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.

JPEG XL is partially based on FLIF/FUIF, which boasted/claimed the best lossless image compression on the planet.

WebP and AVIF are good at what they do, it’s just that Google insists on them being the only modern formats people should ever use, despite different formats being better in specific contexts.

I don’t think people would be as upset if Google gave people the choice to use other formats. The standards aren’t the problem, the monopoly is.

They’re modified grey wolves, Colossal Biosciences had a separate project on red wolves.

Pretty sure it’s 3, they have a history of claiming to resurrect extinct species when they’re just modifying existing species to be a little more similar to the extinct one.

They claimed to bring back dire wolves but they’re more similar to grey wolves. They make the argument that the genes they used are what most makes a dire wolf a dire wolf, but it’s controversial.

I also remember hearing they said they would bring back a population of red wolves by extracting red wolf DNA that had been absorbed into a coyote population, but seemed to ignore the existing red wolves (which could do with extra genetic diversity) and worked using coyotes as a base.

Possibly, I’m waiting until a motive is confirmed.

Everybody described him as being withdrawn, it seems like nobody but his roommates knew anything about him, but those roommates haven’t talked as much. It’s like none of the people that were physically around him were part of his world, and they describe him as being online a lot.

I think he was more shaped by the internet than the people physically around him. Especially since he was described as being apolitical until after he left his parents’ home.

No, but I also hear that there are a lot of leftists with right wing parents, especially in Utah. Maybe that was why he moved out, I don’t know.

Maybe he was more right wing instead. I don’t know. I’m not the person who was saying he was leftist. I was just pointing out that he wasn’t a registered Republican.

Not on its own, but he’s not exactly a registered Republican either. Just wanted to correct that one thing.

Yes, and the voter registration is for a Tyler Robinson, not a Tyler James Robinson.

The Snopes fact check has a screenshot of the registration of Tyler James Robinson.

Different person with same name

By the way, why do you think mRNA vaccines are genetic therapy?

RNA vaccines may be relatively new, but they aren’t genetic therapy. It does not get integrated into your DNA.

Plus, weren’t there 3 covid vaccines? One of them used a more traditional method.

Fortunately cash is still a common option in Australia (and I’m here), and likely will remain so for a long time. However, I’m increasingly hearing that other countries are increasingly refusing to accept cash.

It’s probably best to get something working on Linux phones before it’s too late, but as you said Google is worse than a thief, so whatever is made should not use it. Best to maximise the freedom for people in a horrible future, lest Android or iOS ever become the only viable options. Problem being I don’t know how that would work, especially since banks would probably hate freedom respecting systems.

I agree basic functionality is higher priority, but I fear tap to pay will reach basic functionality status in some other countries when their banks phase out any alternative. (I don’t think cryptocurrencies will ever become common). It may not directly impact me that other countries phase them out, but it will gradually kill the Linux phone ecosystem.