Does the DCO really offer a real guarantee? it looks like it just adds a Signed-off-by John line at the end of the commit, with no actual signature checking that enforces any particular version of a particular document is being acknowledged. IANAL but it doesn’t look like something proven to work in court to give legal protection.

Sure, it’s easier to simply add a sign-off-by line than actually accepting a legal agreement, so it reduces the barrier of entry, but if this were really enough to establish the conditions to shift liability then I don’t see why companies wouldn’t start using their own DCOs and extending them, essentially just being a more convenient CLA (which is a license agreement, not a copyright transfer, even if some might add terms that allow relicensing… which anyway is already possible given the project is already MIT licensed).

This depends entirely of what you mean by “of Windows” and what you mean by “for Linux”. This terminology is ambiguous.

Are you a Lemmy user for lemmy.world, or are you a lemmy.world user for Lemmy?

It’s also inconsistent because when they say, for example, “Microsoft Azure Linux Container Host for AKS”, they are talking about running a Microsoft Azure Linux Container inside of AKS, not a container that is meant to be used for running AKS within it…

If, by supporting this theoretical Nazi science genius, I enable him to better perform Nazism, then I have been morally complicit in his Nazism

If you think anything that could benefit him is enabling that, then there’s all sort of things that are complicit. Even the public social services and the State might be complicit, even people who pay taxes might be complicit… international influence/opinion, the whole world, society would be complicit.

I’m a believer of honesty and direct punishment for direct precise problems. The more abstract the punishment, the most likely it is you’d end up with the innocent paying for the sins of the guilty.

I think people should be aware of the exact reasons why something is bad, as opposed to punishing a general abstraction without actually addressing the root of the problem. I’ve seen how this often results in people religiously believing something is good/bad based on sheep thinking, and this leads to situations that actually create more Nazis than what they destroy. An unjust punishment is just a badly patched up wound that will not really heal and instead extend to other parts. Have you considered this in your calculation of moral consequences?

How about we just tell the truth as is?

But that’s exactly what I mean when I say recommend good software and recommend good thoughts.

Why do you assume I wanna “hide” problematic information? Did I say that? What I’m saying is don’t hide the fact that good things are good. The good car will be a good car, and the manufacturer being problematic will be a problematic manufacturer.

Recommending the good car does not imply that you support the manufacturer, and denouncing the manufacturer does not imply that their cars are bad and not something we should recommend.

What’s the manufacturer of the device you are using right now?

If a notorious criminal created a cure for cancer, I’ll sing praises to his amazing work, asking everyone to use it. But that dos not mean I approve of their crimes. It would be perfectly consistent with my praise of his work to, at the same time, ask for him to to be judged and sentenced accordingly for the crimes he committed…

The world is not black and white. People are not angels just because they have one good thought, nor do they become monsters that poison everything they touch if they have one wrong thought.

So the bad thing is the off chance that he would benefit?

Because that’s a very different thing. Then this should not be about judging morals related to the thing they made, but executing punishment for a completely separate thing they did.

Then it’s not a disagreement of morals, it’s a disagreement on the approach you are taking to execute that punishment.

I’d be very wary of using any of his breakthroughs

Ah, but will you still use them? will you promote his breakthroughs if they help people? what if his scientific work leads to the cure for cancer?

Punish the nazi political work, promote the scientific work.

The more people learn to drive, the bigger the chance they’ll get a private car, the more accidents, the more people will die. Thus: let’s recommend everyone to not learn to drive.

I feel this path is sort of a baby-sitting approach to recommendations. Not only do I have to know if the software if good before recommending it, I also have to research if there’s a chance that whoever I’m recommending it to might find a community somewhere for which they might lack enough critical thinking to judge on by themselves?

How about we recommend good software when it’s good while at the same time recommending good ideals / good thoughts when they are good?

It’s morally wrong to promote bad things, and morally good to promote good things.

Just because I admire the theories Isaac Newton came up with and I encourage others to learn about them does not mean I support everything Isaac Newton did, said or thought.

All of our society is built on the shoulders of giants who did a lot of “good” despite being, in most cases, “bad people”.

I’m not sure why you’re bringing the XDG or systemd “standard” into this.

Probably because in their “basedir” specification they do recommend ~/.local/bin to be in $PATH. I’m sure there’s more than one distro following that spec, whether we’d want to consider it standard or not. I also believe there’s some software (like flatpak) that may place scripts there too, when configured to offer commands for user-level instalations.

Here’s a quote from the spec:

User-specific executable files may be stored in $HOME/.local/bin. Distributions should ensure this directory shows up in the UNIX $PATH environment variable, at an appropriate place.

Thunar is a much better alternative, in my opinion.

Yes. Did I deny that?

Can anyone confirm or deny if what I said is wrong?

I get downvoted for stating one advantage an AGPL fork would have, and yet nobody seems to be disagreeing with what I said… *shrugs* 🤷

Note that AGPL can take changes from MIT but MIT can’t take changes that are purely AGPL without following the AGPL.

So, as far as I can understand, any improvements done to the AGPL version cannot be carried over to the MIT version (without very painful and careful re-implementation / re-engineering). That alone would be a big advantage to the hypothetical AGPL fork.

It would be a bit of a legal nightmare, since it’s theoretically possible that, even without really knowing it, the same feature might be implemented the same way in both forks separately, and the MIT devs might have no sure way to prove they did not copy it. So this would be like walking on eggshells for them.

I don’t think there are many distributions that are truly free, at least not in the eyes of the FSF. Fedora is not one of them.

but for what benefit? […] fedora is going to have off the shelf solutions

Yes, but that’s my point: fedora is already fully featured… the work needed is trivial, to the point that directly using an installation of fedora by itself (along with tools like ansible) wouldn’t be very different from doing he same with EU OS… at that point you don’t need a whole new distro, just Fedora and maybe some trivial scripts (which you are gonna need anyway in any large scale installation, even if you went with EU OS).

Imho, there would be more value if something actually novel was used, and new guides and howtos were created to simplify/clarify things that used to be hard. What would be a pity is to spend a lot of euros for something that is trivial to do, and that only helps filling the pockets of some corrupt politician’s friend. I mean, I’m not against a simple thing, but then I’d hope they at least showed how they will be spending the budget on some other way (marketing? …will there be actual custom software? …are they gonna maintain the entire repo themselves?).

well, the actual software and configuration i’d argue aren’t the important part - owning the infrastructure is the important part…

But I was not arguing against that. And if they did promise to do that, then that would be different. The problem is precisely that I’m expecting them to NOT own most of the infrastructure and instead rely on Fedora repositories, because from experience that’s how these things usually go.

I repeat the full context of the section you quoted: “I guess we’ll have to see how much they customize it, but in my experience with previous attempts, I’m expecting just a re-skin, just Fedora with different theme”

Maybe you have a different experience with government-managed distros, but there have been some attempts at that in my (european) country that were definitely not much more than a reskinned Ubuntu (and before that, Debian) from back in the day. They used Ubuntu repositories (ie. Ubuntu infrastructure), and the only extra repo they added was not a mirror, but just hosted a few packages that were actually produced by them and were responsible for the theming, reskining and defaults. They used metapackages that depend on upstream packages to control what was part of the default desktop environment, there might have been a few more extra packages (mainly backports), but very few and always lagging behind alternative backport repos. Uninstall the metapackage (which you might do if you wanna remove some of the preinstalled things) and it literally was Ubuntu straight from Ubuntu official repos. There was no filtering, no veto, no replacing, no mirroring.

Also, just to keep things grounded in the initial point: do you really think that Fedora / Red Hat would not benefit at all from it?

This is true, but then why not base it off Guix (the GNU distro)? …I’m sure Fedora is full of binary blobs and not-so-free software.

If they needed it, they could still add extra software and blobs to Guix, sourced by the EU… and I think doing that would allow it to carve itself a niche (a version of Guix with more compatibility would be interesting for many) rather than sticking a white label on Fedora and call it something else. I don’t see a lot of value on this over just using Fedora directly, I’m not sure if it’s true that Fedora & Red Hat do not benefit from this… wouldn’t their support agents be able to just start providing support also to EU OS customers if they (both customers and support agents) want? Wouldn’t it make it more interesting for private companies working closely with the government to choose Red Hat as a partner when it comes to enterprise Linux?

I guess we’ll have to see how much they customize it, but in my experience with previous attempts, I’m expecting just a re-skin, just Fedora with different theme. At most, with some extra software preinstalled. I don’t think that’s a threat to Fedora or Red Hat, but rather an opportunity for expansion.

This is the full paragraph:

We collect certain device and network connection information when you access the Service. This information includes your device model, operating system, keystroke patterns or rhythms, IP address, and system language. We also collect service-related, diagnostic, and performance information, including crash reports and performance logs. We automatically assign you a device ID and user ID. Where you log-in from multiple devices, we use information such as your device ID and user ID to identify your activity across devices to give you a seamless log-in experience and for security purposes.

It looks to me that they are using it to identify the user uniquely, maybe also related to captcha to prevent bots (it’s common practice to capture mouse and keyboard while resolving captchas to see if the movement is human-like).

But that’s not what the terms on both Google/Meta and Deepseek say.

There’s no term in their ToS saying Google/Meta restricts the data collection to forms, which means that if the ToS allowed them to collect them from forms (and as you admitted, we do know for a fact that they do), then it also allows them to collect it outside of forms. The reason I put the search suggestions as example is because it’s one we CAN know (and thank you for agreeing on that), but that doesn’t mean they don’t do other captures at times we DON’T know… and also it’s not the only place, Google owns several captcha mechanisms and capturing input patterns is common on those too (and captchas capture outside forms too!). Another obvious example is Google docs, another is Google translate… and again, those are only the obvious ones, we don’t know if there are non-obvious ones.

In the other direction too, Deepseek terms don’t say it does it outside of forms either. You are jumping into assumptions by saying it acts the same as a traditional keylogger and that the keystrokes are captured for “anything typed”. For all we know the only place they might be capturing is when the user is in very specific steps of the login process, maybe for captcha purposes too, or specific forms for preloading results, etc. There’s no reason you should trust they do it any less/more than Google/Meta does, the ToS in both have the same lack of information in that respect.

You can only make assumptions one way or the other, since the terms are not specific on what exactly they allow themselves to do, in the case of Google/Meta they’re so sneaky that they avoid saying they do capture them (even though they do, as you yourself admitted), while in the case of Deepseek, even though they are a bit more specific by using the word “keystrokes”, they also don’t specify where/when/why (other than “to give you a seamless log-in experience and for security purposes” …but that’s also unclear wording).

Yes, it’s possible. To be honest, I find it very sad that we have grown so dependent on ISP and big telecom companies to have a working network.

In theory, you could have an infrastructure in your neighborhood and be able to play Quake with your neighbors without making use of the phone line at all, completely free of monthly fees and with a very efficient and fast connection too! you’d just need cabling connecting the apartments/houses and some decent routers controlling/restricting access on each subnet. It’s a pity that’s not a standard thing when designing residences.

Though less efficient and more limited in range, you can technically do it with Wifi and mesh networking too… there are projects like B.A.T.M.A.N (https://www.open-mesh.org/), however, it’s not very user-friendly to set up. I believe there have been some projects that attempted to launch embedded devices to act as mini routers for this, but the spread has not been wide enough to make it worth it, sadly.

I think the argument is that those alternatives already existed before. Twitter was not being prioritized, it was essentially mirroring the content already available in RSS, mastodon, etc. So effectively, there’s now one less place where the news will be visible.

However, I do agree with the move, but only because Debian being a FOSS initiative should stay away from proprietary platforms and promote FOSS, even if it means effectively “shutting off” a portion of users who don’t wanna leave the twitter bubble.

Were they using Twitter to provide exclusive updates not available anywhere else?

My impression from the post is that they are publishing the exact same updates in multiple locations, including mastodon at https://framapiaf.org/@debian …so just because they were publishing in that one extra site to make it accessible to a particular subset of people does not mean all other people were being shut off from receiving updates.

However, I do agree with the move, but only because Debian being a FOSS initiative should stay away from proprietary platforms and promote FOSS.

I don’t know enough detail about ATproto, but I wonder if it’s technically possible to block access to posts without also blocking federation. From what I’ve heard the functionality is more modular than Activitypub (content indexing being a separate service from content hosting) so I wouldn’t be surprised if it wasn’t possible.

The last thin veil of privacy for Eurpeans has been ripped to shreds by Trump last week.

What did he do? I know Trump does not like the GDPR, but did he sign something affecting it last week?