Yes! I mean, blame those who post AI-generated translations as if they were their own, or blame the AI scrappers that use those poorly generated pages for training, but it makes no sense to blame Wikipedia when the only thing they have done is just exist there and offer a platform for knowledge sharing.

In fact, this problem is hardly exclusive to Wikipedia, every platform with crowdsourced content is in some level susceptible to AI poisoning which ultimately ends up feeding other AIs, the loop exists in all platforms. Though I understand wanting to highlight particularly the risk of endangered languages being more vulnerable to this, since they have less content available to them so the AI models have a smaller dataset which makes them worse and more sensible to bad data.

And even if they did somehow manage to get permission to switch the license, all previous versions would still be open in perpetuity so a fork would come easily. Immich source isn’t only open, and not only GPL… but AGPL-3.0 which is as copyleft as you can get.

Did they work on developing new web standards to unlock that potential on the web?

Back then HTMLv5 wasn’t even a thing, there was no concept of video/microphone/gyroscope/gps access for webapps, notifications, web workers, web sockets, offline PWA webapps, etc. It was not a viable idea unless they actually were to invest big. They weren’t so committed. In Firefox OS even the dialer was a webapp, Mozilla brought forth a lot of innovative APIs to make it possible, many of which are in use today even after the OS was discontinued. And nowadays you even have things like Webassembly that allows you to code it in C or whatever low level language you want.

I feel Apple has always been more interested in their own ecosystem. Opening the web to have the same level of potential as the native apps from their walled garden goes against that strategy, so I don’t believe they were really serious about that approach, it’s always been more interesting for them to prioritize their native apps.

I wonder if resurrecting Firefox OS might still be an option. It was such an interesting idea having the webapps be first citizens.

There’s the KaiOS fork, but the direction is not really the same since it’s more targeted to low power keypad-based phones… and I believe they replaced much of the Gonk layer with a very stripped down low level Android base which isnt fully open source… maybe if they coordinated with the LibrePhone project and some hw manufacturers (like EU-based Nokia) we’d get a fully free stack.

Good marketing means achieving an arbitrary limit of what you consider “good” marketing. So it depends on where you set the bar.

The best marketing necessarily requires some level of unethical behavior, because being honest and saying the whole truth doesn’t sell. Everything has drawbacks and benefits… the better marketing minimizes (or even hides / fails to mention) the drawbacks and emphasizes the benefits, which is a form of deception.

I feel it’s a bit like the usability vs security dilemma… you can try to optimize to have both, but then you won’t have as a result neither the most secure system nor the smoothest user-friendly experience, but something in between (you might still consider that “secure” or “usable”, but that just depends on where you set your expectations).

If you want to maximize marketing then the result won’t be as ethical as it could be, and if you want to maximize ethics then the result won’t be as marketable as it could be.

I always saw I2P as a more modern and distributed onion-routing alternative to Tor.

The thing is that people are used to making use of Tor in different ways than the way they use I2P, but you can also have outproxies (ie. exit nodes/relays) in I2P the same way as in Tor… and you can also host a service inside the Tor network without relying on an exit node, like in I2P. It’s just that people only seem to want to host exit nodes for Tor and not so much for I2P, this led to internal communications in I2P being more common (which is a good thing), whereas in Tor it’s common to use it for anonymous access to the clearnet (which strains the network and causes chokepoints, specially with big downloads or torrent sharing). That’s just a matter of usage, not capability.

I think it makes sense to choose a phone that’s freer than most phones as a start, then fill up the gaps to make it fully free. As things are all phones have blobs (even non-Android ones).

I expect non-Android linux mobile OSes can also benefit from the reverse engineered firmware.

What should be the highest priority in terms of being able to use a fully FOSS phone? I feel we already have FOSS alternatives for most things that make the phone usable.

Perhaps free hardware might be top, but the S in FSF is Software and being able to avoid non-free software would be close 2nd, imho.

I expect it’s a combination of all the above in some sense. They state they want to build on LineageOS (an Android variant) and replace its binary blobs, I expect the result would be a new custom ROM targeting specific compatible hardware with the goal of ultimately supporting usable phones working on fully Free Software.

What it’s not is the creation of a libre hardware phone. I don’t think they are working on hardware, at least not anytime soon. Also if by “Linux phones” you mean non-Android based, that’s not necessarily a requirement (given that they mention LineageOS), but I expect regardless the kernel will be Linux without the blobs and it’s entirely possible that they add support for installing their firmware on those “Linux phones”.

I do kinda wish they’d focus on stuff that has a way bigger user impact 😅

The thing is that technically we already have fully usable FOSS software at that user level. Using for example LineageOS with F-droid as the only app store already gets you there. Whereas, ensuring your phone is not spying you or having some malicious functionality on the hardware/driver level is something that currently is simply not possible.

The FSF has always been doing the thankless job of championing for the things that are harder and less rewarding to do, but that will advance software freedom most for those who do seek it. Even when that thing is not necessarily the most popular/mainstream. I feel this has more of an impact in software freedom than, say, if they were to reinvent the wheel just to have their brand attached to it, and/or provide a slightly different UI to do the same thing other FOSS software already does.

There isn’t much concrete information, but my guess is that OS/ecosystem is exactly what this project is, and that they are not talking about physical hardware. Specially considering that they are putting the emphasis on free software (not hardware) and they are involving a software developer. Making a phone’s hardware free would be an entirely different beast.

In the afternoon, FSF executive director Zoë Kooyman announced an exciting new project: Librephone.

Librephone is a new initiative by the FSF to bring full computing freedom to mobile computing environments. The LibrePhone Project is a partnership with Rob Savoye, a developer who has worked on free software (including the GNU toolchain) since the 1980s. “Since mobile phone computing is now so ubiquitous, we’re very excited about LibrePhone and think it has the potential to bring software freedom to many more users all over the world.”

From the official FSF post about the event.

I didn’t downvote you, but it’s unclear what you meant by stating that.

Depending on how one interprets it, it can be seen as a justification for using “fascist” (since there isn’t a more accurate word) or simply a way to emphasize that the term is inaccurate and shouldn’t be used.

So I’m not surprised if you get up/down votes from both sides in either direction, specially in a polarizing discussion. Not because of what you said being wrong/right, but because of what they might read between lines.

In theory, it can. One possible reason with Btrfs might be that you are only mounting a subvolume even though there might be other files in the same filesystem (such as snapshots/copies of the subvolume for backup) but that are not being mounted.

Also some tools like gparted do not handle btrfs disk usage very well and will display it as if the whole partition is 100% full.

What’s your filesystem?

If you are using something like btrfs, for example, the usage reports can be misleading, and getting the exact size can be complicated… I’d recommend using more fs-specific tools, such as btdu.

I see, thanks for the overview.

If NixOS really does need a community in order for things to work at all, and it cannot be independent from it, then it looks like the moderation team asking for independence is a hard ask. It’ll require restructuring it.

However, with this context it looks to me that what they are asking is not really independence for the moderation team, but independence from Anduril… which are 2 completely different things. The message is misleading.

I get that big projects are not the same, but in my experience there’s always a hierarchy, not a collection of independent bodies (except for fan-made communities that are clearly “unofficial”, those are independent, sure). It’s not unheard of for maintainers at the top of the hierarchy to influence other parts of the organization, like moderation. In fact most open source projects are like that, led by a group of “benevolent dictators”.

For full independence, why not simply detach development from community?

You can even have multiple independent communities with multiple independent moderation teams all about the same software.

As a developer I’ve never needed to engage a particular community on a personal level in order to make a PR to a project… if the technical maintainers want to accept the change, they will, if they won’t then that’s fine, they probably have their reasons. It’s ok to communicate with communities to get feedback, but I’m not making contributions for the social approval, I’m making them when I believe they are useful, and most of the times I write them because I want to have that change myself. If it’s rejected and enough other people are interested in the change, it can be forked. That doesn’t mean I hate the maintainers or that I don’t want the original to exist or anything, it’s not personal.

But well, I understand that some communities wanna make software and they intertwine development and social relationships. However, if you do this then I don’t see how can independence be a thing. Either separate them and don’t intermix them or mix them and don’t expect them to be separate.

Yes, the matter of fact is that the reason why that choice was taken away is because everyone except MS was forbidden from “having” that engine. It might have still been alive today in some form had it not been an exclusive MS-owned thing.

Yes, I understand that. But in my view, Microsoft is the one that might have had “a non Google-reliant engine” (if it’s true that they didn’t rely on Google code).

They just let us use it under their conditions, for the limited time they decided to make it available to us… but it was never “ours”. We were just contractually allowed to use it, but we didn’t really “have” it.

Personally, I think if the engine was closed source, then we didn’t in fact “had that”. Maybe Microsoft had it, not us.

What makes things like chromium, firefox and webkit actual ecosystems is that they at least have an open source basis. Edge isn’t an ecosystem, it’s a black box. We don’t even know whether it’s true or not that it was its own thing or just they sneakily used bits and pieces of chromium from the start anyway.

User Agent checks is the easiest thing to overcome. Had edge’s engine been open source we would have had spins of it resolving the issue within hours. There are many examples of “random developers” succeeding where big companies tied by business strategies (I bet they had business reasons to keep a distinctive user agent) didn’t, to the point that the web runs on servers using FOSS software.