Tootfinder

I've been wondering lately if my job is #bullshit.
I've given it a lot of thought, and I think it's not directly bullshit. I'm doing stuff that's meaningful, at least in a narrow scope, both in my dayjob and my #FreeSoftware / #Gentoo work.
That said, with the arrival of all the bullshit CEOs, CTOs, all their bootlickers, wannabe bootlickers, and all the CEO/CTO/bootlicker cosplayers, the whole software industry is becoming filled with bullshit to the brim.
Even if my work is meaningful, it contributes more and more to software that's either scam in itself, used to scam people or pure unadulterated bullshit. Even if the tools used to be useful, they either gain bullshit parts or bullshit dependencies.
I hate this, and it's making me hate what I'm doing.

Beginning a new #FreeSoftware project and I want to have an inclusive code of conduct in place right from the beginning. Anyone have any good examples to share to help me get started?

I feel like desktop GNU/Linux nowadays (especially around #GNOME) is a lot like: "Do you recall this thing #Android does that you really hate? Good news, everyone, we just copied it to our application, and you can't switch back!"
#FreeSoftware

Being able to use modern technology without being an addict is starting to sound like a superpower!
#Privacy #Security #FreeSoftware

For a project to be truly #OpenSource (not to mention #FreeSoftware), it really needs to:
1. Have a *public* issue tracker that enables you to browse and search through issue reports *without* having to create an account.
2. Accept issue reports, with no strings attached. Yes, expecting registration is fine. Yes, expecting some effort to file a good bug report is fine. No, expecting people to ask permission, donate or otherwise put a lot of extra work to report a problem is not.
3. Do not close issue reports as "stale". Yes, it's fine to close a report if you really believe it was fixed, or if you asked for something and the user didn't reply for a long time. It's not fine to run a bot expecting users to jump every month so that the issue report that *you are ignoring* doesn't get closed.
If a project doesn't meet these, it's just a glorified throwaway code.

A particularly bad kind of trolls are the "concern" trolls. These are the kind of people who say "well, yes, I fully agree that freezing to death is bad and we definitely should do something about it, but I would really like to make sure that we fully evaluated the danger of people burning themselves on a hot heater".
(Simplified. In reality, it's usually a long essay, followed by even more tiring debate.)
#FreeSoftware

Just a random reminder that #Qt is not a good choice. Qt is an #OpenSource spew of a malicious company whose business model is based on constant API churn, and selling proprietary security support to people who can't keep up and are stuck on old versions.
Many volunteers (including #Gentoo developers) are spending hours keeping the previous Qt version alive, so people can continue using software that hasn't been ported to the next version yet, and helping with porting. Dozens of useful programs are dying along with old Qt versions.
#FreeSoftware

I think the most neglected thing about helping others is that you should actually ask what kind of help they need. "Helping" without actually understanding their needs is inefficient at best, and outward harmful at worse.
While this is an important thought in general, it also applies to creating patches for #FreeSoftware.

#LLM users should be obliged to buy *expensive* scraping offsets, and the money should go to #FreeSoftware projects that have to cope with their infrastructure being *killed* by crappy #AI scrapers.
Yes, #Gentoo is suffering from another wave. And yes, if you use their projects and therefore support their business model, please don't use Gentoo.

Oh, "nice". I see that #GitHub now #PGP-signs commits made via the web UI with its own key, and gives them a green "Verified" label as if *you* actually signed them.
Not that you could ever really trust labels displayed by a third party, but still.
#OpenSource #FreeSoftware

Whenever a #FreeSoftware project is suffering from onslaught of low quality LLM-generated pull requests, there will be a bunch of #LLM lovers complaining that people shouldn't be talking of "LLM-generated" being part of the problem, because "using AI isn't bad" in itself. Of course, they entirely ignore all the ethical and environmental concerns, and probably write crappy code themselves.
#AI #NoAI

Let's get this straight: it is entirely normal for a #OpenSource project to accumulate bug reports over time. They're not a thing to be ashamed of.
On the contrary, if you see a nontrivial project with a very small number of bug reports, it usually means one of the following:
a. you've hit a malicious fake,
b. the project is very young and it doesn't have many users (so it's likely buggy),
c. the project is actively shoving issues under the carpet.
None of that is a good sign. You don't want to use that (except for b., if you're ready to be the beta tester).
#FreeSoftware #Gentoo #GitHub #Python

How to absolutely *not* do #OpenSource: require people to commit to work on other issues with your project in order to file bugs. So, sorry, #Typer, I won't be filing bugs. You figure out how you messed up your release yourself.
Also, please don't use #FastAPI. They are clearly bothered by the fact that people dare use their projects and waste their precious time with support requests.
#Python #FreeSoftware #Gentoo

Honestly, looking at the license violation thread of #chardet, I really feel like #OpenSource these days is a complete shitshow and I really don't feel like a part of the community anymore. Almost all replies are basically assholes questioning whether there "legally" is actually a problem there. Nobody's concerned that the whole thing is a huge dick move, which makes the maintainer a complete dick and nobody with a shed of morality left would be willing to approve this.
Also, it's a great opportunity to seed some GitHub blocklists.
#FreeSoftware #AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM

New on #blog: "Money isn’t going to solve the #burnout problem"
"""
The xz-utils backdoor situation brought the problem of FLOSS maintained burnout into the daylight. This in turn lead to numerous discussion on how to solve the problem, and the recurring theme was funding maintenance work.
While I’m definitely not opposed to giving people money for their FLOSS work, if you think that throwing some bucks will actually solve the problem, and especially if you think that you can just throw them once and then forget, I have bad news for you: it won’t. Surely, money is a big part of the problem, but it’s not the only reason people are getting burned out. It’s a systemic problem, and it’s in need of systemic solution, and that’s involves a lot of hard work undo everything that’s happened in the last, say, 20 years.
But let’s start at the beginning and ask the important question: why do people make free software?
"""
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #AI #NoAI #LLM #NoLLM #Gentoo

Sometimes I wonder why do I even bother. I mean, people are perfectly happy to let statistical models designed as bullshit generators do their coding. Why do I even bother running their test suites and inspecting the failures as a human, if these tests may well be complete bullshit?
#FreeSoftware #OpenSource #Gentoo #Python #AI #LLM #NoAI #NoLLM #VibeCoding