kemayo

The problem for any "Wikipedia alternative" is that there's one obvious way to bootstrap themselves: importing Wikipedia's content. But that leaves them either needing to work out how to impose structure on it themselves (difficult), or just importing it as-is and leaving it messy.

It's legitimately a pain to do, because most Wikipedia articles use a bunch of templates. So for anything outside the most-simple of articles you suddenly have to implement a lot of the more painful bits of wikitext. Then if you want to import them back to Wikipedia, you've got to match those things back up or you'll get reverted for messing up the page...

Plus complying with CC BY-SA requirements for the content, of course.

It'd be more convincing if the "problems with Wikipedia" section referenced anything from the last decade. (Also, one of the three things that apparently warranted being called out as an example was pretty petty -- the ArbCom member's on-wiki job didn't have anything to do with how they misrepresented their credentials.)

Yeah, all of that Siri stuff you're trying isn't there yet.

18.1 (the current beta) has minor improvements to Siri for immediate follow up requests and parsing requests where you stumble over words. 18.2 is supposed to be picking up ChatGPT integration so Siri can ask it about things. The "personal context" recall is apparently in 18.4, so we won't see it until next year.

Honestly, 18.1 launching the new Siri UI (the glowy look) feels like a bad idea -- I'd have kept it until 18.4 when the real intelligence improvements actually land.

https://www.macrumors.com/2024/09/22/apple-intelligence-feat...

Fanfiction.net is trivial... apart from it having Cloudflare bot blocking turned up to aggressive levels. I've not seen an approach that works, other than using headless browsers to fetch the content.

Having written my own one of these, the interesting thing about this one is really the UI for iterating on extracting content from an arbitrary site. Having a full GUI for working through the extraction is much more flexible than the norm.

Similarly, I switched away from Castro when it was melting down, and I tried out PocketCasts and Overcast.

PocketCasts is pretty great, but has one crucial flaw that makes it unbearable to me: at the time I was using it it was fairly slow to update feeds automatically, and you can't force an update of a specific feed. This got really annoying with subscriber-only feeds, because I'd know an episode had been released and had to wait a few hours for them to decide to actually let me see it.

Overcast is good at what it does (the audio boost features are the best of any client I've tried), but it's opinionated about a certain workflow in ways that don't play incredibly well with people who want to subscribe to a lot of podcasts and only listen to occasional episodes that catch their eye. Previous statements by Marco suggest that he likes Overcast's workflow and doesn't really want to adjust it to support inbox/queue users. In some ways the recent rewrite helped (the UI no longer locks up regularly when you have a lot of subscriptions), but in other ways it hurts (there's no way to give it a global episode-limit setting, and the default limit now actively wrecks playlists).

I'm inclined to say that if Overcast's workflow fits you, it's probably the best client to use. But if it doesn't, you have to make some choices...

You’ll often see “source available” used for that.

Tl;dr Wordpress.com has a sketchily-authorized copy of the Wordpress.org plugin directory that’s used as a funnel into signing up for a Wordpress.com hosting account. This was causing the author problems because it has better google rankings than the .org, and they were getting support requests from people who thought buying a plan on Wordpress.com meant they got the premium version of their plugin. So they C&D’d Automattic to remove them from the copied directory.

This is only related to the recent WP Engine drama insofar as the author says it made them lose trust in Matt.

Threadreader of the linked twitter thread with all the Slack discussion (since X was completely not working for me): https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1843963052183433331.html

...Matt doesn't come across well in it. Lots of refusing to state what he thinks the checkbox that he added means.

It did all seem to blow up around when he came back from a sabbatical, presumably taken because he really needed a break. Though I guess that he also had a bit of a PR disaster with Tumblr during that sabbatical, so...

The checkbox on WordPress.org is such a bad look, and is dragging the theoretically non-commercial parts of WordPress into this big (stupid) licensing fight.

It continues to reinforce that the entire WordPress.org / Foundation / Automattic cluster has turned out to just be Matt's personal fiefdom... which worked out okay when he was pretty chill, but is terrible when he decides to burn it all down.

> I don't think we're going to agree on this one.

> Crucially, they're not giving up their right to fork, they're just agreeing not to use it so long as the trademark license contract is active.

Mostly, I don't think this contract qualifies as an attempt to restrict your rights for that clause. It's an offer to give WP Engine something that they're not required to be given, in exchange for WP Engine not doing something while that contract is in effect. Crucially, they're not giving up their right to fork, they're just agreeing not to use it so long as the trademark license contract is active. And the term sheet says either party can terminate it for a material breach without any mention of penalties, so I don't think you can argue that they're being locked in to not using their GPL rights for any unreasonable time period -- they can fork whenever they feel like it, they just have to give up the not-GPL-required trademark license when they do.

Separately, the GPL calls out that you're allowed to place a restriction on your distributed code when it comes to trademarks, in that you're not required to license your trademark. I.e. you're allowed to distribute code that's GPL-licensed but that it's impossible for people to legally use as-provided without either forking it or obtaining an extra license from you. v3 is a lot more explicit about this, but it seems implicit in v2 as well.

You could certainly take the position that any sort of trademark license containing usage restrictions at all qualifies as a restriction under the GPL, so your only choices are to completely allow or forbid usage of your trademarks without any conditions. I disagree with that view.

I was referring to the fundamental question of whether conditioning a trademark license on behavior is allowed. I don't think it counts as restricting GPL rights in a way that'd trigger the clause, and you do.

I don't think we're going to agree on this one.

> The contract says the opposite – it states "you can use the trademark, but you have to forfeit your right to fork if you do"

Those mean the same thing. It's implicit in the offer existing that you can choose not take the offer, and so don't get the stuff in it.

I really don't think that's the way to interpret it. Automattic is saying "you have the right to fork, but you can't use the trademarks if you do". The GPL says that's allowed -- you're not required to grant a trademark license.

WordPress is GPLv2-or-later.

GPLv2 is silent on the subject of trademarks, and is a bit vague about additional restrictions -- section 4 would apply to trying to restrict usage of the code, but trademarks are a separate thing. GPLv3 explicitly allows you to decline to license your trademarks (see section 7, the paragraph starting "Notwithstanding any other provision of this License", clause e). This isn't generally called out as one of the big differences between v2 and v3, so I think it's intended more as a legally-spelled-out clarification than a change.

I'm not a lawyer, but the GPLv3 in particular seems compatible with the idea that you can tell someone that they can only use your trademarks so long as they behave in a certain way... so long as you're still allowed to fork the code, strip out those trademarks, and continue using it. Which does seem to be Matt's position. (I mean, he also wants to restrict access to Wordpress.org services, but that's even less in the GPL's area.)

My understanding of Matt's position, and what that term sheet he posted is talking about, is that he feels that WP Engine needs a trademark license to cover what it's currently doing. He feels that their usage of the marks exceeds what's generally allowed under the "everyone can use it this way" terms that WordPress.org offers. His position isn't just that they can't use the trademark to apply to their forked version, it's that they can't use it as they currently are even if it wasn't forked.

So Matt's now offering these terms: a license to use the trademarks as they currently are, in exchange for concessions. The concessions include that they'd agree to not use their GPL-granted right to fork the code. This sounds like an agreement that would hold up, assuming he's right about the trademark policy.

Again, I have no idea about the actual legalities of trademark usage. It's entirely possible that Matt is wrong about them not being allowed to do what they're currently doing with the trademarks, but it sounds like lawyers will be arguing about that.

I'm not defending his position, or talking about whatever's in the legal documents, I'm just trying to explain the distinction Matt seems to be drawing between the trademark license (and attached terms) and the software license in this thread.

(Personally, I think it's a fairly bullshit distinction that's completely against the spirit of the GPL. It's probably legally allowed, though.)

I think what Matt's saying is that they absolutely had the GPL rights to fork and modify the code... but those rights don't include the right to use the trademark. So if they wanted to be able to market themselves as offering WooCommerce(TM), they had to agree to the license, in which they'd have to promise not to use the aforementioned GPL rights.

I am nowhere near knowing enough about trademark law to say whether this is anything even approaching a reasonable use of trademarks.

It's an okay comparison really, so long as you compare the right bits. WordPress.com has cheaper and lower-feature plans than WP Engine's lowest one ($20/month), but once you hit that same price tier ("Business" @ $25/month) you can install plugins.

WP Engine is a pure commercial WordPress hosting service, while WordPress.com also has a personal blogging service stapled on.

I have some domains with wordpress.com as their registrar (they had a good deal when Google Domains was getting sold off), and I'm definitely side-eyeing that relationship now...

It might be sketchy, but WooCommerce is a GPL project: https://github.com/woocommerce/woocommerce/blob/trunk/plugin...

This is explicitly the sort of thing that WP Engine would be allowed to do, and if Automattic isn't happy about this then perhaps they should have chosen non-free licenses.

Basically: "wire fraud" is an extremely overblown claim. Nothing criminal is happening here, because they're complying with the license. Is it ethical? Debatable.

Newsom said he vetoed it because he didn't support legislating an implementation detail -- that all OS/browser makers were required to include support for sending a Do Not Track signal. It sounds like he'd have signed a bill that just said companies were required to respect a Do Not Track signal if one was sent.

> But Newsom said he is opposed to the new bill's mandate on operating systems. "I am concerned, however, about placing a mandate on operating system (OS) developers at this time," the governor wrote. "No major mobile OS incorporates an option for an opt-out signal. By contrast, most Internet browsers either include such an option or, if users choose, they can download a plug-in with the same functionality. To ensure the ongoing usability of mobile devices, it's best if design questions are first addressed by developers, rather than by regulators. For this reason, I cannot sign this bill."

See: https://archive.is/tNlCR

By the look of it, I think the answer has to be "no, and that's that point".

Yeah, but the question is really about how the app was presenting it. If it was making anything that sounded like a health claim...

> 1. Screen-recording permission once every week ?

Every month.

(Which is still annoying, but not the raw level of frustration that weekly would be.)