• 0 Posts
  • 26 Comments
Joined 10 months ago
cake
Cake day: November 28th, 2023

help-circle





  • So… why are people upset about this? I’d say it’s about damn time. Having two settings apps is pretty ridiculous and it’s honestly crazy it’s taken them this long to ditch the control panel. I still remember people making fun of Microsoft’s inability to drop control panel in the Windows 10 era. Is there anything special about the control panel or uniquely terrible about the settings app that would warrant this kind of negative reaction? Is it because of the settings that aren’t available in settings? If they’re preparing to drop control panel that probably means they’re going to add whatever settings are still stranded on it to the new settings app, unless there’s evidence that they won’t do that.


  • Dunno. Regardless of the method used by the extension, I think any extension called “Bypass Paywalls” that does what it says on the tin can pretty unambiguously be said to be designed to circumvent “technological protection measures”. In this case, it circumvents the need to login entirely and obviously it circumvents the paywall.

    Though as you said, these guys should probably be sending DMCAs to the Internet Archive if they actually want to stop their paywalls from being bypassed. I know they do honor takedown requests. Maybe archive.today is the problem? Maybe they don’t honor DMCA requests. I very often see them used on Hacker News whenever someone wants share a paywall-free link to an article.


  • You can do that with permissively licensed software too. Except with those, the party distributing their repackaged version doesn’t have to distribute source code alongside it. A lot of companies avoid copyleft software because they don’t want to or cannot deal with stricter licensing terms. If you’re a company creating commercial software which you intend to sell, you don’t want to use any GPL code, because you want to keep your software closed source to avoid exactly what you described from happening.

    This can be exploited by primarily licensing your open source code using strong copyleft (like the AGPLv3) while selling commercial licenses to businesses that don’t want to comply with the AGPL and are willing to pay up. Qt is able to successfully use this even with weaker copyleft (LGPLv3) because it’s used a lot in embedded systems (like smart cars) which cannot comply with the LGPLv3’s anti-tivoization clause.

    This means copyleft licenses can make it easier to profit if you’re the author of the code, but of course third parties can more easily profit from permissive licenses.







  • leopold@lemmy.kde.socialtoMemes@lemmy.mlWhich will you choose?
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    11
    ·
    edit-2
    2 months ago

    There are pros and cons. I use both, because Lemmy on its own just isn’t big enough to replace Reddit. Lemmy has a decent variety of active communities for very broad/mainstream topics, plus technology and left wing politics, reflecting the shared interests of most Lemmy users. But then for any topic that’s more niche and doesn’t have a disproportionally large overlap with the interests of Lemmy users, it kinda falls appart. A lot of the more niche subredddits I participate in have no Lemmy equivalent.

    I’m also hesitant to call Lemmy’s moderation better. One thing I’ve noticed with Lemmy mods is that they tend to be far too lenient with off-topic posts. Right now the top post for me on “All” is this post from [email protected]. You might notice that it isn’t a meme in any way shape or form. You might also notice that it was literally posted by a mod from that community. This kind of thing happens a lot, communities on Lemmy are very prone to getting derailed away from their nominal topic.




  • These are known as the short scale and long scale systems respectively. Though the United States was indeed the first English-speaking country to switch to short scale, pretty much all English-speaking countries have used short scale almost exclusively for a long time, including the United Kingdom. Saying that it’s simply being influenced is an understatement. From Wikipedia:

    British usage: Billion has meant 109 in most sectors of official published writing for many years now. The UK government, the BBC, and most other broadcast or published mass media, have used the short scale in all contexts since the mid-1970s.[12][13][43][15]

    Before the widespread use of billion for 109, UK usage generally referred to thousand million rather than milliard.[16] The long scale term milliard, for 109, is obsolete in British English, though its derivative, yard, is still used as slang in the London money, foreign exchange, and bond markets.

    I’ve never actually seen the word milliard used in English outside of discussions about the long and short scale systems. However, many other languages do mainly or exclusively use long scale. For instance, my native language French.


  • leopold@lemmy.kde.socialtoOpen Source@lemmy.mlWhy is flathub saying Floorp is proprietary
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    118
    arrow-down
    2
    ·
    edit-2
    3 months ago

    It used to be open source, but large parts of it have been relicensed under their proprietary source-available shared source license. The reason why it isn’t entirely proprietary is that it’s based on Firefox, which is entirely licensed under the MPL. The weak copyleft of the MPL states that all parts lifted from Firefox must remain open source, but the new parts can be proprietary.

    Source-available licenses are a type of proprietary license where the code is made public for people to look at, but you’re not actually allowed to use it. Users can still contribute upstream, so they’re usually parasitic licenses aimed at getting free labour out of the userbase without actually giving back any code to the commons, all while keeping up the illusion of being open source. It sucks.