> One can be forgiven for thinking the author means to imply that all commercial software is non-free.
Do they mean to imply this? It can also be read as a clarification about the mentioned software, not all commercial software in general. Could just be poor wording.
> Open source was right to get rid of the intentional and unintentionally anti-commercial motifs that only got in the way of paid open source development.
Open source did succeed in avoiding the problem present in English language, but in doing so, shifted focus away from freedom and onto different confusing motifs. A rare word like 'libre' arguably does an even better job while staying true to the original ideas behind the term 'free'.
I don't feel strong disagreement with the four freedoms, but the biggest reason I've gone fully _OSS and intentionally avoid "free/libre" is because I don't want to endorse the FSF tactics and because I want to encourage others to demand more radical innovations instead of forty more years of the same.
What I find most disappointing when I talk to the FSF is that if I bring up social finance and technically enabled social decisions that can make social finance a lot more effective, it is rather as if I have spoken some alien language. I believe the non-programmer needs a lever to choose the development model used by programs they rely on. To the FSF insiders, such thinking is so orthogonal as to generate no reaction. If I say "a billion users are important," they refute the necessity. They are content to be monastic, conveniently propped up by donations for saying nice things. I find such abandonment inexcusable, and I get fired up talking about it.
(Not quite; you need to add yoghurt to the milk, in order to make yoghurt. For the rest, though, all you need are bacteria for the cheese and cow to develop naturally.)
Chrome's involvement in the past few years has (until very recently) been anything but reasonable.
That said, have any of them subjected WebP or AVIF to the same strict requirements, or should we reserve those only for less complex codecs actually designed with images in mind?
I think either leaving a hostile platform or staying to promote ideas which run against it are reasonable choices. But what the article doesn't say is why they (as an organisation whose mission is to protect and promote free software) should choose to leave now, when from what I know, Twitter has always been a non-free, profit-driven network.
Generally speaking, both using and not using X seem like reasonable choices for the FSFE, in my opinion. But deciding to leave it right now over changes in 'direction and climate' seems… odd.
The FSFE's mission, as I understand it, is to support and promote free software. But as far as I know, Twitter has never been a friend of free software, nor has it been supportive of other related values the article mentions, like 'privacy', 'transparency', 'autonomy', 'data protection', etc. It has always been a non-free, centralised network which cared about profit more than user rights, and engagement more than fostering civil discourse.
I don't see FSFE's presence on a platform as endorsement of its values, but rather as a way to leverage its popularity to better promote their mission. That hasn't changed; X is still a popular platform. It's attitude to Free Software and related ideas doesn't seem to have changed, either. So why leave now? I get 'misinformation, harassment, and hate speech' are never a good thing, but I don't recall the FSFE opposing them so vehemently before (more like just ignoring them), so why now, out of the blue? Unless there's been a change in their internal priorities, which they don't communicate, it doesn't really add up for me.
In the end, this just reads like them taking a political stance and trying to rationalise it in more neutral language. And I can understand and respect that decision, but the fuzzy phrasing still rubs me the wrong way.
> The FSFE's mission, as I understand it, is to support and promote free software. But as far as I know, Twitter has never been a friend of free software, nor has it been supportive of other related values the article mentions, like 'privacy', 'transparency', 'autonomy', 'data protection', etc. It has always been a non-free, centralised network which cared about profit more than user rights, and engagement more than fostering civil discourse.
Indeed, and FSFE writes:
> The platform never aligned with our values
> a space we were never comfortable joining, yet one that was once important for reaching members of society who were not active in our preferred spaces for interaction
And then says in no unclear terms what changed:
> Since Elon Musk acquired the social network [...] the FSFE has been closely monitoring the developments of this proprietary platform
> Over time, it has become increasingly hostile, with misinformation, harassment, and hate speech more visible than ever.
> an algorithm that prioritises hatred, polarisation, and sensationalism, alongside growing privacy and data protection concerns, has led us to the decision to part ways with this platform.
You cherry-picked two words "direction and climate" from the article and criticised them for taking an ambiguous political stance, but there is nothing ambiguous about the actual announcement and they clarify their exact motivation for leaving multiple times.
The problem is that 'what changed' is hardly related to why they joined Twitter in the first place. Becoming 'increasingly hostile' and prioritising 'hatred, polarisation, and sensationalism' (more than before) doesn't really contradict or prevent you from 'reaching members of society who were not active in [y]our preferred spaces for interaction'. Like I wrote, X is still popular, there are still people you can communicate with about your mission. The original logical (and given) reason for being on X is still just as valid.
And I didn't criticise them for taking an ambiguous stance. On the contrary, I remarked they seem to be taking a rather unambiguous political stance (one opposed to that of X's new leadership). What I criticised was their not being upfront about this and instead giving explanations which don't really add up for me (for reasons restated above).
I quoted only short parts to avoid making my comment appear twice as long, but please let me know if you found the way I did so to be misleading in some way.
> The problem is that 'what changed' is hardly related to why they joined Twitter in the first place.
Does it have to be? The original calculus was "unpleasantness of using unfree software vs. benefit of reaching more people". The calculus has changed to "unpleasantness of using unfree software + unpleasantness of encountering hate speech vs. benefit of reaching more people". In other words, what used to be "1 + -1 = 0" has become "1 + -2 = -1" for the FSFE. As humans, they are free to consider other reasons than their primary mission alone when determining whether the platform is still one they find to be worthwhile to use.
> What I criticised was their not being upfront about this
I really don't get how your impression is that they are not upfront about this, and yes, I found your comment to have been quite misleading, having skimmed the comments before reading the article. The very first sentence in the article starts with "Since Elon Musk...". What part of this would you have liked them to be more upfront about?
Sort of? For an individual, there's obviously a ton of personal factors that play a role in decision-making. For an organisation with a stated mission, though, I should expect them to make their decisions based on what best aligns with said mission, or another set of priorities they're bound to follow. This is important for knowing if one should support the organisation and if their values are aligned. How can one trust an organisation which only ever claims to fight for Y, but then in practice randomly throws Z, W, and U into the mix, as they feel like it?
As I wrote, the content they criticise X for is the kind of content I recall them being much more indifferent about in the past, so seeing this come up as their main reason for leaving this platform, with no indication of any internal re-evaluation of priorities having happened, is rather out of the blue.
> The very first sentence in the article starts with "Since Elon Musk..."
… and goes on to tell us they have been monitoring it; found it increasingly hostile; that they originally joined to interact with people, promote free software and alternative networks; that the platform feeds hatred, polarisation and sensationalism and grows privacy concerns; and finally that they're leaving.
> What part of this would you have liked them to be more upfront about?
What they suddenly have a problem with and why. As I said, what they actually wrote doesn't add up to this for me. Hostile environment, misinformation, harassment? They didn't seem to care much or see it as hindering their mission before. Hatred, polarisation, sensationalism? Same thing, and it doesn't necessarily hinder their activity on the network. Data protection, privacy concerns? The network has always been non-free, for-profit and centralised. Interacting with people and promoting free software? You literally can still do that.
They say why they originally came, but those reasons are still valid today. They say what they dislike about their platform, but it's either irrelevant to their mission or they haven't disliked it so much before. So what they say does not explain their decision. It doesn't explain the logic behind it. Trying to use it as an explanation doesn't really make sense with their supposed mission.
I can only guess the actual logic is more like 'we have other values we care about more now, which the platform now goes against, and in our current political climate we want to more noticeably stand at the "right side" and gain favour with our primary audience over there'. This, for example, could be a sensible explanation. But they chose not to give one.
Apparently, controlling what people are allowed to say "in the name of good" aligns with the FSFE's values. I know enough history to know what that means.
Congratulations on the progress. If I may ask, I'm curious what considerations have motivated your choice of licence (especially since pushover licences seem extremely popular with all kinds of different Rust projects, as opposed to copyleft).
Copyleft doesn't work well with Rust's ecosystem of many small crates and heavy reliance on libraries alongside static linking.
If one library be GPLv2 and the other GPLv3 they couldn't be used together in one project. LGPL solves nothing because it's all statically linked anyway. And yes, one could licence under both under the user's choice but then GPLv4 comes out and the process repeats itself, and yes one could use GPLv2+ but people aren't exactly willing to licence under a licence that doesn't yet exist and put blind faith into whoever writes it.
Using anything but a permissive licence is a good way to ensure no one will lose your library and someone will just re-implement it under a permissive licence.
C is a completely different landscape. Libraries are larger and the wheel is re-invented more often and most of all dynamic linking is used a lot so the LGPL solves a lot.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I think all of these are solved problems.
LGPL should only pose a problem if you explicitly want your program to be used with non-free software. And then only if said non-free software doesn't give you a way to rebuild it yourself, should you want to modify the LGPL program. (So not a problem for open-core or public-source projects, either.)
If, for some reason, you insist on allowing static linking for all the projects, I think the MPL allows this. (People often seem to think of the LGPL, but it's not the only weak-copyleft licence around.)
Otherwise, when releasing your project under GPLv3+, you don't have to put blind faith into the FSF; you can designate a proxy which will decide whether the new version should be allowed for your project or not. This proxy can be yourself, or it can be a different organisation you choose to trust. Plus, I'm pretty sure the GPL allows you to make linking exceptions of your liking.
> LGPL should only pose a problem if you explicitly want your program to be used with non-free software. And then only if said non-free software doesn't give you a way to rebuild it yourself, should you want to modify the LGPL program. (So not a problem for open-core or public-source projects, either.)
No, just if you want it to be used with anything that isn't that exact same GPL licence.
> Otherwise, when releasing your project under GPLv3+, you don't have to put blind faith into the FSF; you can designate a proxy which will decide whether the new version should be allowed for your project or not. This proxy can be yourself, or it can be a different organisation you choose to trust. Plus, I'm pretty sure the GPL allows you to make linking exceptions of your liking.
That's the same as just licencing under the GPLv3 and later retroactively deciding to also give the GPLv4 option when liking that licence. The issue is, what if you don't? Then your code can't be combined with any GPLv4 library.
The simple reality is that crates that have incompatible licences, and GPLv2 and GPLv3 are incompatible, cannot be used together in one distributed project without committing copyright infringement. The thing with MIT is that it's compatible with about every single licence out there.
> No, just if you want it to be used with anything that isn't that exact same GPL licence.
How so? The LGPL only demands the four freedoms for the program it covers, not for the entire project. As long as the user is free to use their own modified version of the LGPL program (by dynamic linking or being able to recompile) and share it with others, the licence should be satisfied, so even if your project as a whole is read-only or has a pushover licence, no?
> That's the same as just licencing under the GPLv3 and later retroactively deciding to also give the GPLv4 option when liking that licence.
It's practically the same if you own all of the code. Which, if you happen to run a public project which ends up accepting a lot of contributions, you won't.
> The issue is, what if you don't? Then your code can't be combined with any GPLv4 library.
Fair enough, but I don't think this problem can be solved. If you want any licensing changes to happen without explicit consent from every single contributor, you have to put a bit of blind trust in someone. My point was that in the case of the GPL, it doesn't have to be only the FSF.
Not in particular, but it's pretty common for permissively licensed projects to complain about companies complying with their license instead of what they imagine the license to be, then relicensing to a proprietary or copyleft license (e.g. Elasticsearch for a high-profile case but there are many others). This lead to some people disliking permissive licenses.
Personally I dislike them because they don't preserve end-user freedom, I prefer the MPL. But if someone wants to donate their work to for-profit companies that's their choice.
'Pushover licence' is a licence which may grant freedom, but doesn't care to protect it. One may modify software under a pushover licence and release their modifications as non-free software. Another, more common name is 'permissive licence'.
If I remember correctly, WebP was single-handedly forced into adoption by Chrome, while offering only marginal improvements over existing formats. Mozilla even worked on an improved JPEG encoder, MozJPEG, to show it could compete with WebP very well. Then came HEIF and AVIF, which, like WebP, were just repurposed video codecs.
JPEG XL is the first image format in a long while that's been actually designed for images and brings a substantial improvement to quality while also covering a wide range of uses and preserving features that video codecs don't have. It supports progressive decoding, seamless very large image sizes, potentially large amount of channels, is reasonably resilient against generation loss, and more. The fact that it has no major drawbacks alone gives it much more merit than WebP has ever had. Lossless recompression is in addition to all of that.
The difference is that this time around, Google has single-handedly held back the adoption of JPEG XL, while a number of other parties have expressed interest.
When I built WebP lossless format I kept testing design decisions against PNG. The average gain against my Internet PNG test corpus was 42 % and 26.5 % if I optimized the PNGs with pngcrush and pngout (kzip). I had not yet come up with ZopfliPNG ideas, those were backports from some WebP lossless ideas into gzip and PNG.
In context of the parent comment, 'only 20% improvement' is not super exciting, 'compared to the pain of dealing with yet another new image format'.
You raise a good point, though; WebP certainly did (and continues to do) well in some areas, but at the cost of lacking in others. Moreover, when considering a format for adoption, one should compare it with other candidates for adoption, too. And years before WebP gained widespread support in browsers, it had competition from other interesting formats like FLIF, which addressed some of its flaws, and I have to wonder how it compares to the even older JPEG 2000.
Not really. FLIF is too slow to decode, about 20x slower than WebP lossless. JPEG XL modular mode uses a similar static context modeling with WebP lossless and Brotli and likely LZHAM where all the entropy codes are generated at decoding time. Also JPEG XL forces tiled coding, making multi-threaded decoding a possibility.
Fair point, though not entirely true: you can run an image through lossy compression and store the result in a PNG, using tools like pngquant [1]. Likely not as efficient for many kinds of images, but totally doable.
Do they mean to imply this? It can also be read as a clarification about the mentioned software, not all commercial software in general. Could just be poor wording.
> Open source was right to get rid of the intentional and unintentionally anti-commercial motifs that only got in the way of paid open source development.
Open source did succeed in avoiding the problem present in English language, but in doing so, shifted focus away from freedom and onto different confusing motifs. A rare word like 'libre' arguably does an even better job while staying true to the original ideas behind the term 'free'.
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