Well, you certainly made me feel much more optimistic, thank you.

I suppose you’re right that copyleft is not the primary motivator for contributions.

I’m aware that forks happen often when a takeover is attempted. There are many big success stories in FOSS. However, my point was that most FOSS software isn’t that successful. There are plenty of projects out there with very few contributors, and it is those I’m saying are easy for taking over. Perhaps they get taken over because most of the community doesn’t care, but it still happens from time to time. I originally commented because you seemed to make out that proprietisation was impossible.

I get your point that it’s incredibly unlikely for anything that matters however.

Edit: I think I misremembered an example I gave of a successful fork after an attempted takeover, but it was something Oracle.

I suppose it’s true that neither would have been called feature complete by its authors, proprietisation is much more likely when there is still a lot missing. But I would still caution against thinking that having all the features you need means you’re immune to it.

Sorry, I didn’t explain what I was talking about.

The problem is that in the modern software environment there’s a constant need for updating and patching, and if a proprietary fork provides those updates and a free original can’t keep up for whatever reason, the proprietary fork (that could have contributed otherwise) gains inertia until the free original dies. This is admittedly harder to pull off in a mature and well maintained free software ecosystem, but I think you’d be surprised how many important free software projects lack needed manpower. It doesn’t help that MIT practically encourages people not to publish code, compared to GPL.

People make out forking like it’s a big protection against proprietisation, and it is, but it’s not foolproof. Good forks are usually founded by community members that already understand and contribute to the code, most forks actually die quickly. The fewer contributors relative to the project’s size and complexity, the more realistic it is to either be overtaken by a more competitive proprietary fork, or for the maintainers to sell out and relicense without anybody to fork it.

Realistically, I don’t know how likely this would happen to anything decently important, but it has happened at least a few times. I remember using Paint .NET while it was still MIT licensed years back, but nobody forked it. Since we’re on Lemmy, Reddit used to use a Free software license.

Code complete is arguably a myth when talking about security. You need to update when vulnerabilities are found at minimum. Sometimes, the changing software environment changes and so the software has to start adding features again or get replaced. Rarely old features are the vulnerability, and have to be removed.

From the description, it sounds like the children might have mtDNA from the mother, so they have 3 genetic parents. Still a very impressive feat, from what I understand up until now nobody had found which genes to trigger a sort of cellular reset to do this, and trying to reset everything doesn’t work.

That’s fair, sometimes people seem to think any amount of effort or understanding is pretentious.

You are correct that they are ignoring ð. I just saw they already said that they were using HeliBoard with accent characters turned on, holding t to get þ. It seems like while it’s possible with the keyboard set to English, they are ignoring the ð that appears over d. I just downloaded it to check, setting “Show more letters with diacritics in popup” to “Add common variants”.

Their use of þ is inconsistent with any orthography in modern use for any language, and it can be obnoxious. However, I would hesitate to say it’s wrong, especially given this context, where we aren’t talking about borrowed words, and it looks like they’re not using an Icelandic keyboard. They’re reviving an old grapheme in the way it was last used in English, even if it was used differently before. Obnoxious, but I wouldn’t say incorrect.

Also, you reminded me of something, what do you think about people saying Mexico with an English ks for x? I can agree that it’s a reminder that English speakers happily ignore other languages to an offensive degree, but do you argue this way whenever somebody says it that way?

Understandable, but are they specifically claiming to be inspired by Old English? If they’re inspired by how it was sometimes used in Middle English, it sounds like you’re upset they were inspired by the wrong time period.

Þatt wass full wel, forr itt wass don

All all se Drihhtin wollde.

Forr he comm dun wiþþ Godess word,

To kiþenn it onn eorþe

An excerpt from The Ormalum, from Early Middle English.

Yes, eth (ð) was used as a voiced counterpart of thorn (þ) for some time between Old and Middle English, but as this isn’t important for distinguishing words, people eventually stopped using eth in favour of thorn for voiced dental fricatives at some point in Middle English. Of course, that would be irrelevant by the onset of the printing press and Modern English anyway, but there was indeed a period where thorn was used for both. It’s not incorrect.

If it’s anything like religious “Great Awakenings” that the US seems to go through every now and again (which I think it is), I think you’ll find the movement much smaller than it first was as people on the fringes peel away quietly with each disappointment. They didn’t lose anybody for years because they didn’t really get to be disappointed, but now they have their promised messiah back in power they’re struggling to make sense of it all. The core might double down after each disappointment until the leader dies, but each time they have to add a new layer of complexity to what they believe, and each time they will lose a few people, particularly people that find the least community and identity through the movement. People that won’t lose as much if they leave.

Where at the peak of some “Great Awakenings” the majority of people are part of the movement, by the end it’s sometimes just a small community of a few thousand members. There is never a single event that causes most people to leave, it’s gradual.

Edit: I’d also like to note that they didn’t have much opportunity to be disappointed in his first term (most of the terrible things he did didn’t really disappoint his followers) until the end when people were dying and inflation was rising, but their messiah was out of power before they saw the full effect of it, and so they got to blame somebody else for inflation and Covid deaths and so on (if they even believed Covid existed).

Y2.1K, assuming Ubuntu lasts that long.

I think they’d just roll over to 100.04

As far as I’m aware, contributor license agreements can include a clause stating that you agree to hand over copyright on submission of code. If every contributor has signed the CLA, there is only only one copyright holder, making relicensing easy.

However, successfully using this to relicense to something less open is extremely rare, and this isn’t a concern anyway as they don’t have a CLA.

I should probably add: if it becomes proprietary, the remaining soft fork will likely die. Turns out very few people have the technical knowledge for Audacity.

If you want to read the telemetry controversy/drama, I found this one I’d read years ago: https://github.com/audacity/audacity/pull/835

I remember feeling a bit bad for the maintainers. There’s a lot of complaining for a minor and optional change, but at the same time it’s interesting that they added telemetry anyway. (Not unmodified however)

As far as I remember, Audacity’s maintainers, previously just some volunteers with no organisation, decided to sell the ownership of the project to a company with some guitar platform. Nothing changed at first, they employed the maintainers to work on the same project they were already working on.

Then they started adding controversial telemetry and some soft forks appeared. I vaguely also remember hearing that there’s some contract that the company owns the source code, so relicensing to a proprietary licence is easy and possible in future. All the new software the company launches is proprietary, and there’s signs they want to tie it all together into a single suite.

Nothing majorly bad has happened to Audacity, yet. But decisions are no longer community driven, as shown by the telemetry drama. I fear it’s a matter of time.

What stops those open source projects having that same rugpull? AOSP was open source and for a long time could be installed on one’s phone indefinitely.

You could argue ownership, but if Audacity can be bought then so can nearly anything.

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I remember being a big fan of FLIF when it came out. I remember it had come out of nowhere to steal PNG’s crown, and then the author suddenly disappeared before finishing it. I soon learned they had been picked up by a company to work on a successor named FUIF and then some time after that FUIF was merged into JPEG XL.

Because of this, I was really excited when JPEG XL came out. An obscure but brilliant format had essentially been merged into the successor to JPEG, and I thought it was really going to take off. It had support from many major tech companies including Google. Browsers quickly started adding experimental support and then… nothing.

Soon after JPEG XL was finalised, AVIF was too, and AVIF was essentially Google’s attempt at making a successor to WebP, by using much the same technology as AV1. So the question was, which one to support? Google made a comparison between image formats, focusing almost exclusively on lossy compression ratios (which I think isn’t entirely fair, considering they both have a lossless mode to compete with PNG) and AVIF won. So they dropped JPEG XL from Chromium, claiming lack of interest or something (which was wild, I’d never heard of a faster uptake of an image format). Soon after, Firefox was talking about removing it too, but ended up deciding to wait and see.

Things looked bleak until Apple picked it up, and then things have just stalled since. I’m happy there’s still interest in JPEG XL, its FLIF/FUIF derived lossless encoding produces smaller files than both AVIF’s lossless encoding and PNG, while having features neither could dream of.

PNG only supports 4 colour channels, RGBA. JPEG XL supports up to 4099… In case you ever needed that for depth or thermal data or something.

PNG only supports 8 and 16 bits for each colour channel, JPEG XL supports up to 32 bits for each colour channel. In case you have something physically capable of displaying the difference.

I’d talk about HDR support, but PNG added that recently when it also made animation support official, rather than an extension. Which JPEG XL also supports.

To be fair, I still use PNG out of habit, and because I can’t show anybody .jxl files over the internet like I can .png files. Also I mentally associate PNG with quality, while JPEG XL sounds like a big JPEG, which it can also be if you switch it to lossy mode.