Preston Maness ☭

  • 0 Posts
  • 31 Comments
Joined 2 years ago
cake
Cake day: March 2nd, 2022

help-circle










  • Then there is the tankie Left, which also started with good intentions but seem to have confuse the recipe-book of slogans and the Party über alles discipline invented in the late 19th century and early 20th century by middle class intellectuals to inspired the near-illiterate masses of the time to create an utopian leftwing world (which didn’t work) with the actual thinking Principles and Intentions from which the rules were made.

    The “tankies” are absolutely not utopian. There was a great big schism about this very question more than a century ago, with Marxists roundly rejecting the utopianism of the libertarian socialists (Anarchists). Socialism: Utopian and Scientific by Engels is a good starting point.



  • Absolutely not, and this article goes into quite a few reasons why:

    https://blog.brixit.nl/developers-are-lazy-thus-flatpak/

    Sadly there’s reality. The reality is to get away from the evil distributions the Flatpak creators have made… another distribution. It is not a particularly good distribution, it doesn’t have a decent package manager. It doesn’t have a system that makes it easy to do packaging. The developer interface is painfully shoehorned into Github workflows and it adds all the downsides of containerisation.

    While the developers like to pretend real hard that Flatpak is not a distribution, it’s still suspiciously close to one. It lacks a kernel and a few services and it lacks the standard Linux base directory specification but it’s still a distribution you need to target. Instead of providing seperate packages with a package manager it provides a runtime that comes with a bunch of dependencies.

    If you need a dependency that’s not in the runtime there’s no package manager to pull in that dependency. The solution is to also package the dependencies you need yourself and let the flatpak tooling build this into the flatpak of your application. So now instead of being the developer for your application you’re also the maintainer of all the dependencies in this semi-distribution you’re shipping under the disguise of an application. And one thing is for sure, I don’t trust application developers to maintain dependencies.

    Even if there weren’t so many holes in the sandbox. This does not stop applications from doing more evil things that are not directly related to filesystem and daemon access. You want analytics on your users? Just requirest the internet permission and send off all the tracking data you want.

    Developers are not supposed to be the ones packaging software so it’s not hard at all. It’s not your task to get your software in all the distributions, if your software is useful to people it tends to get pulled in.

    Another issue is with end users of some of my Flatpaks. Flatpak does not deal well with software that communicates with actual hardware. A bunch of my software uses libusb to communicate with sepecific devices as a replacement for some Windows applications and Android apps I would otherwise need. The issue end users will run in to is that they first need to install the udev rules in their distribution to make sure Flatpak can access those USB devices. For the distribution packaged version of my software it Just Works™






  • I see a lot of posts about how lemmy.ml admins are deleting any posts critical of Russia & China. Are there any receipts for those claims? I haven’t seen any actual proof, just a whole lot of people saying tankie.

    The modlogs show that the moderators there are doing their job. If folks wanna continue uncritically regurgitating NATO propaganda and McCarthyism, they can do it elsewhere. Though I will admit, the irony of thousands of people fleeing a capitalist sinking ship, to a ship built and run by communists, only to then complain about all the communists, is funny.


  • I was overwhelmed by the options of instances. Then Reddit is Fun had a pop up message suggesting to go to lemmy.world. I trusted Reddit is Fun so I followed its suggestion.

    I open today rif accidently and it started to work again. Logged out mind you. Got a weird message with instructions to log back into my Reddit account. Was able to browse Reddit as a guest on the meanwhile. Didn’t want to log back in as fuck Reddit.

    Did rif sell to Reddit? Couldn’t blame him if he did but all the same I am leaving. Just can’t see how rif would still work without Reddit owning his servers. Anyone know what is going on?

    [emphasis mine]

    If anything, it sounds like rif sold to lemmy.world.


  • I don’t think Red Hat is violating GPL. For sure it’s not violating the legal terms of it (I’m fairly certain the army of lawyers RH and IBM have at their beck and call made sure of that) and I don’t think it’s violating it’s spirit (at least not yet) – they are still contributing any changes and their customers still get access to the source code.

    They are absolutely violating the spirit of the GPL. Telling your customers that you will not keep them as customers if they exercise their rights under the GPL is as clear a spiritual violation as it gets. And whether they are violating the letter of the law is an unresolved question.

    The way I see it, RH wants to be the only game in town providing service contracts for their own product which is fair game, imho. The problem with Rocky is that they also stand to make money out of the same source code which is the disingenuous part, in my opinion.

    The problem is that the software is not “their product.” Free Software is a collective endeavor that RedHat contributes to. It is not a product that belongs to them. The product is the support, and RedHat, by virtue of the GPL and the nature of Free Software, cannot stake an exclusive claim to the support.