Many indexers have donations optional, or a points system today. The tradeoff is that invitations are now even rarer and harder to get.

Split versions is usually the first step. Many projects have done so before. Next year there will be some technical reason they can’t keep feature parity with the commercial repository, and it will drift from the OSS repository. Oops, we broke compatibility, sowwy guys. A couple of years later the OSS repository will be closed because it is a security risk. By that point the company and management would’ve drifted so far from the initial values of the project that people won’t notice. Those who cared will have jumped ship to alternatives sooner, those who noticed later will be already too deep into depending on the software that they will keep paying the subscription.

I have no evidence, but I also don’t have any doubts this is the plan.

It currently doesn’t work with Vaultwarden. The Linux client doesn’t accept custom certificates. And the Android client is paid. It is a dead-end for self-hosting.

The license is also stupidly a single sentence. Which means that use could be nuked at any minute, and any money you use to pay the developer means nothing. If they wanted to kill the project today and nuke the repo, you have no legal rights, the project dies and fuck you and your passwords. That doesn’t exactly inspires confidence.

Sure, everything costs effort and money. But not $400 per image download like what some commercial sites want to charge.

There’s two comments mentioning AI, and people happily and cordially correcting them. What the fuck are you on about?

You are the only angst comment here, calling people stupid.

I skim them all. The options I wrote are soft parodies of what each said. There’s a ton of problems with this model of governance, but I’m no voting member, so my opinion has no impact.

That said, it makes it so a single posture has to be voted on in its entirety, which is dumb (as some legislative bodies of the world have proven). As a result, nuance is erased alongside with any sense of ideological vision or compromise, and instead it promotes vagueness in every action and glacial institutions that break slowly break apart.

The very person who wrote the proposal that won reacted to winning with:

I regret the loss of contributors (which would have happened with either option winnign [sic]). It is just too early to take a final decision on the mater [sic]. Let’s revisit this in two years or so, and let this mess of a GR be a warning for our future selves.

The proposal was designed to win time without having to take any real stance while taking the smallest loss of contributors in the process. And thus it was written as the most milketoast nothing burger. When an infinite set of possibilities exists that actually do address real concerns like climate impact, social impacts, copyright and legal problems related to generated code, etc. in relation to the principles and overall values of the project. Instead, they are deferring the practicalities to pull request’s bickering.

But again, I’m not a voting member or contributor. So my opinion is null. I still think the way the process is designed and conducted is stupid and prone to cause the eventual failure of debian via governance collapse.

The Debian vote was so stupid:

Option A: Psychotic breakdown
Option B: Ethical impracticality
Option C: Political extremism
Option D: Two contradictory things at once
Option E: Something that doesn't prevent the other options but packaged with something nasty and unpalatable
Option F: Sensible but ultimately vague and action-less common place neutrality.
Option G: Nuclear option
Option H: Do nothing

It was such a brain dead exercise in futility. It was designed for the winner from the start.

Nussbaun’s comment on the result is hilariously dull:

On a very personal note, I regret that the winning option does not acknowledge all the legitimate concerns around AI: environmental impact, copyright and licensing uncertainty, the health of Free Software communities, and the strain of aggressive scraping on the open web.

The GR results give us raw numbers about our opinion, and a direction, but we have a lot of work ahead of us to act as a community and understand how we can continue to accommodate the very large minority that would have preferred to ban or discourage AI.

Lucas

¹ obligatory disclosure: the script used is AI-generated

Yeah, the option that doesn’t say anything won. Who knew?…wait yes, mathematicians, they knew. The most important part of a survey is choosing the options carefully.

What is more disturbing is the little “everything is fine” message when the session refresh fails. It bugs the app out displaying just that message. It’s amusing in a weird kind of way.

There’s also maintenance blindness. It is easy to see how something lasted forever, when you weren’t the one doing the maintenance and repair work everyday. Also, many “good ol’ immortal appliances” neglect to mention how most of the parts are actually brand new or it wouldn’t be functional otherwise.

We tend to forget that the design on the left was the corporate ux language for a long time. Open source is just slower to fall for the trends, but they fall eventually.

Same difference. If you used assistant then clicked on it expecting assistant but instead your phone switched to using Gemini without telling, then you’re counted as having used it. But did you willingly use Gemini?

How many people have touched Gemini by accident while looking for some other google app that stupidly uses the same color scheme for the logo? It is even stupidier and less meaningful from a data analysis point of view.

It’s OK if you don’t eat carbs. Just, for the love of good, eat more fibre. People are killing themselves with weird fad diets.

Just to be clear. The flatpak is free but the mobile one is $3,62?

Not judging, nothing wrong with FOSS getting sources of income to keep the work up. But I’m just trying to make sure I understand the rationale. What does the app exposes on users? because pay usually demands google play’s most privacy invasive services.