Re: Microsoft's revenue structure

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 15/05/24 04:49, Marc Sunet ha scritto:
Which reminds me, how is it still legal for an OEM to ship a "default" 
OS in a computer without giving the customer any choice [...]? Has this been an 
avenue of research for the FSF or some other organization lately?


It's already illegal in the EU, according to multiple court rulings 
applying the EU treaties.


https://fsfe.org/news/2014/news-20140912-01.en.html
https://fsfe.org/news/2021/news-20210302-01.en.html
https://wiki.fsfe.org/Activities/WindowsTaxRefund

It's no mystery that Microsoft engages in industrial-scale illegality 
nevertheless. Nowadays many orgs focus their antitrust enforcement 
activity on the newest tool in the block, the DMA: «Device Neutrality is 
the policy concept to regulate monopoly over devices and re-establish 
end-user control over their digital equipment. The Digital Markets Act 
(DMA) regulates the economic activity of large digital platforms and 
introduces Device Neutrality into EU legislation, fostering access to 
Free Software in devices».


https://fsfe.org/activities/dma/dma.html

Federico

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Re: Truth Social as an example of the limits of free software

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Truth Social is a success story for free software.

People who could have been subjected to some proprietary software due to 
their interest in one certain celebrity are now using a (largely/mostly) 
free software service, thanks to Mastodon and the AGPL. They can benefit 
from years of development focused on community rather than advertisers. 
They can also benefit from external analysis of what we know about their 
variant of the code, which might be little but it's more than nothing.


You might discount those benefits as minimal, but they're not trivial 
and they're multiplied by the millions of people receiving them right now.


We don't know what's going to happen in the future, but thanks to free 
software (and open standards) the people have multiple possibilities. If 
some conflict arises, subcommunities might splinter and move to their 
own instances with lesser disruption. If the company fails and decides 
to discontinue the service, another service provider might take it over 
and make it better; users could even take matters in their hands with 
limited capital, thanks to lower costs.


You might consider this a distant possibility, or something you don't 
care about because you'd prefer the community to just vanish, but it has 
a non-zero probability. That reduces the centralised power of the 
current owners, even if just by a little, and that's certainly a good thing.


Federico

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Re: very specific project proposal Re: What does Elon Musk say about free software?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 02/05/22 01:23, Thomas Lord ha scritto:


Here, broadly, would be the technical infrastructure:

Set up instances dedicated to the "celebrities" in one field
of interest.  It is good to make these redundant and distributed.


This already happens, indeed.

An example was newsbots.eu:
https://web.archive.org/web/20220408204643/https://newsbots.eu/@admin

More recently I set up one such thematic instance for EU officers: 
https://respublicae.eu/@praetor/108077919947708699 . (Although frankly I 
would probably not have bothered, if I had known of plans for the 
official instance https://social.network.europa.eu/explore , given 
complications: https://respublicae.eu/@praetor/108222742095791966 .)


Federico

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Re: Should distros take steps to reduce russian access to Free Software?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 13/03/22 05:52, Aaron Wolf ha scritto:
The inventors of nuclear technology might feel guilty about their role 
in the threat of nuclear war, but it's too late now to undo that.


The same is true or any invention or creation. You can hope to keep it 
secret if it's so dangerous, but once it's out there in the world, it's 
too late. If you restrict access, chances are only the worst actors will 
get access to it.


This concern about dangerous software seems related more to trade 
secrets than to copyright. Keeping something secret so that nobody knows 
about it is a completely different kind of problem than "what's the best 
copyright regime for the use of this work by copyright-complying 
entities". Making it public but regulating its usage by private actors 
is more likely to be a matter of patenting and the like. (If a software 
is so dangerous, it must be for the ideas/inventions it contains, rather 
than for the creativity of the specific software implementation.)


As usual, the "intellectual property" bandwagon probably makes people 
more confused. People often forget the basics, so it's useful to spread 
pages where trade secrets and patents are discussed, like:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.en.html
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/danger-of-software-patents

As for the example of nuclear, it's not particularly useful because any 
conclusion depends entirely on your personal assumptions, particularly 
about whether centralised power is good or bad. If you like centralised 
power, you will argue for more trade secrets, more patents, stricter 
copyright; and vice versa. I would argue that nuclear catastrophe has 
been avoided due to popular pressure and decentralised actions of 
responsible people, more than by exercise of central power, therefore I 
would argue for less secrets, less patents and less copyright restrictions.


See for instance how Stanislav Petrov saved the world:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1983_Soviet_nuclear_false_alarm_incident

He was able to make the correct decision because he knew some details 
about how the alert systems worked. If he had trusted the software, we 
would not be talking now. More transparency (at least internal, possibly 
external too) would increase the chances of such correct interpretations.


Federico

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Re: Should we take steps to reduce russian access to Free Software?> the headache of it all dissolves in forgiveness

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 08/03/22 13:01, Jacob Hrbek ha scritto:

use of free software in russian military to
do war crimes


That's pretty much like asking how to stop people who do crimes by...

* ...talking over the phone (shut down the phone companies?)
* ...reading and writing paper notes (fire all primary school teachers?)
* ...using the laws of mathematics (repeal the Peano axioms?)
* ...communicating over the ether (confiscate the airwaves?)
* ...breathing air (burn all trees in the world so there's no more oxygen?)

Federico

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Re: Is Telegram or Signal acceptable for harm reduction?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 05/08/21 02:30, Jorge P. de Morais Neto via libreplanet-discuss ha 
scritto:

Telegram/does/  have free clients on GNU Guix and PureOS repositories,
which is great, but it is a centralized network, the server code is
hidden, and it doesn’t even have end-to-end encryption!  So is it a real
improvement over the fully proprietary---but allegedly end-to-end
encrypted---status quo?


If you mean WhatsApp, the end-to-end encryption of its groups is mere 
fiction, because [to simplify] the decryption keys are available to 
attackers and metadata is not e2e-encrypted:

https://eprint.iacr.org/2017/713.pdf

Depending on your threat model, Telegram can be an improvement.

That said, don't give up so easily. If we're talking about half a dozen 
users, you can probably just help them create a Matrix account, by 
meeting in person if necessary. In my experience they'll soon tell you 
it's easier than they thought.


Federico

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Re: Were Intellectual Property to be abolished altogether, would you or FSF support it?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 13/07/21 00:37, Yasuaki Kudo ha scritto:

In a worker cooperative, there is one-person-one-vote democracy.  So I cannot 
just dictate that the Software Licensing we use will be GPL.


You can if you put it in the articles of incorporation or bylaws 
(depending on your jurisdiction).


Federico

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Re: Were Intellectual Property to be abolished altogether, would you or FSF support it?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 12/07/21 02:04, Yasuaki Kudo ha scritto:

the spirit of abolishing the Intellectual Property
would perhaps also need to be stated


If you mean abolishing the *term*, see the link I sent earlier:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

If you mean abolishing any and all things occasionally placed under that 
term, you will still need to define an overarching principle to do so. 
In addition to some of the classics linked by Aaron Wolf you can see:


Boldrin and Levine, "Against Intellectual Monopoly"
http://dklevine.com/general/intellectual/against.htm

Lange and Powell, "No law: intellectual property in the image of an 
absolute First Amendment".

https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2085671W/No_law

Federico

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Re: Were Intellectual Property to be abolished altogether, would you or FSF support it?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 11/07/21 02:44, Yasuaki Kudo ha scritto:

abolishing the concept of intellectual property


Can you be more precise, please? "Intellectual property" doesn't exist.
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/not-ipr.html

Thanks,
Federico

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Re: MS Teams and Windows 11

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 26/06/21 10:01, Paul Sutton via libreplanet-discuss ha scritto:


I am not sure if the FSF legal department can take a look at this, as it 
may be something that the FSF, FSFE, EFF and others need to scrutinize 
to see if there is a violation in competition law.


AFAIK the European Commission is "looking at it" since last year.

«The European Commission confirmed it received the complaint and said it 
will “assess it under our standard procedure.”  Slack General Counsel 
David Schellhase told reporters that the company is also “having 
conversations with relevant U.S.” authorities,” adding it’s not ruling 
out actions in other jurisdictions.  “Microsoft is reverting to past 
behavior,” said Schellhase in the statement. The company “created a 
weak, copycat product and tied it to their dominant Office product, 
force installing it and blocking its removal, a carbon copy of their 
illegal behavior during the browser wars.”»


https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-07-22/slack-takes-on-rival-microsoft-with-antitrust-complaint-to-eu

The idea that Teams is "a copycat product" is a distraction (Slack is 
just one chat system like dozens others), but the tie-in argument has teeth.


Federico

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Re: Ethical and inexpensive mailing list service?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 13/06/21 15:18, Jorge P. de Morais Neto via libreplanet-discuss ha 
scritto:

Do you recommend an inexpensive [...] and
ethical (privacy and software freedom) mailing list service?


The GNU mailman wiki lists a few hosting services:
https://wiki.list.org/COM/Mailman%20hosting%20services

For small mailing lists (say, if you are a group of 10 friends), note 
that many hosting companies offer basic mailing lists in association 
with a domain name and/or mailbox (often using ezmlm), so you can look 
for that too.


Federico

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Re: Avoiding paying Windows license in the US

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 30/05/21 06:46, Julian Daich ha scritto:

I got a new HP laptop and still did notl open it- Any idea how to
avoid paying the Windows license before installing GNU/ Linux?


In what jurisdiction? In the EU/EEA, the CJEU ruling on case C‑310/15 
applies.

https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:62015CJ0310



1.


A commercial practice consisting of the sale of a computer equipped with 
pre-installed software without any option for the consumer to purchase 
the same model of computer not equipped with pre-installed software does 
not in itself constitute an unfair commercial practice within the 
meaning of Article 5(2) of Directive 2005/29/EC of the European 
Parliament and of the Council of 11 May 2005 concerning unfair 
business-to-consumer commercial practices in the internal market and 
amending Council Directive 84/450/EEC, Directives 97/7/EC, 98/27/EC and 
2002/65/EC of the European Parliament and of the Council and Regulation 
(EC) No 2006/2004 of the European Parliament and of the Council (‘Unfair 
Commercial Practices Directive’), unless such a practice is contrary to 
the requirements of professional diligence and materially distorts or is 
likely to materially distort the economic behaviour of the average 
consumer with regard to the product, a matter which is for the national 
court to determine by taking account of the specific circumstances of 
the case in the main proceedings.



2.


In the context of a combined offer consisting of the sale of a computer 
equipped with pre-installed software, the failure to indicate the price 
of each of those items of pre-installed software does not constitute a 
misleading commercial practice within the meaning of Article 5(4)(a) and 
Article 7 of Directive 2005/29.




This ruling has been applied by lower courts as giving the right of 
reimbursement depending on certain conditions.


Best regards,
Federico

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Re: [OT] Blind people, advocates slam company claiming to make websites ADA compliant

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 24/05/21 22:23, quil...@riseup.net ha scritto:

Reference #18.176727b5.1621884113.6ce7ff7a


That's a typical Akamai error, famously served to every Tor user for 
instance.

https://gitlab.torproject.org/legacy/trac/-/wikis/org/doc/ListOfServicesBlockingTor#Akamai

Federico

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Re: The anti-GNU defamatory group of Ludovic Courtès - Re: assessment of the GNU Assembly project

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Il 28/04/21 18:27, Andreas Enge ha scritto:

This cannot be qualified but as personal harrassment.


What exactly? Naming a person 4 times while commenting their actions? Do 
you propose to apply such a standard universally, e.g. to an email 
criticising actions by an FSF or GNU office holder? (I might have missed 
something in Jean Louis' message, I admit I've only read it quickly.)


As a reminder, we have the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines:
https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html

Jean Louis, please consider whether certain expressions, for instance 
"like children", may sound like personal attacks. Andreas, please 
consider whether expressions like "hate email", which seem to attribute 
intent, may be needlessly harsh and inflammatory and therefore fall 
short of the standards proposed by the GNU Kind Communication Guidelines.


Best regards,
Federico

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Re: Support RMS

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Dear Deb,
thank you again for participating in the conversation here and for all 
your work promoting free software!


In relation to outreach and promotion efforts, it's worth remembering 
that sometimes well-meaning actions can lead to unexpected results, or 
even the exact opposite of what was intended. See for instance Marit 
Hinnosaar (2015):

https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2015/December#cite_ref-1
https://www.carloalberto.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/no.411.pdf

«From the survey, the author concludes that "almost half of the gender 
gap in Wikipedia writing is explained by gender differences in two 
characteristics: frequency of Wikipedia use and belief about one’s 
competence [...]


Respondents were asked to look at Wikipedia articles and find some 
relevant information from the web that is missing from a Wikipedia 
article. ... In the end, they were also asked how likely they are to 
edit Wikipedia in the future."


The first version, highlighting the criticism of Wikipedia's gender gap, 
is "associated with a 35 percent decrease in the likelihood of editing 
Wikipedia in the future", i.e. discouraged rather than encouraged 
respondents from contributing, which the author calls "somewhat 
unexpected". [...] As summarized by the author:


"The result provides an example where encouraging gender equality can 
partially backfire."»


Personally, I changed my methods of outreach after that study. I now 
focus on positive communication and examples to help reinforce that 
"belief about one's competence" and hopefully compensate stereotypes and 
other negative communication which instil irrational self-doubt.


Il 15/04/21 19:13, Deb Nicholson ha scritto:

You mentioned that a public letter is a hostile act. I understand that
it feels that way to you. [...]  It's completely false to draw a
parallel between that action and acting rudely to complete strangers at
an event where the primary goal should be bringing in new free software
supporters.


It's surely different. For instance, the anti-rms letter has been 
accused of being libel, while other kinds of criminal standards have 
been invoked in other cases.


For what it's worth, I hope that some day we can achieve the high 
standards of behaviour recommended by the GNU communication guidelines, 
hence I don't subscribe to any document which engages in personal 
attacks, whatever side it takes.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/kind-communication.html

Best regards,
Federico

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Re: chromebooks

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Óscar, 06/11/20 13:00:
> Recently, the public school that my 9-year-old daughter attends has
> imposed on us the acquisition of a certain Chromebook.

Imposed on what grounds? Surely the only thing they care about is that
it has certain performances and can login to the Google apps? Any
netbook can do that.

Federico

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Re: The sad decline of copyleft software licenses? :(

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Pen-Yuan Hsing, 22/09/20 13:02:
> (2) WHY do copyleft licenses seem to be in steep decline?

Are they? People have been claiming so for decades, but there's no
compelling evidence. Counting the number of throw-away git repositories
is not sufficient to answer the question.

Federico

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Re: What forums/groups/listservs/etc. are available about Knoppix?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Don Saklad, 16/09/20 00:06:
> What forums/groups/listservs/etc. are available about Knoppix? 

Taking the question at face value: the #knoppix IRC channel on freenode
has some people.

Depending on your language you may find a dedicated forum or forum
section, for instance I see in Italian there's
https://forum.voxpopulix.org/index.php?board=3.0

Federico

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Re: Sacrifices made for Free Software

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Paul Sutton, 29/07/20 21:31:
> In the UK I guess on main piece of software is SIMS,  this is a school
> management software system seems to have been around for decades.  so it
> helps to manage all sorts of essential school, and student data.

Ah yes, that's a whole other story. Do students ever have to interact
directly with it?

In Italy there's U-Gov , which is
practically speaking a legal monopoly. The provider is a consortium
which is nominally owned by the universities, but is in practice used by
the ministry to enslave them. So they're happy to keep it proprietary
even though it cost them several lost lawsuits already. The ministry is
happy to foot the bill as long as it buys some power for the bureaucracy
in Rome.

Federico

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Re: Sacrifices made for Free Software

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

LM, 29/07/20 14:11:
> I really don't understand, why is the FSF petitioning schools (
> https://www.fsf.org/blogs/community/sign-this-petition-for-freedom-in-the-classroom
> ) to use Free Software if there is no available Free Software
> alternative for what they're specifically looking for

Uh? What are they looking for, that doesn't have a free software
alternative?

Federico

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Re: Sacrifices made for Free Software

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

LM, 28/07/20 13:06:
> Is there a Free Software
> solution that does the job?  If not, how do we expect schools to give
> Free options or replace what they're using? 

The typical way would be that some large universities identify some
common issues they have with the proprietary software, set some
priorities and pool their resources to pay someone to develop a free
software alternative, ideally integrated in whatever free software they
already use (Moodle?).

The issue with plagiarism checkers is that they built a monopoly by
getting exclusive access to student-made materials. You cannot really
expect Turnitin (or even Google) to license you their dataset in order
to build a competitor. Sure, you can hope for some antitrust action to
force them, but even if you're successful it's going to take 10-20
years, so if you start from scratch you need a significant critical mass
either way.

On the other hand, a university building its own software knows what
sources they really care about checking, and may not need such a giant
index. Specific pieces may be outsourced without insurmountable
difficulties, for instance there are many web crawling services and a
few good indexers of academic content (Microsoft Academic is actually
behaving quite well so far! forgive me for the satanic reference).

Federico

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Re: Is there a way to identify flash versus HTML5 sites for Open Education Resources?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Thank you for mentioning Merlot, I didn't know about it. What's the
expected audience for it? I see it's nearly impossibly to find any free
content in it.

There is a filter by "a CC license" (which of course doesn't mean
anything )
which returns 38k results, but according to an external search engine
maybe 5 match the name of a free license.


LM, 23/07/20 21:38:
> Are there
> any OER search engines that filter on sites that are friendly to FSF
> standards (such as Free JavaScript usage, avoiding Flash, etc.)?

Given the definition of "OER" is generally extremely broad, it's
probably easier to use a normal search engine which filters by license,
like , or an academic aggregator
like , and start the search only within
freely licensed materials.

As for websites which only use free software, it's probably easier to
search directly for the few widely used free software CMS/other. Most
are probably wikis, and most educational wikis are MediaWiki:
https://wikiindex.org/Category:Education

Federico

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Re: Sharing your free software / quarantine success story

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

LM, 17/04/20 20:05:

The School District where I work prefers to
stick with vendors that offer full support rather than using Open
Source software.


Your general point stands, but I just want to point out that this 
doesn't need to be a roadblock. For instance, a group I know switched 
from Dropbox to Owncloud (and then Nextcloud) in part because the new 
provider offered a SLA with support over the phone and some 
old-fashioned employees feel better this way. Naturally, you have to pay 
for such a service.


Federico

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Re: emergency issue: california public meetings

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Thomas Lord, 13/03/20 06:43:

Organized, competent, volunteerism from the libre community could help
democracy in California right now.


Yes. A simple way people have helped is by running instances of Jitsi 
(sometimes also BigBlueButton or Nextcloud) and showing teachers and 
others how to use them.


For instance:
https://status.framasoft.org/incident/592/
https://it.wikibooks.org/wiki/Software_libero_a_scuola/Jitsi#Scegliere_il_server_Jitsi

Federico

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Re: purism why does fsf and libreboot embrace a misleading company?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Félicien Pillot, 11/03/20 23:05:

What's wrong??


ninhar has raised such topics earlier in the Replicant mailing list, see 
for instance:

https://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/replicant/2019-November/002268.html

"Report from 36C3" is AFAICT the best summary of the status of play as 
we know it.

https://lists.osuosl.org/pipermail/replicant/2020-January/002441.html

If the proposal is to ban from LibrePlanet all companies and products 
which are not RYF certified, I doubt that's advisable.


Federico

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Re: purism why does fsf and libreboot embrace a misleading company?

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

a via libreplanet-discuss, 11/03/20 23:58:

And a link is
easier to share.


This mailing list has a public archive which you can link just fine and 
doesn't require JavaScript to be read:

https://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/libreplanet-discuss/2020-03/msg00033.html

So, no, your external text is not easier to share than an actual message 
to this mailing list.


Federico

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Paper: Intersections between Free Software and Open Scholarship

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

There's some more talk about free software in the open access circles 
recently. This paper attempts to recap a few aspects (in almost 100 pages).


It's CC-BY-4.0 and this URL opens without JavaScript:
https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2kxq8/download

Federico

  Messaggio inoltrato 
Oggetto: [SCHOLCOMM] New paper: A tale of two 'opens': intersections 
between Free and Open Source Software and Open Scholarship

Data: Fri, 6 Mar 2020 13:50:30 +0800
Mittente: Jon Tennant (via scholcomm Mailing List)

Dear all,

Apologies in advance for any cross-posting. We are delighted today to 
announce the publication of a new paper, entitled "A tale of two 
'opens': intersections between Free and Open Source Software and Open 
Scholarship".


It is currently available as a preprint on SocArXiv, and open for 
additional comments/annotations: https://osf.io/preprints/socarxiv/2kxq8/


It's a bit of a monster, so best not to be tackled without an 
appropriate caffeine level.


Abstract: There is no clear-cut boundary between Free and Open Source 
Software and Open Scholarship, and the histories, practices, and 
fundamental principles between the two remain complex. In this study, we 
critically appraise the intersections and differences between the two 
movements. Based on our thematic comparison here, we conclude several 
key things. First, there is substantial scope for new communities of 
practice to form within scholarly communities that place sharing and 
collaboration/open participation at their focus. Second, Both the 
principles and practices of FOSS can be more deeply ingrained within 
scholarship, asserting a balance between pragmatism and social ideology. 
Third, at the present, Open Scholarship risks being subverted and 
compromised by commercial players. Fourth, the shift and acceleration 
towards a system of Open Scholarship will be greatly enhanced by a 
concurrent shift in recognising a broader range of practices and outputs 
beyond traditional peer review and research articles. In order to 
achieve this, we propose the formulation of a new type of institutional 
mandate. We believe that there is substantial need for research funders 
to invest in sustainable open scholarly infrastructure, and the 
communities that support them, to avoid the capture and enclosure of key 
research services that would prevent optimal researcher behaviours. Such 
a shift could ultimately lead to a healthier scientific culture, and a 
system where competition is replaced by collaboration, resources 
(including time and people) are shared and acknowledged more 
efficiently, and the research becomes inherently more rigorous, 
verified, and reproducible.


Also, of potential interest, is that we wrote this paper in a way that 
inspired the concept of a "MOOP", more details here: 
https://osf.io/preprints/metaarxiv/et8ak


Special thanks to the brilliant co-authors: Ritwik Agarwal, Ksenija 
Baždarić, David Brassard, Tom Crick, Daniel Dunleavy, Thomas Evans, 
Nicholas Gardner, Monica Gonzalez-Marquez, Daniel Graziotin, Bastian 
Greshake Tzovaras, Daniel Gunnarsson, Johanna Havemann, Mohammad 
Hosseini, Daniel Katz, Marcel Knöchelmann, Leo Lahti, Christopher Madan, 
Paolo Manghi, Alberto Marocchino, Paola Masuzzo, Peter Murray-Rust, 
Sanjay Narayanaswamy, Gustav Nilsonne, Josmel Pacheco-Mendoza, Bart 
Penders, Olivier Pourret, Michael Rera, John Samuel, Tobias Steiner, 
Jadranka Stojanovski, Alejandro Uribe-Tirado, Rutger Vos, Simon 
Worthington, and Tal Yarkoni.


Best,

Jon

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Re: Campaign to boycott Facebook

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Aaron Wolf, 24/02/20 17:55:

Leaving is better, but if someone*doesn't*  leave, they should at least
focus on consciousness-raising there. They can do so in replies as well
as posts. 


Comments may be good, I agree. For instance you can comment when 
somebody makes an announcement or opens a conversation which excludes 
people who don't use Facebook, pointing out the problems. You can also 
comment on posts which violate copyleft, which are plenty: 
. On the 
other hand it's difficult to do this while claiming you're not on Facebook.


Never comment on misleading posts or posts you disagree with, because 
activity and controversy make them more visible.



I agree that it's likely they overall bury anti-FB posts, but
who knows, it's a black box.


There was some report about this in the last few months from a former 
employee, claiming there was a permanent monitoring of posts with the 
word "Facebook" in them, and not just to listen to feedback. I couldn't 
find the exact source though:



Federico

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Re: FLOSS alternatives (was re:Campaign to boycott Facebook)

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

LM, 24/02/20 21:11:

With the recent issues
with Yahoo Groups, I investigated what free mailing list alternatives
were still available.  I ran across a few options like
https://framalistes.org/sympa/  but I really could not find a lot of
options even when I looked at non-Free alternatives in this area.


Sounds like you want https://mobilizon.org/ , the test instance has been 
made available recently: https://test.mobilizon.org/


In general, have you checked https://degooglisons-internet.org/ and 
https://contributopia.org/ plus https://sandstorm.io/ too?


For small mailing lists it's not that complicated to find an existing 
mailman instance to join, unless the topic of your group is very 
peculiar. If you don't need as many features or as right an integration 
with email workflows, for a new group I guess nowadays you'd probably 
end up on a hosted Discourse forum or something of the sort. Finally, a 
lot of people have unlearnt asynchronous communication, so instant 
messaging is all the rage; there are various good solutions for that.


Federico

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Re: One word label for someone who rejects proprietary software

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Andrea Trentini, 16/02/20 23:34:

Libretalian

Librephile

Propriephobic (but it conveys negative meaning, illness)


I rarely need a single word for this, but I sometimes use 
"softwareliberista" with friends ("liberista" usually means an advocate 
of the free market); for supporters of the commons some use 
"benicomunista" (opposite problem, rhymes with "communist").


For those who don't dislike the acronym "FOSS" or "FLOSS" it's easy to 
use "fosser" or "flosser" but it can get funny. Sometimes we use 
"Wikisourcerer" or "Wikisourceror" for Wikisource users, so one could 
even use "opensourceror" for fun. In fact I see someone created a 
Wiktionary lemma for this (apparently there are sources from 2008 and 2015).

https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/open_sourceror

Federico

P.s.: Roberto and C. Cossé, I don't know what clients you're using but 
your subthread is utterly unreadable. If you check the HTML archives I'm 
sure you'll see why. Some help is available for instance at:

https://wiki.openstack.org/wiki/MailingListEtiquette#Formatting
https://curl.haxx.se/mail/etiquette.html#Quoting

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Re: Free licensing of surveillance software

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Roberto Beltran via libreplanet-discuss, 15/01/20 20:48:

The software is being used ON the surveilled. The surveilled are not users of 
the software.


This is a key distinction and I don't think it's clear at all. There are 
good reasons why copyleft clauses are usually triggered by more "active" 
(and demonstrable) actions.


If I go to the library and return a book by opening a custom application 
on my device, do I "use" that software? And if instead I need to tap or 
click on some graphical interface on a library computer? And if I just 
scan a barcode at a machine? And if I just need to walk near the 
machine? And if I don't even need to do that?


Similarly, with a software-powered doorbell: my goal is to get (myself 
or something else) past the door. Does it matter whether I press a 
button? Whether I have knowledge that the button executes some software? 
Whether the software runs just when I walk in?


(Also, at what point is it SaaSS and at what point "the computing isn't 
your own activity" or "you are not doing your own computing", per 
?)


I'm not sure what older concepts in copyright law one could rely on. The 
only analogue I can think of is some music machine in a public space 
which plays some music when a person walks in. Maybe some passer by has 
been involved in a lawsuit somewhere! There are special laws about music 
machines though.


As Danese Cooper recently quipped at FOSDEM,* there are "only six verbs" 
our licenses can use, because we depend on copyright law.

https://fosdem.org/2020/schedule/event/municipal_government/

More discussion on the topic was at CopyleftConf (recordings available 
soon, I think):

https://2020.copyleftconf.org/schedule/

Federico

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Re: Stop the .org domain registry from being sold to a private for profit company

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Greg Farough, 13/12/19 21:59:

The FSF was one of the original organizational signers of this petition, and 
we're keeping a close eye on things. I'm glad to see it brought up here.


Indeed. I'm afraid a lot of orgs do not know yet about this matter, we 
need all the outreach possible. Why not have 5000 institutional 
signatures on that letter?


Out of the top 5000 .org domains in the Tranco list, I removed those who 
had already signed (a few weeks ago) and those without MX records and I 
got this:

https://framabin.org/p/?dbaa78dc8a49f181#5hwIE2C0i1QunV90sC7U3AOG4fJHmA8gYyiT+9+Ukzs=

For those looking for details, I usually direct people to Sj's summary:
https://blogs.harvard.edu/sj/2019/12/02/the-dot-org-fire-sale-sold-for-half-its-valuation/

Federico

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Re: Exciting new changes for the LibrePlanet Wiki (Valessio Brito)

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Arthur Torrey, 06/10/19 04:59:

I am not a programmer, but see no reason why editing something in a Wiki should 
be any harder than using a modern WYSIWYG word processor like in LibreOffice


The reason is simply that it took several years of work by a team of 
multiple developers.

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:VisualEditor

The LibrePlanet wiki is using a really bare-bones install of MediaWiki. 
Nowadays the packaging is more extensive in Debian (and Ubuntu PPA) so 
it should be possible to improve the user experience without much effort:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Legoktm/Packages

VisualEditor may be included in a future release.

Federico

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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Apologies

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

A. Mani, 26/09/19 17:02:

The point under discussion was "women's rights in free software world".


Yes, and RMS has always strongly advocated for them, against people who 
argued GNU should be apolitical and so on.


Federico

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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Apologies

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

A. Mani, 26/09/19 03:43:

The sad thing is that RMS is one of the champions of womens rights in
the free software world.

This is false.


Uh? It's one thing to say that some actions were not enough, and another 
to deny facts which are demonstrably true.


It's trivial to find RMS statements in support of women rights from 2000 
because they're on . 
It's also rather easy to show that RMS has strongly advocated for GNU to 
support both software freedom and women rights since before 1993.


How many other prominent free software maintainers were doing the same 
back then? Genuine question, I have no idea. From 
 it seems some 
of the earlier efforts were in 1994. Remember that «By the 1990s, 
computing was dominated by men. The proportion of female computer 
science graduates peaked in 1984 around 37 per cent, and then steadily 
declined» (quoted from the same section).

https://text.npr.org/s.php?sId=357629765
https://www.theguardian.com/careers/2017/aug/10/how-the-tech-industry-wrote-women-out-of-history

Federico

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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Easy to understand way of getting a new computer already setup out of the box as close as can be to rms' principles.

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

Thomas Lord, 24/09/19 20:41:
Very few people will ever find those links and fewer still have the 
knowledge to know how to use that information.


Can you clarify? Are you saying they wouldn't be able to use a pretty 
standard webshop, or that the offer doesn't satisfy their needs?


[...] Or similarly, consider the City IT 
department - a microsoft shop through and through. Good luck finding 
training materials they can adopt and adapt if they want to put GNU 
systems on staff desktops, or get away from proprietary software on City 
servers.


This is certainly more complicated. It's usually not enough to provide 
documentation: you need thorough analysis and development, in-person 
training, support, social change management etc. The Document Foundation 
has a protocol for the migration to LibreOffice and some advice on 
migration consultants.


https://web.archive.org/web/20170622191021/https://www.documentfoundation.org/assets/Certification/tdf-migrationprotocol.pdf
https://www.documentfoundation.org/gethelp/migrators/

It's a lot of work and it needs to be done properly. There are some 
examples one can copy from various large public administrations around 
the world but there is no one size fits all process.


Federico

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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] “I don't answer questions from women”

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

A. Mani, 25/09/19 06:58:

For basic applied feminism (intersectional):
https://everydayfeminism.com/?s=virginity


Where the first article is about male virginity:


Federico

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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Easy to understand way of getting a new computer already setup out of the box as close as can be to rms' principles.

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

The way I find the answer is usually this: 
https://www.fsf.org/resources/ (third link) → 
https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw → 
https://www.fsf.org/resources/hw/endorsement/respects-your-freedom → 
various links including , 
, 
.


Does this satisfy your requirements and do you think it's easy enough? 
Do you have suggestions for different ways to provide this information?


Federico

P.s.: I had to copy the Message-ID from the mbox archive

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Re: [libreplanet-discuss] Moving Forward

[Federico Leva (Nemo)]

For context:
https://mail.gnome.org/archives/foundation-list/2009-November/msg00010.html
https://stallman.org/saint.html

If you never saw the saint IGNUcius routine in person, there are some 
recordings around.

https://archive.org/details/RMS_at_UPD_2015_St_IGNUcius

I used to belong to the Roman Catholic church and I'm an atheist; people 
with different experience may need more context and I can't speak for  them.


Federico

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