I think there’s been a misunderstanding about the issue. They’re rewording other people’s emails and presenting it as their own work. If they just directly quoted the email it wouldn’t be an issue.
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You’re not making sense friend.
Firstly, the GNOME Foundation’s financial woes long predate the rise in AI scrapers.
the increase in hosting costs which is hitting everyone for the last few months
I know of no such increase.
it is obviously sensible to assume
I disagree. There’s no need to make assumptions. And even if there were, this does not seem like a sensible assumption to make given that the GNOME Foundation’s financial woes long predate the rise in AI scrapers.
That’s not GNOME-specific. [email protected] is saying GNOME have experienced “massively increased hosting costs” but there’s no mention of increased hosting costs in the article I linked to, massive or otherwise, and as far as I know, nobody has mentioned any increase in the context of GNOME, hence my question.
the massively increased hosting costs.
Eh? What increased hosting costs?
It’s really, really, really bad reportage. 90% of what they post is just rewording emails from mailing lists with nothing added at all. They’re just regurgitating words they don’t understand.
They focus a lot on drama and it’s like a twelve year old decided to write about all the most superficial drama without any technical understanding of what they’re writing about.
Their “benchmarks” have been heavily criticised too and it’s clear they basically have no idea what they’re doing and the numbers aren’t to be trusted.
Their English prose is terrible. “For this …” wut?
All in all, just a sorry excuse for a website. If it were a newspaper, the appropriate term for it would be a “rag”.
The GNOME Foundation has been going downhill for a while, they keep having to cut spending, and cut, and cut. The latest is:
https://www.phoronix.com/news/GNOME-GitHub-GitLab-Redirect
(Forgive the Phoronix link.)
12·2 months agoThis comment thread is about your opinion on the developers wanting to gain renumeration for their efforts.
No it’s about the Home Assistant developers valuing profit over well engineered software.
I’d say they are focussed on making well engineered software over making money.
I think you must have a different idea of what “well engineered software” means because to me, nothing you’ve said implies a focus on making well engineered software.
Writing software without remuneration doesn’t imply a focus on well engineered software. A person can write software without remuneration with a focus on anything, not necessarily good engineering. For example, one can write software without remuneration with a focus on financial reward in future. Which is exactly what appears to have happened. Working without pay to build a business with the expectation that the business will be profitable in future doesn’t imply that the business will be built on good engineering.
Helping secure remote access for those who don’t know how to do it themselves doesn’t imply a focus on well engineered software. Educating people isn’t the same thing as engineering software, let alone engineering software well. Ease of use isn’t the same thing as good engineering; one can engineer easy to use software well and one can engineer easy to use software poorly. Nabu Casa Inc. have done the latter.
Eh?
The software is free, but no dev works for free.
It’s possible to engineer software well and still earn a living.
That said, engineering software poorly is often a choice, usually made by people who are poor engineers. In some cases, and I suspect this may be the case for Nabu Casa Inc., the people are such poor engineers that they aren’t even aware that their software is poorly engineered. Many technology companies are better at business than they are engineering.
Edit: actually no, I don’t think Nabu Casa Inc. are unaware of their poor engineering, I think they just don’t care. They’re far more concerned with maintaining their company’s profits.
Why so negative?
It’s clear that the Nabu Casa Inc. people, who also happen to be the Home Assistant project leaders, are focussed on making money over making well engineered software.
For example, Home Assistant’s settings page includes an entry for Nabu Casa Inc.'s cloud services product as the first entry in the list and there’s no option to switch it off.
Home Assistant is engineered in such a way as to make it difficult to install on operating systems that aren’t under control of Nabu Casa Inc., like Home Assistant OS or Home Assistant Container. If Home Assistant were engineered well, it would be simple to take individual Home Assistant packages and build and install them on any distribution, as has been customary in the free software community for decades. As far as I know, there’s no reason Home Assistant must be an operating system rather than simply individual packages. See https://feddit.uk/post/17543373 and especially https://feddit.uk/post/17543373/12207671 .
Bands also makes merch to increase their income, should we hate on them as well?
If a band makes selling merch their purpose, over and above making decent music, then I would likewise scorn them.
Oh, and before I forget: have you seen our brand new merch store?
🤮
Nobody from GNOME has linked the Gitlab -> GitHub redirect to the rise in AI scrapers.
I surely would were you only to provide references to sources backing up your claims.