparent wish fulfillment fantasies or grindfests. And that’s fine, but I find it so boring! Isekai series with female protagonists tend to be more fun. Mushoku Tensei sounds like it has a lot of the stuff I enjoy in those isekai stories, and I can put up with fanservice for the sake of that. I’ve got a loooong plan-to-read list, but I will eventually read it!

I have no other words than “that’s insane”, even for Mushoku Tensei I didn’t get close to that (I averaged a little over one volume a week) and that was with me being addicted to it’s story (I even had to jump to a translation on the WN later on because the english light novels weren’t caught up and I needed to know more.

I think I spent about 14 hours a day reading it and lost a fair bit of sleep in the process. Combine the novelty of reading with a great story, and I just couldn’t get enough. There is no way in hell I could spend anywhere near that amount of time reading a story today, even if I lost sleep for it. That being said, HakoMari volumes are only about 200 pages long.

Meanwhile, Worm took me three weeks and I was not the same afterward.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

DRM was a mistake enabled by corporate greed and our current copyright laws

Section 1201 of the DMCA is an incredibly shameful piece of legislation to have made it to law. Ridiculous copyright terms apparently weren’t enough for Disney and co.

the best we can do is show that we’re not biting anything that smells of these practices which is hard when exclusive licensing only provides one legal option with the alternative being piracy.

Yes, unfortunately, that’s all we can do. I doubt it will convince any of these companies to abandon these practices, but I refuse to support them monetarily. I’m reminded of the Veronica Mars Movie kickstarter campaign, where fans happily pledged over $5 Million dollars to see it come to fruition. Warner Bros. rewarded their fans for their generosity and support by encumbering the film with DRM so GNU/Linux fans who funded the film couldn’t watch the film: techdirt.com/…/warner-bros-turns-kickstarter-succ…

This is greed, plain and simple. They already brought in $5.7 Million in revenue before the film was made. Sure, that money was spent on making the film, but at the very least, they knew they would break even; anything on top is pure profit. Not many studios have that kind of guarantee. They brought in another $3.5 Million from the Box Office, making a solid profit. It’s very possible that without fans funding the film, Warner Bros would have lost money.

DRM did nothing to increase their profits, but it did tarnish their reputation in the eyes of fans.

Yes, I’m a Veronica Mars fan, but this kickstarter was before my time, so I didn’t get burned by it. ZDNet has a good summary too: zdnet.com/…/we-used-to-be-friends-the-veronica-ma…

I haven’t gotten into the whole Blu-Ray shenanigans yet (part because getting anything anime here is a fucking nightmare in the first place and DVD/Blu-Ray are far down on the list of anime things I’d buy) I also don’t have anything that could read Blu-Ray ATM (my laptop does read CD/DVD perfectly fine though) so it’ll be a good bit before I even dare bother.

Thanks to the discussion we had, I spent yesterday going through my Blu-Ray collection. MakeMKV is fantastic and I highly recommend it if you ever buy a show on Blu-Ray. Hell, even DVD. I don’t know how well it keeps up with constantly changing Blu-Ray encryption schemes, but it seems to be much better than any of the standard methods. Plus, it has a nice GUI. I’m still using it with a trial license but if I find myself using it more, I think I’ll pay for a license.

Depends from studio to studio, nowadays 1080p generally looks “fine” for most anime; but for older projects where SD DVD or VHS (/Betamax) was the best quality option or a lot of stuff early in the HD era it’s always a gamble to see if it turned out ok-ish.

Ah, that makes sense. I don’t have a VHS or Betamax player, haha. Or a Laserdisc player. I’ll have to settle for the DVD conversion when I buy one of those older shows.

New technology usually comes with less consumer control compared to it’s predecessor, e-books can have DRM

That’s an interesting thought. I can’t say I disagree with it at all. I own Harmony on Blu-Ray and started watching it again for the first time since 2015 (fantastic film btw), and it really does feel that way. The more advanced technology gets, the less the general public can do with it. It’s just…strange, when you think about it. The one exception has been the web, which was kind of an accident. Had Microsoft created it instead of some wide-eyed engineer at CERN, it definitely wouldn’t have ended up being the open platform it is today. And even though it is very open compared to a lot of other areas, there’s a trend toward certain companies trying to lock it down.

On the subject of locking down physical books, TorrentFreak has a super interesting article on the history of libraries and how publishers really didn’t like them: torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries…

Make sure to set it to use an invidious instance that works well for you, freetube also has SponsorBlock built-in which you can enable in the settings, there’s also much more there for you to tweak.

I’ll have to tweak it sometime, thank you! For the moment, the default invidious instance has been working great. A lot better than the invidious instance I use in my browser.

On the surface it definitely sounds like the usual isekai; but it doesn’t just copy the formula for the sake of copying the formula, it takes care of every detail in order to build something that stands on it’s own.

That’s my favorite kind of story, actually. It’s the same reason I really like the Monogatari Series (even though I despised it when I watched it originally; the novels grew on me).

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

All in all, having AV1 support heavily benefits the open source community, as AV1 itself is an open source codec. This means that AV1 has a royalty-free licensing model that makes it suitable for adoption in various open source projects. It was also designed to solve long-standing patent litigation issues that were common in other codecs in the industry.

It was certainly designed that way. However, Sisvel believes that AV1 uses patented technology in the specification. Sisvel announced this one year after the AV1 standard was finalized, and not during the three years the standard was being developed. Of course, patent holders can’t be expected to deeply investigate every new technology that’s coming out on the market…but this was the largest new technology, formed by a coalition of some of the biggest companies in the world deliberately designed to get away from patent-licensing organisations like MPEG LA, under development for 3 years. Read into Sisvel (and its member companies) motivations as you will.

Nonetheless, Unified Patents is hard at work challenging invalid AV1 patents, among others:

• unifiedpatents.com/…/gevc-patent-in-sisvel-av1-po…
• unifiedpatents.com/…/kaist-etri-av1hevc-patent-pa…
• unifiedpatents.com/…/interdigital-av1vp9-patent-j…
• unifiedpatents.com/…/two-xylene-jp-patents-revoke…
• unifiedpatents.com/…/interdigital-sisvels-av1-poo…

Don’t know who Unified Patents is?

Unified is a 350+ international membership organization that seeks to improve patent quality and deter unsubstantiated or invalid patent assertions in defined technology sectors (Zones) through its activities. Should Unified determine that its goals can be better served by settling a post-grant challenge (or agreeing to never file any challenges), Unified will consider settling in exchange for a license, though never for money. As with all aspects of its challenges, Unified acts independently when settling, and never provides members with advance notice of negotiations, draft settlement agreements, or actual settlement.

They also do…prior art competitions?

Unified is pleased to announce prior art has been found on three patents owned by Speir Technologies, an Atlantic IP Services subsidiary.

We would also like to thank the dozens of other high-quality submissions that were made on this patent. The ongoing contests are open to anyone, and include tens of thousands of dollars in rewards available for helping the industry to challenge NPE patents of questionable validity by finding and submitting prior art in the contests. Visit PATROLL today to learn more about how to participate.

In other news, more than half of the H.264 patents have expired, and all the essential ones will be expired by 2027.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

Seriously though, a stable API is not the GTK/GNOME developers’ agenda here. Nobody wanting a stable API should write software with this toolkit.

This blog post doesn’t mention GTK, but I’ve heard GTK will sometimes implement breaking changes in minor version bumps. I was thinking about writing some software with GTK, and I haven’t been deterred so I guess I’ll learn the hard way, but has GTK 4 had any of these stability problems yet?

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

There are also Windows users who rely on niche business applications. Wine isn’t great for that sort of software yet. Another big one is the creative industry. While the VFX industry is very Linux-focused, and 3D is very viable, other parts of video production are not. And GIMP needs non-destructive editing before it can even think of competing with Photoshop or Affinity Photo. Inkscape is a viable vector image tool. The many other Adobe programs don’t have great alternatives, and if you need to collaborate, that means you all need to switch to a new program. Then there are the retraining costs to consider.

Gamers have the easiest time in switching to Linux. The amount of compromises and sacrifices you need to make in other industries are much greater right now.

However, Adobe is trying to bring some of their programs, like Photoshop, to the web. It’s unlikely we’ll see stuff like After Effects on the web, but Photoshop, Illustrator, maybe even inDesign could possibly, maybe be there in a few years. Photoshop web is already in beta (though it’s garbage). The web continues to be the great equalizer.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

I think Krita is a more viable competitor to Photoshop than Gimp at this point… It’s also great for pen tablet drawing and arguably superior in that category.

Absolutely agree it’s there for artists. Krita is a very successful project and I hear mainstream artists talk about it often, while not being an artist myself. Well, technically I own a Cintiq…

I haven’t been able to get it to work well with PSDs, though, and I find the interface clunky for the sort of image editing I’m doing. I find GIMP easy enough to use, but it unfortunately lacks some crucial features. 3.0 is right around the corner (for real this time), so I’m hopeful. Unfortunately, PSD is a must because of collaboration. GIMP’s ingest of PSD is better. But Krita does have non-destructive effects.

What I’m really hoping for is Affinity Photo to work well in Wine. Most people can get it running now but I think it’s a little buggy or lacking in performance. I’ll have to give that a shot soon.

But yeah, video editors are lacking. Kden live is ok (and awesome for the price)

As it so happens, I’ve thought about this a lot.

Kdenlive is definitely the best free software option but the lack of hardware accelerated playback really kills it dead in the water for me. I’m hoping it will improve soon, given the success of the fundraiser. DaVinci Resolve is fantastic but needing to transcode footage if you have H.264/AAC source footage (geh, I know, but some of us do) and being stuck with H.264 hardware encode in the best-case scenario is not great. I found Lightworks was the best option in terms of professional features + workflow. Proprietary, but hey, at least it works really well on Linux.

Audio editors are behind too. Audacity is pretty good for 2 track. Bitwig is a great multitrack alternative to Ableton… But Ardour isn’t developed enough for a pro studio and I’ve never seen one that uses Linux. Part of this is poor support for vst plugins developed for Windows, mostly due to their copy protection.

That’s a shame to hear! I don’t work with audio on a very professional level, so Audacity is fine for my use cases. It’s improved in a significant way since the Muse Group acquisition (mainly non-destructive editing, but plenty of other stuff). I’m also annoyed but unsurprised to hear that DRM has thwarted compatibility yet again.

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

The GNU kernel was not originally supposed to be called the Hurd. Its original name was Alix—named after the woman who was my sweetheart at the time. She, a Unix system administrator, had pointed out how her name would fit a common naming pattern for Unix system versions; as a joke, she told her friends, “Someone should name a kernel after me.” I said nothing, but decided to surprise her with a kernel named Alix.

Source: www.gnu.org/gnu/thegnuproject.en.html

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago (edited 9 months ago)

I like Kdenlive and used it for a few months, but I also really like Lightworks. Lightworks is proprietary, but it’s also a professional tool. Unlike DaVinci Resolve, it will decode and encode H.264/AAC, and most people don’t need much more than that, though AV1 is also supported. The color correction tools in Lightworks are better than Kdenlive’s and the cutting tools, while they take a while to get used to, are quite nice when paired with they keyboard. Best of all, Lightworks is a lot faster to startup, doesn’t crash as easily and it’s always responsive.

The most annoying part has to be dealing with licenses. If you use up your two licenses, you need to contact their support via email to shuffle them around. It’s a great program, but this is super annoying. It also discourages you from purchasing the perpetual license because you don’t want to get stuck in this situation. Mind you, their support is very friendly so I have no doubt they’d help you out, but it’s an issue of needing to ask them in the first place. DaVinci Resolve’s licensing system at least works perfectly fine, no matter what, or so I’ve heard. If you activate a new computer, it will just deactivate an old installation, and that’s it. No need to wrangle customer support while everyone’s on holiday…

The other professional option on GNU/Linux is DaVinci Resolve.

DaVinci Resolve is a very nice NLE at a very nice price, though proprietary. But $500 is a lot better than the $800,000 it used to cost. Annoying to install although fat-tire’s containerization project is worth a look for easy installation. However, it doesn’t work for my source footage, even with Studio. The free version doesn’t support H.264 decode/encode or AAC decode/encode, which are the two main codecs you’ll see with MP4, the most ubiquitous (and patent-encumbered) video format in the world. The Studio version supports H.264 decode/encode only with NVIDIA GPUs, but it still doesn’t support AAC decode/encode. It can encode H.264 though, which will leave you with an MP4 file with no audio track.

To use DaVinci Resolve with H.264/AAC in a livable way, you need a NVIDIA GPU, you need to purchase the Studio edition, and you need to transcode your audio from AAC to something Resolve can ingest. There are scripts to automate this. Optionally, you should also purchase a third-party AAC encoder plugin for Resolve so you don’t need to transcode again after rendering, assuming you’re targeting H.264/AAC on render. If you’re not, you can just render to Quicktime/PCM .mov.

As much as I love DaVinci Resolve, I kind of didn’t think that was worth it for me at the time so I went with Lightworks which supports H.264/AAC encode fine with their Free/Paid licenses. I think I’ll come back to DaVinci Resolve after 2028, when the patents for H.264 and AAC have finally expired (hopefully), and DaVinci Resolve includes decode support for AAC (hopefully). I might still use the Fusion tab for creating some VFX, but I’m trying to see if I can work with Natron first.

As for other NLEs:

• Cinelerra-GG: I quite like this editor, but damn it is particular and some things are just annoying to do. I’ve also heard it has color management issues… that was the main reason I stopped using it. That, and I can’t actually get it to build anymore, haha. The manual is super amazing and beats out almost every other NLE mentioned here except DaVinci Resolve. It’s not a bad read even for just generally learning video editing.
• Blender VSE: It works okay but the workflow is very slow and the lack of sequences (only projects) only makes things more annoying.
• Openshot: I’m not a fan of the interface and found the workflow, at least initially, slow.
• Shotcut: Seems nice enough but it didn’t work for me. I forget why.
• Pitivi: It crashed the instant I tried working with 4K footage.

Edit: Olive is nice too but very early stages. Color tools are very basic. And unfortunately development is winding down.

Ah…sorry, I just realized this probably isn’t the response you’re looking for. But I’ve spent a lot of this week trying to find a professional NLE on GNU/Linux and that was what I came up with. For the record, I’m a GNOME user and I liked Kdenlive the most out of free software NLEs. I’m looking forward to the new improvements to come from the fundraiser to improve workflow!

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

I don’t know if they’re still 720p locked on the free version.

Yes, it’s still locked to 720p on the free version, but the Create plan is very competitive at $9.99 a month. It has all of the features of Pro except encoding is limited to H.264/AAC and AV1 on Vimeo/YouTube, and you have no control over the encode aside from resolution. That was enough for me, though. I’m not doing anything super professional but I’m doing more than you can do easily with most of the NLEs on the list above.

I’ve tried LW before but I never really liked the workflow.

The workflow kind of broke my brain when I first looked at it a few years back but after acclimating to it I quite like it. The cutting is keyboard-based in a way most other NLEs aren’t, but yeah, it can definitely be annoying without some tweaks. Were you using Lightworks when they didn’t have a Fixed Layout option? The Flexible Layout pretty much leaves you to it, but the Fixed Layout is very reminiscent of Resolve. What I love most about Lightworks is definitely the speed. It’s the fastest and most responsive NLE I’ve ever used (Cinelerra probably comes a close second). And it gives you good Color tools and many other powerful features! Not a common combination. The community is also full of knowledgeable people, but that’s true of Resolve too.

Anyway, if you’re happy with Resolve, there’s no reason to consider switching. Pricing wise Resolve beats out Lightworks after two years of Pro license ownership and the licenses are less annoying. Main reason I went for Lightworks is I didn’t want to be forced to keep a NVIDIA GPU forever. It seems less disruptive to my workflow in the long run. How is Resolve stability-wise for you? I’m still trialing Lightworks but the ownership cost is leading me to re-consider Resolve…

Having a look at the Resolve 18 Codec manual, I see they’ve moved from CentOS 7 to Rocky Linux 8.6. I’m glad they didn’t kill the GNU/Linux version or something along with CentOS, lol…

Spectacle8011, 9 months ago

TIL Firefox could use the updated GNOME File Picker with thumbnails. Just set widget.use-xdg-desktop-portal.file-picker to 1 instead of 2.

For KDE.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

I also prefer chromium dev tools, though it isn’t that bad to switch to Firefox’s dev tools.

I actually vastly prefer Firefox’s dev tools to Chromium’s. There are keyboard shortcuts to open every tab, it has a color picker, it has a multi-line Javascript console, and in general I find it more intuitive. Chromium developer tools seem to be less complete than Firefox and harder to use.

I just learned Chromium technically has a color picker tool, but you need to scroll through CSS propetries to find a color selector, click the color, then click the color picker. With Firefox, I tap CTRL+SHIFT+I to open dev tools, click the color picker which is front-and-center, and it copies the hex code to my clipboard. This is a microcosm of my overall experience with Chromium’s developer tools. Everything is slower or further out of reach.

I don’t know how it ended up this way.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

Photoshop Web (Beta) only supports Chromium-based browsers, Descript only supports Chromium-based browsers (well, Firefox still seems to work but you’re on your own), and many new webapps are only supporting Chromium-based browsers. Now, these are beta products, so that might change, but it seems unlikely. So I’ve been switching to Chromium-based browsers to use some of these apps, but I’d really rather not. It’s the way everything is going, unfortunately.

A lot of developers target the web because it means they can have one codebase that is supported on multiple operating systems. Imagine how much harder it would be to develop a macOS, ChromeOS and GNU/Linux version in concert with the Windows version. In reality, some browser engines support more web features than others, and Google has by far the most resources to keep up with those standards. So Firefox is an afterthought. Google Chrome is on every operating system worth supporting anyway, so why bother supporting another browser? It’s a lot less work and testing.

MDN is the best place to read about those standards, though.

I like Firefox:

• userChrome.css lets me make Firefox look like a GNOME program
• I much prefer the developer tools. Everything is a lot easier. I always use Firefox when doing web development.
• I can easily customize the browser. For me, this means having a separate dedicated URL bar and search engine bar.
  • The search engine bar lets me swap between search engines very quickly and keep my previous search terms for new tabs. Switching search engines is really annoying in Chromium-based browsers because you need to use shortcuts, and there’s no autocomplete for shortcuts. It also doesn’t tell you whether you typed the shortcut correctly, so you’re guessing every time! It’s really under-developed. The Android Chromium-based browsers are even worse. You can’t change search engines at all when searching; you need to change your default engine. Firefox lets you search any search engine easily on iOS, and slightly less easily on Android.
• I can…turn off history? Apparently this is an amazingly complex feature that Chromium-based browsers just can’t handle. The best you can do is clear it when exiting, but you can’t just turn history off.

Okay, it’s mostly the search engine thing, to be honest.

But Firefox still doesn’t use the new GNOME thumbnail view when you’re uploading files, for example…

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

Ah, I can see how that might be useful. I first learned about the command pallette when I needed to instruct everyday users on taking a full-page screenshot on Chrome…it’s far more complicated than Firefox’s method of Right-Click > Take Screenshot. Just another odd thing, lol. Interestingly, Firefox is considering implementing this feature: github.com/firefox-devtools/ux/issues/101

I don’t think it would make much sense in my workflow right now but I can see how it would benefit others. Quickly turning on accessibility constraints I’m sure would be very useful. One thing Firefox’s dev tools is desperately missing is search. I get along fine without it, but it would be nice to have.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

I wish I’d known how to use node-based compositors like Natron to produce VFX so I don’t have to keep going back to macOS to use After Effects.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

Oh my goodness, I’m sorry to hear that this is happening to others but I am so glad its not just me. This has been something that’s driving me crazy, because I knew it wasn’t a cable / GPU issue due to the fact that it doesn’t occur in Windows.

I know right! I thought it was something I did! You don’t know how many times I’ve gone into the back of my monitor and tried to shove the HDMI cable in just a bit further, to no effect. I thought I’d broken it by trying to run Sway or something…

Nope, the driver is just that bad. Ughhh.

KDE is worse, but GNOME isn’t great either. It’s been going on for months! Additionally, I have “Prefer Maximum Performance” set, but it hasn’t helped much. I’ve seriously been considering an AMD card next year… I have an RTX 2060S with 535.98.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

macOS has made it difficult for both game developers and Wine developers to support the platform by letting their OpenGL support rot, removing 32-bit support, ignoring Vulkan and coming out with their own graphics API, Metal. Wine is in a worse state than on GNU/Linux. There aren’t many native games available for macOS.

That being said, your best bet is likely CrossOver. They employ the principle Wine developers, worked with Valve on Proton, and have put a lot of effort into supporting macOS. They’ve got a free trial with complete functionality you can try out.

But if the games you’re playing have native releases for macOS, that’s not something you need to worry about. There are just so few games available on macOS that I assumed they don’t. Now, I only have an Intel iMac which I never play games on so I couldn’t tell you how the newer ARM laptops perform.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

I was aware of the Game Porting Toolkit announcement. In fact, I first learned of it from CodeWeavers, who noticed Apple used their code to develop it.

We are ecstatic that Apple chose to use CrossOver’s source code as their emulation solution for the Game Porting Toolkit. We have decades of experience creating ports with Wine, and we are very pleased that Apple is recognizing that Wine is a fantastic solution for running Windows games on macOS. We did not work with Apple on this tool, but we would be delighted to work with any game developers who try out the Game Porting Toolkit and see the massive potential that Wine offers. Our PortJump™ team has perfected the art and science of creating ports of Windows applications using our Wine technology, and we welcome inquiries about how we can help get your game working on macOS.

I don’t play games on macOS, but my understanding was the same as yours; that it was a testing tool for developers to test out how the game might work on macOS. That’s how it was presented. I didn’t think it was meant to be used by macOS users.

In any case, CrossOver is intended to be used by macOS users (and the GPT uses the same code, as enthusiastically explained above), and it has a good graphical interface. I think these factors make it obvious to recommend CrossOver as the canonical solution for playing Windows games on macOS.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

When developers need to draw graphics on the screen, they use an API like Direct3D (or DirectX) or Vulkan to accomplish it. Direct3D only works on Windows. Vulkan works on many operating systems. Vulkan replaced OpenGL.

DXVK translates DirectX calls, which only work on Windows, to Vulkan calls, which will work on Linux and other operating systems. It’s so good at this that it’s better than commercial game engines like Unity. DXVK is a separate project from Wine. Wine also uses wined3d to convert older Direct 3D calls to OpenGL calls, for the same effect.

Lastly, there’s VKD3D, which is Wine’s own Direct3D12 ➜ Vulkan compatibility layer. Valve forked this and created VKD3D-Proton, which is specifically designed for games, as opposed to general software.

Yes, it’s a bit confusing.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

It’s a shame that Cory Doctorow of all people seems to have misinterpreted this. And that he is using Medium to deliver this story.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

To add to this, there’s Sourcehut Pages too, which is a free software code forge unlike Github. Sourcehut is very minimal and doesn’t even use Javascript in its interface. The landing page for Sourcehut declares in no uncertain terms:

Absolutely no tracking or advertising

I can’t say I’ve used the Pages functionality myself as I already have my own website hosting, but the quick-start guide seems pretty approachable: srht.site/quickstart

It might be easier to use Hugo to build the website files if you don’t want to learn HTML/CSS. If you want to use a custom domain name, the steps seem simple enough: srht.site/custom-domains

Sourcehut is in Alpha at the moment, so it’s free, but they intend on charging for it once they’re out of Beta. You can optionally pay for it now, and the prices are pretty reasonable.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

I’m assuming uralsolo is talking about free software as in, software which gives users the four freedoms.

I don’t think all software needs to be free, but in some ways, it’s no longer the issue of the day. In this day and age, a lot of what we’re using is no longer really software. We’re using services with client-side Javascript which is nominally free software (but not really). Most of the actual software is sitting behind a server. I see this as good and bad. It means users of less popular operating systems get access to the same services as users of popular operating systems so long as they have browsers, and the negatives are, well…I’m sure you don’t need my help to think of some.

It’s hard to make money with free software because everyone has the right to commercially exploit it. For this reason alone, I don’t think it’s necessary for all software to be free, but I’ll be there to celebrate the programs that are free.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

Linus Torvalds, the Finnish engineer who in 1991 created the now ubiquitous Unix alternative Linux, didn’t buy into this dogma. Torvalds and others, including Microsoft’s Bill Gates, believed that the culture of open exchange among engineers could coexist with commerce, and that more-restrictive licenses could forge a path toward both financial sustainability and protections for software creators and users.

It’s kind of amazing that this article gets one thing right that most journalists don’t, which is that pushover licenses are more restrictive toward the software’s users than copyleft licenses, while simultaneously ignoring the fact that free software can be sold and the GNU Project actively encourages doing business with free software. However, I worry that by “more restrictive”, this article isn’t talking about passing on freedoms but instead talking about source-available licenses. I think this because it includes Bill Gates and Linus Torvalds in the same class, the former who was the CEO of a company that started the Shared Source Initiative, which was a source-available licensing program for Windows. Meanwhile, Linus Torvalds is a veteran of free software.

A little confusing, but I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt here. They’ve got the history right for the most part.

As the tech industry grew around private companies like Sun Microsystems, IBM, Microsoft, and Apple in the late ’90s and early ’00s, new open-source projects sprang up, and established ones grew roots. Apache emerged as an open-source web server in 1995. Red Hat, a company offering enterprise companies support for open-source software like Linux, went public in 1999. GitHub, a platform originally created to support version control for open-source projects, launched in 2008, the same year that Google released Android, the first open-source phone operating system.

I don’t understand why Github is being included in this list of “open source projects”. Github isn’t free software! It’s as proprietary as it gets. Gitlab, Gitea, or Sourcehut make more sense as they are actually free software projects. It’s a strange fact of life that the largest free software code forge is proprietary. I also think it does Apple a disservice by not mentioning the fact that Apple completely rebuilt its operating system on a free software BSD foundation in the late '90s, and then released parts of it as free software, like the XNU kernel, as well as CUPS, which I use today! Even as far back as the '90s, large private corporations like Apple were releasing both proprietary software and free software. Sun Microsystems of course was a much bigger free software contributor at the time.

All in all, I’m kind of confused by this paragraph. Is it trying to juxtapose “private companies” and “open-source”? Well, private companies just so happen to be the biggest contributors to the largest free software project today; the Linux kernel. Is it trying to say that private companies suddenly started releasing free software because of ‘open-source’? Why list companies that have made big contributions to free software without listing those contributions, then?

This is made even more confusing when it talks about Amazon relying on the free software Java language developed by Sun, trying to make the point that private companies relied on a blend of proprietary and free software components. It confuses things a bit more by introducing patents when it starts off talking about copyright, which can also be registered for free software.

Others, including Kelsey Hightower, are more sanguine about corporate involvement. “If a company only ends up just sharing, and nothing more, I think that should be celebrated,” he says. “Then if for the next two years you allow your paid employees to work on it, maintaining the bugs and issues, but then down the road it’s no longer a priority and you choose to step back, I think we should thank [the company] for those years of contributions.”

I agree very much with this. Red Hat’s many contributions to the freedesktop project come to mind.

There’s no singular definition, either. The Open Source Initiative (OSI) was founded in 1998 to steward the meaning of the phrase, but not all modern open-source projects adhere to the 10 specific criteria OSI laid out, and other definitions appear across communities.

I find this very troubling. The OSI applied for a trademark on “Open Source” in 1999 and were not granted it. They wanted to trademark the term so no one could twist “Open Source” into something it wasn’t (there’s a quote earlier in the article referring to “openwashing”), meaning they foresaw this. The Open Source Definition is very specific and if we start applying the term “open source” to source-available projects (or whatever else, like Brave Search’s “open” API), it loses all its meaning, and Windows suddenly becomes an open source operating system.

Here’s the Open Source Definition: opensource.org/osd/

Read it, know it, use it appropriately. It looks a lot like the Free Software Definition.

GitHub helped lower the barrier to entry, drawing wider contribution and spreading best practices such as community codes of conduct. But its success has also given a single platform vast influence over communities dedicated to decentralized collaboration.

Yes. That’s pretty scary.

While this volunteer spirit aligns with the original vision of free software as a commerce-free exchange of ideas,

…No, it was never like that. Since this article judiciously references our shared history, let’s talk about how Richard Stallman funded the GNU Project. Richard Stallman originally made his living off selling GNU Emacs (free software) on tapes to programmers so he could employ developers to work on parts of the GNU Project. Free software isn’t about not making money. Linus Torvalds, in fact, is the guy that originally didn’t want to make money from software! He originally released Linux under a restrictive license that prevented anyone from making any money from Linux. The GNU Project celebrated the kernel when Linus released it under a free license that allowed commercial exploitation—specifically, the GNU General Public License (V2).

But allowing anyone to use, modify, and distribute AI models and technology could accelerate their misuse.

This isn’t new. The GNU Project has a page about why software must not restrict people from running it. The entire point of free software is that no one is at the mercy of the developers and their ethics. Personally, I don’t trust OpenAI to know what is good for me.

LLaMA 2, a new model released in July, is fully open to the public, but the company has not disclosed its training data as is typical in open-source projects—putting it somewhere in between open and closed by some definitions, but decidedly not open by OSI’s.

This demonstrates why the Open Source Definition is important and canonical.

---

Overall, I’d say this article actually rates better than most articles I’ve seen written about free software in terms of accuracy and history. It makes some good points about funding. The article also includes voices from very relevant people in the free software / open source space, which is good.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

Well, so much for me having the right side of history 🙂

Thanks for the correction! I had a proper look at the CUPS page on Wikipedia and it’s as you say:

Michael Sweet, who owned Easy Software Products, started developing CUPS in 1997 and the first public betas appeared in 1999.[5][6] The original design of CUPS used the Line Printer Daemon protocol (LPD), but due to limitations in LPD and vendor incompatibilities, the Internet Printing Protocol (IPP) was chosen instead. CUPS was initially called “The Common UNIX Printing System”. This name was shortened to just “CUPS” beginning with CUPS 1.4 due to legal concerns with the UNIX trademark.[7] CUPS was quickly adopted as the default printing system for most Linux distributions. In March 2002, Apple Inc. adopted CUPS as the printing system for Mac OS X 10.2.[8] In February 2007, Apple Inc. hired chief developer Michael Sweet and purchased the CUPS source code.[9] On December 20, 2019, Michael Sweet announced on his blog that he had left Apple.[10][11] In 2020, the OpenPrinting organization forked the project, with Michael Sweet continuing work on it.[12][13]

This is kind of counter to the point I was making, so thanks for bringing it up. Apple still released some of their software under a free license back then, but without CUPS, it’s nowhere near as significant. I guess it’s worth mentioning that Apple forked KHTML from KDE as Webkit and continues to develop and maintain that browser engine today. However, Safari is not free software. Webkit is free software because KHTML was released under the LGPL, which prevents derivative software from developing it under a proprietary license.

Although, Apple’s own contributions and “any further contributions” are available under the BSD 2-Clause license: webkit.org/licensing-webkit/

Which kind of contradicts what I’ve read on the Wikipedia page where it says certain parts of the browser are licensed under LGPL and others are licensed under the BSD license…

I have no idea how it ended up that way, but there’s this announcement: docs.webkit.org/Other/Licensing.html

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

I can understand Systemd being trademarked, but does the Linux Foundation own the trademark for Systemd…? Surely not. I’d think Red Hat before I thought Linux Foundation.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

I learn something new every week about subjects I was decided on for a long time, forcing me to re-evaluate. It seems like there are more knowledgeable people here than on Reddit. I do wish our visualnovels community was more active, but alas, it’s a more niche subject that’s bound to grow slowly.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

Thanks for posting this! It was a long read, and while I was familiar with a lot of the history, I learned some new things.

As I’ve said before:

I would support Red Hat if they only made their free software offerings available to paying customers. I think this is how a free software company should work. Most free software is not sustainable today, and it would be nice if Red Hat could be a good example of how to build a successful free software company.

Even if Red Hat terminates the contracts of customers who share the sources, this wouldn’t be against the GPL, but I think it would be nasty to scare your customers into not exercising their granted freedoms under the GPL.

My position is that I don’t think this is how a free software company should behave, but I’ll refrain from voicing any further opinions until Red Hat actually terminates a customer’s contract for redistribution.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

Red Hat has decided to stop allocating resources for maintaining and improving these parts of the freedesktop project. Red Hat isn’t working on proprietary versions of them. They’ve just decided to stop paying for work to be done on them. It just so happens that many of these projects were only being maintained by Red Hat employees, it seems.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

Not Power Profiles Daemon…

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

My work laptop doesn’t have a discrete GPU; I bought it explicitly to get better battery life (I really like the gaming laptop for its 120Hz screen and other specs, but the battery life made it a no-go). It gets around 4-5 hours, which is good enough for me, but I’m sure it would get better battery life on Windows.

How did you get better battery life on the gaming laptop, if you don’t mind my asking? It uses a NVIDIA GPU.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

Some good pointers, thanks! I imagine it’s mostly the 120Hz display that’s killing my battery life…which is a shame, but alas, sacrifices need to be made sometimes. I’ll have to give these things a try!

Was it hard to find an AMD dGPU laptop? There are almost none where I’m based.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago

all-AMD Asus Zephyrus G14

That was what I originally wanted! They were sold-out by the time I needed to buy one, so I went with an ASUS Scar something-something.

Most of the laptops I own are Dell laptops which originally came with Windows, on account of the 5-year repair deal where they repair it wherever you are (making use of IBM’s network to do so). I didn’t get a chance to see how the latest one worked with Windows 11 because I wiped it immediately…

I’ve heard good and bad things about Framework with Linux. I don’t know if I would end up buying it either way, as it seems like it would demand more experience than I have.

Spectacle8011, 10 months ago (edited 10 months ago)

I was buying a new laptop subsidized on 80% store credit, so I could only go for what they had in stock, unfortunately. I still haven’t had a single computer with an AMD GPU, but iGPU laptops give me a taste of what things could be like without NVIDIA…