Tootfinder

I couldn't care less about a bunch of rich people in Brooklyn, I just read the article for the delicious drama. However, about halfway through the article, I started to see so many #FreeSoftware parallels.
1) Volunteers spend countless unpaid hours creating/maintaining something to better their community.
2) For-profit business packages it up as part of their offering.

It's so scary and painful to watch the speed and enthusiasm with which the bastion of software freedom that we built the past 40 years is being ripped apart by rust-infatuated drones doing Big Tech's biddings. Remove Copyleft protection at all cost so that we can steal all your work for our proprietary evils.
"So this is how liberty dies...with thunderous applause" -- Padmé Amidala
#FreeSoftware

Kinda related to #Gentoo, so cool" or "they stopped using it, so sad". And I'm like, "why should we care?"
Do they donate money to Gentoo? They don't. And if they did, it would probably come with obligations making this not worth it.
Do they contribute back? Rarely, and if they do, they are unreliable. They benefit more than we do. They just want to dump the packages they need, quickly duct taped together, so that we would maintain them going forward. Their employees rarely reveal that they're paid to do this, and if they do, it's not so they'd be held to higher standards, but to emphasize their importance: "you must placate us."
Well, sometimes they hire Gentoo developers. It's nice that these developers get some gratification for their work, especially if they're able to continue contributing on work time. But in the end, company priorities win. We are either left with loads of new packages with no maintainer and unclear significance, or a Google employee who appeared every once in a while to dump a bunch of ChromeOS patches and never bothered handling the fallout.
So, sorry, but I'd rather care for volunteers who want to make Gentoo better, than companies who see some profit incentive in it.
PS. I'm probably focusing too much on the negative aspects, and we likely had some positive interactions that are far less known and usually don't meet with such fanfare.
#FreeSoftware

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

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.

Slowly, but without pause, our #FLOSS slicer for resin #3dPrinting is starting to take shape :) .
#OpenResinAlliance ( #Resin3dPrinting #OpenSource #FreeSoftware

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

There's a new piece explaining "The Slow Collapse of #MkDocs": "How personality clashes, an absent founder, and a controversial redesign fractured one of Python's most popular projects."
#httpx?
Well, turns out no, not at all. It looks like encode has already crumbled and became immensely toxic.
httpx is not allowing bug reports anymore, apparently because of "absurdly skewed gender representation", whatever that means.
#OpenSource.
#FreeSoftware #Python

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

#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.

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

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

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

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