nickwitha_k (he/him)

  • 2 Posts
  • 585 Comments
Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: July 16th, 2023

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  • That’s the beautiful thing about gifting software with permissive licenses (when one wants to): it’s a gift and anyone can do whatever they want with it for free.

    ETA: I DO think that it is important for one who chooses to license software permissively to be informed about their decision and its implications. But, just like consent in other areas, as long as one enters into it intentionally and with the understanding of what the license means, it’s noone’s place to judge (and, like consent in other interpersonal areas, the license can be revoked/modified at any time - with a new version). Honestly, really weird of those that take issue with individuals choosing to gift their software to humanity - there’s way more interesting and useful things to engage in in the FLOSS landscape.







  • what would you do if someone used it to hurt people instead? I’d personally feel like shit if my software were used for that, and as others said in this post, they’d prefer to have entities request an exemption rather than have their code used in ways they don’t approve of. So what say you?

    I’ve a few thoughts on this:

    • Anyone who wants to use anything that I release for harm, will probably do so regardless of license. Bad actors are going to act badly. Plus, chances are that they’d see no legal repercussions as underdogs winning in court is the exception, not the rule. The legal system is heavily stacked against the little guy.
    • I tend to specifically avoid working on things that are weaponizable to reduce the chance of ethical conflict.
    • The projects that I’ve released or plan to release tend to be pretty esoteric. The one that saw the most interest was years ago and it was an adapter between abandoned gallery plugin and an abandoned social media CMS thing. It would take some great creativity to hurt people with that, other than making them read my horrible code from that era. My current projects are more about FPGA and mixed reality stuff.
    • Once I’ve created something and shared it freely, it is no longer wholely mine. I cannot dictate how one uses it, anymore than a musician can dictate how someone listens to the radio. As long as one abstains from creating tools intended to harm (or that can be predictably turned to harm), I don’t see legitimate ethical culpability. We only have control over ourselves.


  • Really?..

    Just about every FOSS and Source-Available license that I’ve seen is perfectly valid. As a software developer, one has the option to choose how they wish to license their software. This can be based upon one’s personal philosophical view or what seems most appropriate for the piece of software.

    Not everyone is motivated by profit. Most software that I develop personally is permissively licensed because IDGAF as long as I have enough to get by. If I write some code that makes someone else’s life better or easier, that’s more than enough for me.

    Wait. What am I saying? This is the Internet and, according to the rules of corpo social media, we’re all supposed to be dicks to each other to further “engagement”. WHICH ONE OF YOU SAVAGES IS USING TAB INDENTATION INSTEAD OF BLOCKS IN YOUR LICENSE FILES?!?;!!!111one







  • By acting as a man-in-the-middle with the ability to read unencrypted message data (absolutely required in order to try to match against known CSAM), this is absolutely providing a backdoor as well as undermining privacy and security. By needing to trust another party, there is now a greater threat surface which is outside of end user control. One compromised account with access to that third-party is all it would take to extract private details from any messages, undetected, whether for sale on there blackmarket or for suppressing political dissidents, that’s exactly where this would go and we know this because state actors have been caught doing it and getting their toolkits leaked to criminals.

    This kind of law doesn’t make children or regular people any safer.


  • I have a first gen pair of Airs that I absolutely love, except for the lack of open-ness. I think that I’ll have to try dumping the firmware and writing my own at some point - likely when I have to replace the frames (have had to CA glue and tape the right arm three times now; I’m rough on my electronics). The teardowns that I’ve seen show that they contain almost entirely common off-the-shelf components (MCU, IMU, I/O expander, etc), so, shouldn’t be too bad to implement via Arduino or Rust.

    The thing that drives me most crazy though is the lack of forethought on the Beam. It does it’s job great but they didn’t bother to have a dedicated power-in or support high enough wattage to run it off of external power. It’s absolutely maddening to have to recharge it 3/4 of the way through work. Think I’ll be modifying it to add a USB-PD input for power.