erikb

Yeah that's unfortunate. Luckily on HN are also many people who live in more developed countries. ;-)

And on a more serious note: Even in your situation a self-hosted solution might be more free. Then don't host it at home, but discuss with universities, hacker/maker clubs and companies in your surroundings and host it behind their internet connection. Usually you need one member of such an organisation to support you and then you can simply do it.

There are some open source router OS projects. I bet they could be convinced to consider such a suggestion with some pull requests, emails and/or a few sponsoring $$$.

The painpoint is, they will do it anyways. Maybe not Google leadershipt but someone elses management. Google and Facebook have shown that we can execute power over datasizes that are too big for any group of humans to understand themselves, and they have shown that by manipulating these datasets they can manipulate human behaviour. This is too big a power to not fight over. That's bigger than the nuclear bomb. So the question is not whether or not it will happen, but who will be the first. The first might very well be the one deciding the new world order.

> truly distributed means of hosting is everyone hosting their own websites

That means "self-hosted". Distributed hosting means you can't host it in one place. I agree though, that one might consider it as a form of decentralized hosting if everybody hosts their own stuff, which you also totally can now that we have cheap computing power like raspis.

If you can't recognize that this game will be mediocre at best, I'm already sorry for the amount of disappointment you will have on release date.

> You don't leave the command line

An advantage of gitless on one side, a statement about how to live life on the other side.

Wondering why again SAP isn't even mentioned...

This is such a common phenomenon that you can expect people sharing links to non-blocked websites after a short time. Next time just be patient and read the comments.

This sounds a lot like cum-cum and cum-ex dealings. It might not be illegal per-se. But the moment too many people do it, governments will churn in and send some to jail.

Let's not ignore the part where the creditor is actually willing to let go of the debt for amount X but not offering X to the debtor. This is at least as immoral if not more than buying your own debt back through indirect channels.

lol, why does anybody need to say so? This is free market 101.

Also I really believe that's how the future looks like, thanks to AI and automation: fewer and fewer jobs with higher and higher requirements but also higher and higher pay.

Today is the first day I hear about this company. What are they doing? Do they have noteworthy customers?

The premise itself is also quite funny, imo. I think very few people on this planet would think "I need a database so I build one myself". They might do this with the application layer, but most people consider databases black boxes that they interact with through SQL, or maybe not even that. Maybe they just use an abstraction framework in their favorite languages that lets them write objects which have .load() and .save() methods that generate SQL by themselves.

On the other hand most people who write the software don't have assistants and are also expected to do all their arrangements themselves. It is even culture in software development circles that one should be self sufficient. For instance that created terms like RTFM (ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RTFM).

So for them it's quite likely hard to imagine that other people might have assistants to do things for them.

You must really suffer from imposter syndrome if you can't find a company that is worse than you at software development.

Well, I can see why such inspections have respect from a lot of people. But also keep in mind that a multi-billion dollar company, which might be stronger than any single government organ, will be treated differently than the burger shop around the corner.

Yep, especially when they are not general purpose like "PC" but from a very specific knowledge area. In this case it's even an old one. New engineers won't be educated to do ETL anymore.

Please mark sarcasm at least with a ";)" otherwise many people might think you mean what you say becaise they don't know that it's a ridiculous idea that a big corp will come and protect each users privacy.

> What gives? Is this just part of the growing "corporatization" of Linux

I would argue that this is the case, and if it's not the case then mostly because it's not becoming more corporized but because it always was.

I would argue that there are three popular reasons for open source development, that there is a huge difference in user impact between these, that corporate interests have been the main driver behind open source, that having ones own preferred solution allowed to take profit from the competition, and now that the profits are dwindling distinction between competitors becomes less important than saving costs, and therefore everybody focusses on whatever appears to be as the winner in the current topic area.

Reason 1 for open source development, and probably the original reason, is art. People wanted to scratch an itch, they themself felt. They don't care much about gaining any additional advantage so they share the whole thing and not just the binaries, maybe by doing so gaining some recognition by other smart people. These artist developers usually hate the normal user and despise the disrespect these bring towards their piece of art. They often don't care about the trivial problems the user has, like the need for a complex yet intuitive UI. So users will often refrain from using these tools. Making them mostly unimportant at large, if not someone else comes along and uses the knowledge gained from it for another category of open source.

Reason 2 for open source development is the goal of social and political influence, which drives a person or group to develop tools to fascilitate communication between supporters and fascilitate spread of the culture. One example I see here is the scuttlebut network, which if you analyse closely, is not really good for everybody but mostly used by a group of New Zealend developers to spread their ideas of off-grid lifesstyle and something they call "solar punk". This is by no means criticism. It's a great tool/protocol and the ideas they spread with it also don't seem harmful to me. But without the desire to influence the political landscape they probably wouldn't invest that amount of time and energy to build their social network. This kind of project can gain quite a lot of influence on users at large. For instance all these 2chan,4chan,8chan imageboards might rival professional social networks in size and usability. But usually it's limited to people who support the political goals or at least can accept them. For instance it's unlikely that a group of feminist game developers would choose 8chan as their platform after it became a platform for the anti-feminist gamergaters.

Last but not least stand the group of open source project which directly or indirectly are for profit. For instance Linus Torvalds is one of the best earning people on this planet. Multiple companies have formed around linux distributions. And most of the commits nowadays come from people who are paid to do them. As said as it may sound, this is the most influential group. It's simply a fact that user-focussed development can be a daunting task and most people wouldn't do it if nobody paid them for it. So the development is also built around market dynamics. When cool UIs gain user attention most distros will focus their resources on one desktop manager that separates them from the rest, so that users who like these distinctive features will come to them. And when profits shrink they will look for whatever desktop manager is the current winner and jump on that band wagon, so they can reduce their development investments and focus these on other topics.

If we can agree on these three categories I think it's clear that the last one is the one that gains the most users, and therefore will also influence open source in general the most. Also it might have never been different from that, and as long as the getting is good it's also not to the users disadvantage.

If one thinks about it, a properly used social network also doesn't need proof-of-work, because it has social proof. If three people you trust have spent 2 years regularly liking posts from a fourth account you can be quite sure that fourth account is no fake.

I was quite surprised after studying your main page that movim looks much more like a chat app than a social network. How comes you advertise it as social network? And assuming it is in fact a social network, what brought you to use the XMPP standard for that?

Have you also checked other distributed/decentralized social networks? Curious about your experiences.

Bittorrent is decentralized in theory, but I think nowadays it's not worth much without trackers. Trackers again enable centralized groups with self-serving interests to centralize the activities and track user activity.

Check out what gnutella or the dat-protocol have to offer for reasonable alternatives.

Scuttlebutt, Gnu/Social and Mastodon are also worth checking out.

Comparison of many distributed (and some even decentralized) social networks: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_software_and_pro...

Yes, but it's wrong. Kings kill(-ed) kings all the time. For instance check out what the Saudis are doing these months.

That makes it a big question, why it's not happening more often then they can reproduce. And it's not like they are writing on their own wikipedia page "hey, I, prince Saudi XYZ don't kill Saddam Hussein's nephew because <reason>". So of course it's some guessing involved.

And I have yet to see a more convincing one than that they have dirt on each other. It makes a lot of sense. And while you might think that getting killed is worse than getting bad press or going to jail, for them it means losing power, and that's all they have.

So let's not get too romantic here and try to discuss the facts. If you have a really good reason they don't kill each other more often, then let's hear it. But morals or an "understanding" can't be it.

I also heard, that the American continent is more and more Blue Hat focussed and Suse is more a European thing.

Not just them. Almost everybody does that. Just a few weeks ago saw a documentary that explained that the same happens in dating apps/websites, for instance.

It's also logical. I mean, what can you do when you are the market leader already.

Is anybody still using Suse besides some big three letter corps?

I think when you figure out why Amazon is currently losing to Microsoft you will also understand why Red Hat, just like Docker, was completely crushed by Google, and why IBM, despite trying super hard, wasn't even a player until now.

> Where do you work and how do I get a job there?

Western Europe country. I wouldn't suggest my company though. Where I currently work is Slack-off Fest 9000, but it's also a big corp.

Maybe you should check out meetups, hack fests, hackathons, coworking spaces, hacker spaces, maker spaces around you. There you can meet the real engineers. They earn maybe even just 50-75% of your colleagues. But they always give 120%.

And these also exist in big corps, but true, it's rarer there. The highest motivated engineers I see in big corps are people who don't care about engineering that much, but are certainly working their ass off to ship whatever stupid idea their manager had latest. The thing will not work in a customer environment, but it's good for a demo, and more does their manager not need.

I also led teams of engineers in the start-up world. Usually all you need to do is keep the political bullshit away from them, show them the sufferings of the customer, and provide them with enough money that they don't starve to death (and can afford 1-2 raspberry pis, and/or a nerf gun).