joepie91_

MIT/BSD-like would still require attribution, which they are also not doing.

> Instead of having to retype boilerplate code, your productivity is now enhanced by having a system that can do it for you

We already invented something for that a couple decades ago, and it's called a "library". And unlike this thing, libraries don't launder appropriation of the public commons with total disregard for those who have actually built that commons.

That would be a legal no-op. Either their use is covered by copyright and they are violating your license, or it isn't covered by copyright and then any constraints that your license sets are meaningless.

Licenses hold no power outside of that granted to it by things being copyrighted by default.

> These types of contracts are actually quite common, for example an employment contract will almost certainly include an IP grant clause.

In the US, maybe. In most of the rest of the world, these sorts of overreaching "we own everything you do anywhere" clauses are decidedly illegal.

> training ML systems on public data is fair use

Uh, I very much doubt that. Is there any actual precedent on this?

> We expect that IP and AI will be an interesting policy discussion around the world in the coming years, and we're eager to participate!

But apparently not eager enough to have this discussion with the community before deciding to train your proprietary for-profit system on billions of lines of code that undoubtedly are not all under CC0 or similar no-attribution-required licenses.

I don't see attribution anywhere. To me, this just looks like yet another case of appropriating the public commons.

> if that did happen; I have not looked into the author's claims, nor do I follow the BSNES/Higan community

Perhaps you shouldn't be trying to "both sides" this, then.

This is false. The specification allows for you to define custom event types and fields in most places, and even specifies the naming conventions for doing so. There exists no requirement for it to be absorbed into the Matrix specification itself.

This is really no different than for XMPP. XEPs are also centrally managed, and you are expected to implement any proprietary extensions outside of that process.

A much better option is Consent-o-Matic, which will reject cookies for you automatically.

> Which is something we came to accept and assume for interpreted languages (Python, Ruby, Node, etc.)

Tangential, but:

- "Node" isn't a language, it's a JS runtime

- There's no such thing as an "interpreted language", whether something is interpreted or not is a property of the execution environment, not of the language itself

- The commonly-used runtimes for JS at least are JIT compilers, not "interpreters", and this can be true for some Python/Ruby runtimes too

No. Both use some form of double-ratchet for E2EE, but the messaging protocol itself is completely incompatible.

> I hope there's a good postmortem on this in 5-10 years that explains what on earth all this nonsense is about, because it makes literally no sense.

I wouldn't hold out much hope for that. Even for those of us who are directly involved in it, it doesn't make much sense at all.

By this point, the remaining explanation is "Andrew went completely unhinged after his attempt to fulfill his childhood dream of owning Freenode went to hell".

> A LLC has enough papers to prove that they own Freenode

Actually they almost certainly don't. But they don't need to, either; they can just suppress the staff through legal threats, because lawsuits are expensive. Whether they are in the right is immaterial.

> But most people just don't care about the platform they chat through.

People love to throw this sentiment around literally every time any kind of platform does something shitty, and it's certainly very effective at demotivating people from even trying to do anything about it. It would be great if people stopped claiming this, because it's really not helping anybody and makes the job of resolving governance issues so much harder.

This specific case is actually a good example of how the sentiment is completely wrong, too; with the right strategy (which was what happened here) it's clearly possible to get people to move en masse. As evidenced by Freenode bleeding users to Libera at breakneck pace, and effectively all projects having moved over.

Bottom line: you might not want to put in the effort to solve governance issues like this, and that's fine. But please stop actively telling other people that they won't succeed.

That's how I started out with openSUSE + Nix, but I quickly found that I still had to learn about most of Nix's quirks, while only getting a small part of the benefits (namely, not the system configuration).

It may be worth it if you care a lot about having imperative escape hatches, but if you're willing to invest upfront work in getting past the learning curve and want to maximize the benefit you get from it, I would just recommend diving into NixOS directly.

The old Code of Conduct seems to have moved to https://docs.fosshost.org/en/home/mutual-respect-policy. Doesn't seem to be linked from the new CoC, though.

The early adopters were considerably more varied than just "anarcho"-capitalists.

You're actually almost right. While Bitcoin was launched with lofty goals, it was pretty quickly overtaken by capitalist vultures who saw a low-regulation industry to extract money from people.

Importantly though, it's not an either/or. Capitalism is problematic and cryptocurrency is problematic. Both can be true at the same time.

Considering that almost all legitimate users have been priced out of the market due to ever-increasing transaction fees and increasingly draconian regulations (often stricter than for non-cryptocurrency) and the resulting interoperability issues...

Yeah, I think it's safe to say that the primary use of cryptocurrency nowadays is as either casino chips or a money laundering mechanism. The economics no longer make any sense for anyone else.

In fact, he was explicitly warned of this exact outcome by me and undoubtedly various others, back when we were still hoping that this could be solved with diplomacy. I think it's in the published logs, even.

The GDPR applies regardless of where the company is, so long as the requester is an EU resident.

> I can understand how the new Freenode doesn't want to get half-filled with such zombified channels.

Then maybe they shouldn't have done a hostile takeover, and actually worked with the community instead.

I do believe he was truthful about his intentions. But his ego has gotten in the way of realizing that his approach is wrong, and is causing harm.

My read of the situation is that Ariadne was more or less correct; running Freenode was a childhood dream for Andrew, he mistakenly believed he could get there with money and strongarming, the community rejected him and refused to provide validation, and now he's increasingly trying to keep the community from leaving him by force.

They're not actually duplicate rules, even if they look like it. To simplify things:

The rule that was removed:

- Hate speech is not allowed

The rules that are still there:

- Hate speech is discouraged

- Illegal hate speech is not allowed

You'll notice that this has opened up an allowance for legal hate speech, which is merely "discouraged", which of course no malicious actor is going to care about.

Bottom line, yes, hate speech is now allowed.

I'm guessing that he's now going to claim that the policy change he instituted 5 hours ago that allows him to do this[1] has always been there.

[1] https://github.com/freenode/web-7.0/pull/513/commits/2037126...

This is indicative of the broader problem: whereas the former staff treated Freenode as a community resource of which they were stewards (hence also the policy around abandoned channels), the new administration is clearly treating it as their personal sandbox to play in.

> But apparently the staff was indeed forced to hand the keys over on their way out and start from scratch instead of just standing up the same data on another DNS and doing a blockchain style split. Why this happened seems to be IRC drama.

Well, no, not really. More likely the reason for this is that taking the database with them would have given Lee a reason to continue legally harassing and essentially bankrupting them.

There were actually plenty of concerns about the PIA involvement and logo at the time, but they were largely dismissed by others with the usual "what are you complaining about, it's just business" rhetoric.

And that's how we ended up here.

I do commercial FOSS work without an NDA just fine. Seems it might just be a problem on your side...

It's worth noting that, unlike the integral chatlogs published earlier displaying Andrew's questionable views on Freenode, this PDF is full of heavily-snipped logs without context.