Neither wins here. I cannot tell you how many libraries I have had to replace because FOSS devs move on. It’s probably greater than the number of products I’ve had to abandon for lack of support but I’m not sure what that is at a percentage level. In the DevOps world everything burns constantly, paid and free.
It’s very misleading to say “paying for software is stupid” and not consider the total cost of ownership. TCO includes things like infrastructure and maintenance. As an exec, I am constantly faced with two choices: free software that might do what I want or paid software that sort of does what I want. At face value, you would immediately tell me to get the free stuff. That’s where you miss TCO.
(Read the last paragraph if you think the business lens is bullshit)
Every FOSS solution I run requires me to deploy and maintain it. I only have so many hours in the day so at some threshold I have to hire more and more people to deploy and maintain. Integrating? That’s on me too because I’m using free software so now I need a resource to glue things together. My “free” option actually costs a portion of my engineering resources. I’m also on the hook for failures. Running my own ERP? I need to have support staff on-call to handle outages.
Every paid solution I run costs can require some of those things. Let’s ignore paid licenses and just focus on things I can completely outsource. This means I’m no longer on the hook for deployment and maintenance, so if I can show the cost of the paid software is less than my TCO, it’s a better deal. If I have a good relationship with the vendor, I might be able to delegate my integration needs to their product pipeline. I might be able to purchase a support contract that’s cheaper than running my own.
At some point every company will outgrow certain software. It’s a constant reevaluation of the costs of paid vs TCO of free and when I need to spend resources making it do something it doesn’t. A managed telemetry stack like Sumo or New Relic allows me to scale quickly but cheaply until I have the revenue to build an in-house team to instrument fucking everything.
The exact same logic applies to my time. I could run free everything. That comes with a higher TCO (usually). I say this as someone who has rebuilt dot files repos on the dot every three years and been running Linux since you could get it in a book at B Dalton at the indoor shopping mall so my tolerance for personal TCO is very high. However, I don’t change my own oil. It’s free! I could do it myself! I don’t want to. I buy certain things, like software, in my personal life because the TCO of FOSS is higher than I want to pay. I have outgrown Windows and Mac so I have some level required cost in Linux. I pay for some things like storage and routing solutions even though I could build and deploy and maintain all of that myself. Sometimes I just want my shit to work and not have to do it myself.
Just alias pdoman=podman. I do that with all my common typos.
That explanation runs counter to my experience with VC-funded companies, marketing budgets, and running in the red in general. Trying to hit as much of the total addressable market as possible means burning money. Notice how I expanded and included discounts? You don’t even get a 5% off code. Framework is making a profit so they can lose margin on a low percentage (if they’re not making a profit then there’s no reason to not throw away more to get closer to TAM anyway).
Board games run in the thousands for some of the bigger ticket items. I’m not sure you understand either market. I regularly crowdfund packages that are more than at least 25% of the Framework prices I’m skimming now.
You’ve done a great job summarizing the bad things they’re doing!
Game promos are usually expensive long-term because they’re produced in limited batches.
Most board game companies run off Kickstarter. Your distinction doesn’t really apply because it’s not normal to get external funding. Framework just hit their Series A which, usually, includes money for marketing and running in the red. Board game companies usually can’t run in the red.
I thought that there was no way this was unpaid and that the ambassadors would get Framework tech. Nope. You have to already own it. Doesn’t even seem like it comes with a discount even?
I am a product “ambassador” for several things in the gaming world. I get access to new things earlier and at a discounted rate. I get free promotional items that actually have some value. I sometimes get a per diem if I do certain events. I feel valued. I don’t get that vibe at all from this.
You realize that Bitcoin is traceable, right? You kinda picked the wrong crypto to use as an example. Unless you’re completely in the Bitcoin system and never connect to any outside system or interact with anyone who interacts with an outside system or interact with anyone who interacts with someone who interacts with an outside system or so on (it’s not quite ad infinitum), you are most likely traceable. Tools like Chainalysis have been used by governments for almost a decade.
Your other points aren’t really valid if you ever want to convert Bitcoin to something that isn’t Bitcoin. I’m not aware of complete supply chains and grids that exist solely on Bitcoin (or any combination of crypto for that matter) so things like having control of your money, needing ID, and trusting centralized entities (sure, exchanges plural) are a huge part of Bitcoin.
It doesn’t sound like you have a good grasp on the differences between this case and Ross Ulbricht.
I wasn’t aware Silk Road was taken down via FISA. I’ve read all of the long form accounts of it that I’m aware of and I don’t remember FISA being mentioned at all. Can you share a source?
That’s fair. I don’t disagree with licensing comments necessarily. I think users doing it to provide the basis for a legal argument is fine. I think my pushback comes from my lack of trust in any of these users actually acting on their license which could be construed as victim-shaming. I’m hung up on the follow-through which careful analysis like yours really highlights.
Calling a license by anything other than its name and stated purpose is something I’d dare to call mislabeling. If CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 decides to add “anti-commercial-AI” then and only then is it not mislabeling. That’s like me calling the US copyrights of the books sitting next to me “anti-bitfucker” licenses. They have nothing to do with you at this point in time so it is misleading for me to claim otherwise.
While you are correct that lemmy itself does not add a license and many instances do not add a license, it’s not as simple as “the user notifies [you] must abides by [their] licenses.” Jurisdiction matters. The Fediverse host content is pulled from matters. Other myriad factors matter. As you correctly pointed out, there is no precedence for any of this so as I pointed out unless you’re willing to go to court and can prove damages it is actually useless.
I feel like a better analogy is someone who signs their text messages which is a more recent problem than people with obnoxiously long forum signatures.
They’re mislabeling the license too. CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 has nothing to do with “anti-commercial-AI.” It provides some terms for using content and, in theory if OP is willing to take someone to court, should provide some basis if the license is being abused. Until there’s actual precedence, though, it’s debatable whether or not sucking up CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 content is a breach of the license. For it to actually matter, someone needs to demonstrably prove 1) CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 content was sucked up by AI, 2) it was their content and it was licensed at the time, 3) the terms of the license were violated, and 4) other legal shit that will pop up during the course of the litigation. “Someone” has to be someone with deep fucking pockets willing to go the distance in many international jurisdictions.
I really struggle with the justification present in the article. “I need to emulate to do my job as an academic” is pretty hollow. “I want to emulate because I want to learn” is the real reason and, as an academic myself, I don’t feel like there’s a higher ground that gives me access to literally anything I want just because I want to learn.
If the argument was “the copyright system is fucked and knowledge needs to be more open” I would be 100% behind that. I feel that way. I just don’t think someone should get to say “show me your secrets because I’ve arbitrarily decided to make my next publication about your secrets.”
I like how simple it is. It’s made distrohopping very, very simple for me over the years. The only pet machines I have are my actual dev boxes. The rest are cattle I manage with other tools. Galaxy has also made it much simpler to consume other Ansible which used to be really annoying.
I’m on the fence about Nix. When I first saw years ago it was yet another package management system. I’ve seen enough interesting things with it now that I’ll probably try it out the next time I want to rebuild my configs from scratch.
I really like Ansible and have used it for my personal dotfiles for years. I don’t think it’s a silver bullet and I’m aware of a lot of the criticism. Containerization or immutable infra solves more production problems so I don’t really use it much at work.
At least in the devops/SRE circles I work in, we know there are different tools for different jobs. While we might fight about which is the best, I haven’t seen the ossification you’re describing.
It’s okay to be naive! The video talks about what data your bank has and how that gets used, as a security professional I know how all of this data is tied together plus the other data (assuming you don’t vote either?), and you don’t think there is anything tied to you so cool. Have fun with that. Keep pushing crypto.
That’s fair! I agree with that.