yup digital music is functionally free already streaming makes artists a pittance and most artists make most of their money from live shows and merch sales and physical media. I literally do not pay for any digital media at all. I pirate everything and if I was to buy like a t shirt from a band I like I’d be giving them more profit than someone who listened to their song 1000 times on spotify. As it pays 3-5$ per 1000 streams and the profit from a single shirt is easily like 15-20$ atleast.

I think you are taking this the wrong way maybe. I’m not even saying I want it to be this way. I’m just saying this is how digital goods work. The best way to explain it is that there is no scarcity in the digital space. Yet we try to artificially introduce scarcity in order to make it work with out currently scarce physical reality. There’s a mismatch. I just think we should embrace the post scarcity nature of the digital commodities market and that the benefits of accepting this reality would outweigh the potential issues. Mostly because its a losing battle. But also because its both wrong and counter productive. All artifical scarcity for digital goods accomplishes on a societal level is that we have a bunch of hugely profitable corporations that literally produce 0 productive capacity for society. Take like Adobe, Spotify, Microsoft, All the AI companies, etc. Them being so huge is fucking up the economy of actual physical commodities that are actually scarce.

This is the fallacy. It is not simply “My money/time” -> “Unique thing”. The entire technological base of human civilizatio made it possible for you to make that thing. Most of the costs were bore by society. Yet you would now wish to privitize the profits and deny society access to that way to do things without your permission.

Take open heart surgery for example. There is very clearly a right way to do it. Perhaps a few good ways to do it too. But 1 way is the BEST way. Imagine if only 1 surgeon owned the patent to that best way. Other surgeons have to figure out their own way. Even if they figure out the same way as him independently he did it first so they can’t use it. This would make that surgeon very rich, but it would harm medicine overall, and harm heart surgery’s progress.

Then what happens? Let’s take the language example. “Hi, how are you?” is patented. “Hello, are you well?” is patented. “Howdy!” is patented. etc. You want to greet someone. Now you don’t just need to figure out a way to do that. You have to make sure YOUR way to greet someone is different than the thousands of patented ways to greet someone. So you have to do something like “Hey, hey, hey! Me say welcome to you! Haha! Good, yes?” this is what I meant by it getting silly. All the obvious ways to do something become patented and so you have to find some roundabout way to get the same result. Which is usually inefficient and complicated for no good reason.

Patents also do not simply stop “stealing” as you put it. If you and someone else both put in the effort to independently invent the “turns lead to gold” machine then whoever patents it first owns it. The other person, despite also putting in the effort and not even knowing you exist, just has to basically go fuck themselves.

But I’d push back on even that. You don’t own an idea. Because 99.99% of the effort to get to the point where that idea could exist was not yours. It was every other humans. You stand on the shoulders of giants and touch the stars. Then want to claim the stars as your own.

I am simply pointing out an unfortunate fact of how digital goods work. I am not saying your labor has no value inherently, but that because the product can be infinitely reproduced it becomes so diluted as to approach 0. Imagine an artist made a sculpture. It has immense value because it was very hard to make. Yet if they could snap their fingers and create 2? And then 20? 200? 2000? Suddenly its not worth very much.

It’s even worse because with digital goods anyone can do the copying.

The reason I say the current model of proprietary software is exploitative is because it attempts to legally enforce a monopoly of this infinitely reproducable commodity in order to extract infinite profit from society in exchange for its use.

I will clarify about the monetization model. If you wanted to write some code, then tell people they can access it for a set fee, and once accessed it has no DRM, no restriction on copying, etc then that’s fine. It’s not the act of asking for money in itself but the act of attempting to claim ownership over all the infinite copies I take issue with.

There are many ways to monetize something without doing that. One of them is asking for donations. One is the single payment before access to an unrestricted product model above, and there’s all kinds of other ways too.

I do understand why you are upset by what points I made. I just think that you are wrong that we need to be fully communist to implement a different model. Many of the current issues with open source not recieving many donations, and not having much in the way of support is because of the massive companies with proprietary software that absorb all the software markets value for themselves. This also fragments the software infrastucture of society.

Most of the funding for software in general comes from huge companies. But they lock down the things they pay for. So nobody else can use them. This means open source devs have to reinvent the wheel to get anything done. If you got rid of the proprietary model companies would still have a need for software, and would still pay to have it made, but their software could then be repurposed for other uses. Developers would get paid for their initial labor by the companies and then the product is out there and can be copied for free by everyone else. This does not require communism to work. It just requires restrictions on how software can be locked down.

Now as to the personal point. You asked above to list all FOSS software I use and say how much I’ve donated. I can’t list everything. I assume that was a point you were trying to make about the invisibility of things like libraries. So how are they meant to get donations? I use Debian. I give money to Debian. Not much, but I try to give them 5-10$ every year. I’m not a wealthy person. In fact I live below the poverty line. But I do this anyway because I appreciate what Debian does. It’s my opinion that the way this should be structured is as follows:

Visible Software (OS) -> Infrastucture A -> Infrastucture B

Visible Software collects donations. It has the visibility to request them. It should then be required (by law? by expectation and social pressure? We would need enforcement, I am aware.) to have a list of attestations. What other FOSS projects made their project possible? To what extend did they do so? Then Debian in this case would need to take their 10$ donation and divy it up. Infrastucture A was used by them then is given 1.50$ by them from that 10$. If Infrastucture B was used by A then A would need to figure out how much they helped it and pass on some to them. Say 50 cents. This would act like a donation dispersion model where a donation to Debian is a donation to all the infrastucture that makes Debian possible by proxy. This is sort of how Debian works now tho I don’t think they have it down to quite a science.

Hopefully this clarified my position for you.

Oh boy. Now this post? This is brave.

This is exactly China’s plan. As much as capitalists hate communism they love profit more. It’s genius tbh.

It’s the psychosis of the petit bourgeois. They’re treated like a sacred cow but only while spending their money. In all other aspects they are treated as expendable. And so they cling to this one area of privlege like their life depends on it.

Value comes from labor. That value is tied to the specific thing being made. Even if your initial creation of the software is difficult the fact that it can be copied for no cost dilutes that labor value down to nothing. A new copy does not take money away from you. It does not steal your labor value. That is the anti-piracy argument and it is empircally false. As I said you are welcome to do a donationware model and still have it be entirely moral and I’m sure that you’d get more than your labors typical market value back. But what you want to be able to do is to withhold the code and not allow it to be copied without paying. So that you can extract infinite value from something that cost a finite amount to create initially and now costs nothing to copy. That is exploitative.

Why? The way I see it the current system only serves to concentrate the profits in the hands of the corporations that hold the patents and IP. In what way would removing that harm the working class?

I think it’s because of capitalism as cliche as that sounds. People are so used to the idea that they’re entitled to things and stuff like “the customer is always right” that they’ve got it in their head that the consumer is sacred. That they have rights or something as the user. That people who make things should be grateful they use them. Rather than the other way around being the case. If you use FOSS software and you never donate to any of them, never submit issues, never provide diagnostic data, etc then you are just a leech. You aren’t entitled to anything. There’s nothing wrong with leeching off something like this that’s why people make it but for fucks sake be grateful. Even a little bit of money makes a difference btw. I use Debian and I will send them 5-10$ a year. I’m also considering sending them some of my old hardware but I’m not sure if it would be very useful to them lol.

That’s assuming the Free VPNs aren’t run BY law enforcement as honey pots

Even if he is he was being paid for the workload he was doing before. That workload has vastly increased. It would not be reasonable to expect him to take on a bunch of new work with no pay increase. And that’s assuming its even possible for him to do it all by himself.

Free VPN use is like worse than not using one tbh. Like if its free its definitely monitoring you. And who knows what else its doing. It’s about as safe as going to the dark alley downtown and accepting some “Free samples” from the guy selling weed out of his jacket.

Well yes, but proprietary only works with patents. All it means without them is you have to decompile it and reverse engineer it. Which is pretty easy to do these days.

But I’d push back on the idea of “The same code you made” being special. Code is just language and math put together. Take a sentence. “Hi, how are you?” under patent rules once someone patents that specific way to say this nobody else can do it. You can do the same function but have to phrase it differently. Like “Hello, are you well?” and eventually this just gets silly. Being the first to do something the most obvious way to do it shouldn’t give you a right to not let anyone else do it that way.

My argument is based on a fundamentally different way of viewing invention. Many people think of it as a singular inventor/genius coming up with an idea nobody had before, and then anyone else who has the same idea after them is “stealing” it. This is just silly imo. That inventor is not special.

Inventions do not happen because someone has a special idea. They happen because the material conditions exist to make them possible. You wouldn’t invent the car before the steam engine for example. Or the book before paper. Take Calculus. Isaac Newton and Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz were getting to the same conclusion (inventing calculus) around the same time entirely independently. Because it just so happened they were alive at the right time to do so.

In general inventions will arise some time after the conditions to create them exist. This relies on the work of all human civilization prior, and so these inventions should be the collective property of all humanity.

If one accepts the premise that discovery is an inevitable result of material conditions, the moral and economic justification for patents collapses. In this framework, the patent holder isn’t being rewarded for creating something that otherwise wouldn’t exist; they are being rewarded for being the first to reach a finish line that many others were already approaching. The patent then functions as a tool to capture a monopoly over a natural progression of knowledge, effectively taxing society for a discovery that would have happened regardless.

I’m not really trying to argue with you here btw. Just explaining my complete view on the topic. I get that you might agree with some of this, and disagree with some. I just wanted you to have a full picture of where I’m coming from.

I use mine for pulling packages because I want it to work without internet. I just keep a USB stick with the installer to install the distro from and then would point my sources to the local mirror and update it for an installation. That’s not really my use case tho since it’s more something to help me maintain my existing installation and always have any packages I might want. Not meant to be a full backup. So yours being bigger does make some sense.

138GB:

sudo debmirror --nosource -m --passive --progress --verbose --host=deb.debian.org --root=/debian --method=http --dist=testing --arch=amd64 --rsync-extra=none locationcensored/DebMirror

Way smaller. Like 180GB or something like that I don’t remember exactly. But I didn’t do the full mirror I just did source and non-freefirmware and stuff like that. I can check my mirror update command when i get on my desktop to see exactly what I did. I have a script that has it in there.

I disagree fundamentally. Just because you came up with an idea first does not mean you should be the sole person able to use said idea. All this does is hamper the progress of civilization. You are under no obligation to tell others how you did something, but if they also figure out how to do it then the law should not shield you from competition and people making your thing cheaper. This is especially true in the case of software where its infinitely copyable at near 0 cost.

I’ve made things before. I’ve never tried to make a profit off of those things. Despite being broke myself. Because I see it as simply extortion to withhold something in exchange for money. The only way I’d ever monetize something digital is to give it out for free and ask for donations if people feel like it and it helps them. Something physical is slightly different as it costs money to make more of them, but I still disagree with the idea that you’d be able to ban others from using a technology just because you happened to patent it first.

oh no the poor entrepenuer! Not. All software should be FOSS anyway.

I’ve already done this for Debian Testing if you run into any problems let me know.

Are you serious? He’s one human being. He’s not getting paid to do this. All the people who volunteer their time to maintain Linux have lives and jobs too. He didn’t “shoot the messenger” He said "Given the current throughput in the kernel resulting from AI-generated series, I unfortunately lack the bandwidth to generally be able to offer review except in those areas I maintain.

I have separated the patches into areas maintained by David, Andrew, and Alice + Danilo, so each can take the patches relevant to the subsystems, for convenience.

Apologies for doing this, but given the current trends I’d like to do something to make my inbox a little more manageable :)"

It’s right there in the post. It doesn’t matter if the vulnerabilities are valid or not. The man can’t keep up with doing everything he’d been doing because its just too much work for one person to handle.