All companies should be required to release their entire codebase under the GPL if the product is no longer going to be maintained by them.

That way a community of people who actually care can maintain and improve it.

I play several games that run on 20+ year old engines, long since abandoned by their original creators. The community reverse engineered the games and server infrastructure so they can still be run and enjoyed today. Same for all the folks who develop emulators and the entire ecosystem of ROM dumpers, readers, and handhelds that surround them.

Capitalism is a cancer. So amazing that, at least in certain parts of the software world, we have something better.

This is also a friendly reminder to donate to and support your favorite FOSS projects! they need all the help they can get. ❤️

I hate these companies, they are the end game of hyper-consumerist Capitalism. Cheap junk, made largely with slave labor, with extremely toxic chemicals that destroy our environment, most of which gets dumped after a few uses in landfills to slowly rot and leak micro plastics into everything.

DO NOT BUY FROM THEM!!!

Influencers on TikTok doing $200 haul videos with huge boxes of this swill for their addicted viewers, it's horrific.

God bless iFixit, and God damn Samsung.

Anarchism understood as a proper model and not just "chaos" is about horizontal and distributed power structures.

The whole idea is that no single person or group has a monopoly on power. Now if you are asking how do anarchist societies prevent people or groups like that from rising up and forming monopolies of power, there are a bunch of different answers. Ultimately it's about collective action and proper structure.

If your organization's rules allow for a single person to rise up and take over, it isn't formed correctly. It's like the Fediverse, no one server or person gets to make the rules for all the other servers or developers.

Everything is federated by the choice of the instances and ultimately the users. If they don't agree with how any instance is being run, they can start their own and run it how they want, federating with who they want assuming it is mutual.

Anybody can fork the project at any time, build it different, start a new instance, run it how they want, etc.

You build into your society, mechanisms that resist monopolies of power. It's like how your body's immune system has layers of protection against all kinds of germs.

Another example, in typical small company the structure is top-down with the owner usually being a single person with universal power over all their employees. They can hire and fire whoever they want whenever they want. They can shut down the company or change how any part of it operates whenever they want. Nothing in that company structure protects the employees from abuse by the owner.

There is no magic bullet to protect against everything, just like how your body despite being healthy and strong can still succumb to cancer, infection, poison, etc. That isn't a reason to just give up on being fit and healthy, because it is about improving your odds and trying to make your life on the average better.

This has Systemd vs Runit vibes. No matter how many anti-systemd folks scream to me about how horrible it is for XYZ technical reasons, every Linux distro I've ever used for years, desktop and server, has used systemd and I've never experienced single problem that those users claim I will.

Same here with Wayland. All the major desktop environments and distros have or are implementing Wayland support and are phasing out X. The only reason I'm not on Wayland on my main computer already is because of a few minor bugs that should be ironed out in the next 6-12 months with the newest release of plasma.

It's not because Wayland is unusable. I try switching to Wayland about every 6-9 months, and every time there have been fewer bugs and the bugs that exist are less and less intrusive.

Any time you get hardcore enthusiasts and technical people together in large community, this will happen. The mechanical keyboard community is the same way, people arguing about what specific formula of dielectric grease is optimal to lube your switches with and what specific method of applying it is best.

At a certain point, it becomes fundamentalism, like comic book enthusiasts arguing about timeline forks between series or theology majors fighting about some minutia in a 4th century manuscript fragment. Neither person is going to change their views, they are just practicing their arguments back and forth in ever-narrowing scopes of pros and cons, technical jargon, and the like.

Meanwhile the vast majority of users couldn't care less, and just want to play games, browse the web, and chat with friends, all of which is completely functional in Wayland and has been for a while.

It's the timeless debate between accessibility and exclusivity. Do you want more people in your community by compromising some values? Or would you rather be a hardliner but never reach those people?

Most of the time you have to pick somewhere on that spectrum. It's a question of pragmatism and utilitarianism.

Does it do more good for lots of people to be slightly more privacy-aware, or is it better to have a very small portion of the population that are super privacy-aware?

You have to decide, and the debate rages on all the time.

Gee, if only there was some way to have seen this coming before hand...

Bitwarden password manager. I've used several proprietary PW managers, Bitwarden is by far the most stable, intuitive, and functional IMO.

I thought that when the clerk at the checkout asked, "would you like cash back?" That you could say yes and they would just give you cash straight out of the register for nothing lol.

I figured that most people were very honest and didn't need the money, so they would just say no thanks and leave it in the register for somebody who really did need it.

But you forgot that the truck can be used to haul 4 pieces of lumber twice a year!