Why do you ask?

grok came up with this:

Some libraries implement free data formats that are competing against restricted data formats, such as Ogg Vorbis (which competes against MP3 audio) and WebM (which competes against MPEG-4 video). The success of the free format requires allowing many proprietary application programs to link in the code to handle the format. For instance, we wanted nonfree media players, especially appliances, to include the code for Ogg Vorbis as well as MP3.

In these special situations, if you are aiming to convince proprietary application developers to use the library for the free format, you would need to make that easy by licensing the library under a weak license, such as the Apache License 2.0.

I like copyleft and have convinced about 7 projects to convert to copyleft. but in this case its such a small project i don’t really see anyone turning it into some proprietary project and the project losing a lot of contributions because of it. Also even the FSF says that permissive licenses might be better when you implementing standards (And i think you could argue this project is at least partially a implementation of posix).

Lemmy has a similar number of active users and makes about 3K . That money would be good for the ecosystem and could help fund upstream projects (I am sure wine could use the money for example). But they will have to use fundraising methods similar to lemmy to reach that number (popup, good message etc)

The donate page is kinda a mess IMO to be honest. There should be one organisation to donate to otherwise this creates overchoice.

Have you looked at the state of how open source smartphone os projects are funded? Seems like not enough people think it is currently important. i saw no bump in funding since the announcement. I would say the best bet is trying to help one of these projects with fundraising and trying to educate or convince enough people it is worth investing in. and obviously donate if you can. Although to be honest even i don’t do that (i think i invest enough in FOSS).

Once i bought a phone i tried to pick one that is friendly for FOSS projects and went with a pixel (which grapheneos recommended). so voting or signaling with your wallet is an option.

I also think something like codeberg. where anyone can be a member if he pays fees that help fund the organisation and democratically elect a board that decides what to fund could be helpful. codeberg has a pretty good organic growth so that is encouraging but i don’t know if there is enough interest in that.

Its like restaurants . you could go and some menu items you like and some you won’t like. asking for a recommendation from the waiter is a pretty good bet.

A quick search in their github didn’t show anyone requesting this. maybe just open an issue?

Flatpak top contributor by number of commits works for collabora, so i think it is a matter of just getting funding for work. no need to start an ugly fork. its a question of how badly people want the work to be done.

I wonder how well collabora would do if they started a subscription for regular users that could vote on what issue to work on (and maybe delegate their voting power), the issue that he mention that is “not great” sound like something a lot of people would be interested in fixing. and in general with so much of our lives documented on our computer more security enhancement work could be great.

We really need a user friendly way to show packages that are really manually installed by the user (some automatically installed package are marked as manually installed, see the answers to this question).

even nix interface is known as being kinda bad but you still have a easy way to do this.

Openhub also says it’s “mostly written in javascript”.

Probably because the website site is listed as one of the repositories.

I don’t want to start a holy war. but they say it should bring more contributors and a more fun programming language should mean more contributions but contribution metrics on openhub show no meaningful improvement IMO.

Yeah, but i think any programmable system should allow low level constructs if the high level constructs are not enough.

iirc this caused serious problems with wine because the API of windows requires setting coordinates.

I don’t know if it could be cheaper , it probably could be cheaper because if it will be more popular prices will drop (Economies of scale) , but i am afraid there will always be a price premium for FOSS friendly hardware because companies are losing their competitive advantage by giving away some of the work they do for free.

Reminder: Microsoft GitHub social media likes is not an accurate barometer of much. Starhacking is a thing & it tells you nothing of the code quality

Its funding track record is also pretty good it seems . no indication can prove a project is high quality, but it can help in deciding what to check out.

Needs a web version you could set as a homepage .

Legal then says later that the clause was not legally binding and can’t be enforced or such, making dev rollback to earlier Intel version

Yeah it was said by email, i actually did some research and turned out it is indeed not legally binding, i think it is good to know.

good is the enemy of excellent. X11 works for most users (almost all the users?) well. You can see that with the adoptions of other standards like the C++ standards and IPV6 which can feel like forever.

Another thing I think one of the X11 maintainers mentioned iirc is that they have been fairly gentle with deprecation. some commercial company could have deprecated X11 and left you with a wayland session that is inferior in some ways.

The score seems very similar to that of the US average life satisfaction score of 6.72. I assume the survey was done in the US.

This seems like a classic case of Confounding . The happier scores seem to be from people that have more money (ios, macos ,pop os) , and people that have technical skills (slackware, gentoo , mobile linux) which are probably more educated and earn more money which iirc according to research correlates with being more happy. Arch users might have higher screen time which might cause lower levels of happiness. slackware might have older users which iirc according to research are happier.

Of course this is not a scientific study , it hasn’t been peer reviewed and this could all be statistical noise.

I think the best way to make linux users happier is have by default in the distro a course on being happier, i can’t find the link but iirc the course on coursera increased the score by 1 point (so probably somewhere around from 6.7/10 to 7.7/10), I spent a while learning about this stuff and experienced a similar jump (Although i don’t know if i will keep it if there will be some strong negative event).

Snap packages are better sandboxed (on Ubuntu) than Flatpak or any other system packages.

Source?

System packages already use apparmor, i don’t see a reason they could not be as sandboxed as snap, and i am not aware of a reason that flatpak has a worst sandbox.

it’s not that transparent , for example if i am considering funding signal , i can look at the 990 form , see the top salaries, the amount spent on salaries, the number of employees and calculate the average salary. I don’t mind it if the shareholders make a 10-20 percent return but i don’t want to to be a 90 percent return (which basically no public company has, from what i have seen in tech companies it is somewhere around 10-30 percent).

Whats interesting is that both income , profits and the stock have been growing well for years, maybe they are just monetizing more aggressively because they can’t compete on product quality (unlike other markets that are still evolving, AI and Cloud). not a ton of stuff to improve in operation systems it seems.