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Cake day: July 10th, 2023

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  • I would argue that it is about incentives. A market economy is about maximizing profit, so that (the class of) shareholders get more money out of it, than they put into it. Incentivising making money means you incentives a race to the bottom, producing lots of expensive and addicting crap that easily breaks for as little cost as possible. And you incentivise massive consumption of it.

    A socialist economy should instead incentivise improving the world for all the people that live in it. Produce stuff that is robust, adaptable, sustainable and so on. Incentivise the mindfulness of the social and ecological impact of each product. And if someone needs something special, incentivise local makerspaces etc. that allows people to produce custom stuff in low quantities.



  • I found the main issue with many non-rolling release distributions are the upgrade instructions from one stable release to the next, and not the difficulty of installing them.

    I’m myself a Archlinux guy, but that does sometimes require some carefulness and regularly (at least weekly) applying updates and does not have stable automatic updates, so I started installing Fedora atomic desktop distributions (Fedora Silverblue/Kinolite/etc.) for people that just want to use their device for basic stuff.

    The reason for that is long term maintainability without an expert at hand.

    I had so many bad experiences updating distributions from one stable version to the next, be it Debian and Ubuntu-based, or Fedora-based distributions.

    And with those atomic desktop distributions the amount of moving parts is much lower, so hopefully upgrading them to newer releases is much more stable.

    So I would suggest giving Fedora Silverblue (Gnome desktop), Kinolite (KDE) or Budgie Edition a try.






  • Well I can only speak for myself, but I prefer games stores in that order:

    1. GOG, because DRM free and they don’t enforce game updates.
    2. Steam, because they are well integrated into the SteamDeck, they push Linux gaming, and Gabe seems to be an alright guy.
    3. Itch.io, because lots of indy games
    4. Epic Game store, good: free games, bad: Epic and Tim Sweeney.

    There are business decisions with all of them that I dislike.

    For the top dog PC game store, Valve could behave much much worse. Epic is still in the customer and game developer acquisition phase (and still behave like a d*ck with their exclusive deals), if the ever manage to push Valve aside, I believe they will be much worse.




  • The problem is EAs business model for this game. It is free to pay, so EA need to extract money otherwise. They introduce some gamified resource collection and crafting with exponentially rising costs, etc. And hope that gamers circumvent that by buying stuff with real money. Now players don’t all want or can’t do that, and look for alternative solutions.

    So EAs business model drives people to cheat. To cheat them primarily and other players secondarily.

    And because of their business model, they cannot solve the cheating between players by giving them dedicated servers or just let them P2P match, because they would loose control over them and their ability to extract more money.




  • So you meant to say:

    I would go as far as to say that Bitwarden’s main competitive advantage and differentiation is that it’s source is available.

    That is not true, there are a lot of other password management software out there where the client source code is either open source or source available. For instance keyguard: https://github.com/AChep/keyguard-app?tab=License-1-ov-file#readme which is an alternative proprietary bitwarden client, where the source is also available. Also the Proton Pass client is under GPLv3.

    I would argue that the main advantage of bitwarden compared to others is that it is open source and has an open source server for self-hosting (vaultwarden). Which of course makes it difficult in terms of business strategy with their VC funding. But maybe becoming a non-profit org and getting money from donors, the strategic funds of EU and other governments, etc. might be an alternative way.


  • Ok, lets take it step by step:

    Thanks for sharing your concerns here. We have been progressing use of our SDK in more use cases for our clients. However, our goal is to make sure that the SDK is used in a way that maintains GPL compatibility.

    • the SDK and the client are two separate programs

    I think they meant executable here, but that also doesn’t matter. If both programs can only be used together and not separate, and one is under GPLv3, then the other needs to be under GPLv3 too.

    • code for each program is in separate repositories

    How the code is structured doesn’t matter, it is about how it is consumed by the end-user, there both programs are delivered together and work together.

    • the fact that the two programs communicate using standard protocols does not mean they are one program for purposes of GPLv3

    The way those two programs communicate together, doesn’t matter, they only work together and not separate from each other. Both need to be under GPLv3

    Being able to build the app as you are trying to do here is an issue we plan to resolve and is merely a bug.

    Not being able to build a GPLv3 licenses program without a proprietary one, is a build dependency. GPLv3 enforces you to be able to reproduce the code and I am pretty sure that the build tools and dependencies need to be under a GPLv3 compatible license as well.

    But all of that still doesn’t explain what their goal of introducing the proprietary SDK is. What function will it have in the future? Will open source part be completely independent or not? What features will depend on the close-source part, and which do not? Have they thought about any ethical concerns, that many contributors contributed to their software because it under a GPL license? How are they planning on dealing with the loss of trust, in a project where trust is very important? etc.


  • None of that makes Bitwarden not open source.

    Yes, it does, because it violates its own license GPLv3 by having proprietary build-/runtime dependencies.

    If it was under a different, maybe more permissive, open source license, then maybe it would still be open source, but as of right now i likely breaks its own license terms.

    Not only that, they specifically state this is a bug which will be addressed.

    From what they state, they think that because executables that share internal information via standard protocols does somehow not break GPL3 terms compared to two libraries that share internal state via the standardized C ABI which does. And they seem to not consider that a bug, just the build-time dependency.