It’s been 5 years. I don’t think they’re going to change the license to allow distributions to distribute MongoDB more easily.

We should actively be against corporate leeching.

In a world without free software, Amazon will build their own proprietary software for servers that is better than everyone else’s, and will be in the same position. At least with Redis, multiple employees of AWS were core maintainers for Redis. It isn’t like Amazon didn’t contribute anything back. Now that it’s non-free, they’ll just fork it. Again.

All this really accomplishes is making licensing a headache for everybody, which is the main reason people and organizations use free software.

I think free software developers should be able to make money from their software, and money from working on their software. I also think everyone else should be able to, too.

To put it another way, open source means surrendering your monopoly over commercial exploitation.

Additionally, Elasticsearch does not belong to Elastic. Redis doesn’t belong to Redis, either.

Not only companies: https://lists.archlinux.org/hyperkitty/list/arch-dev-public@lists.archlinux.org/thread/OY2DLNWTZOBPAHFE5FSV4Q6AIWGZO6KV/?noscript

It’s the fault of copyright. Restricting what shows you can stream to your users instead of, for example, being required to pay a royalty, inevitably leads to this situation. Netflix being the sole company allowed to stream every show and film would result in a monopoly that would be bad for everyone as they progressively sought to increase profits year over year. One company having all that power would not be a good thing for anyone, including content holders.

The solution is simple: every streaming service should be allowed to stream every show/film in every country. Then, piracy can only compete on price. That requires significant copyright reform, however, and is very unlikely to happen.

PHP 8.0 is no longer supported so I hope they update the “really, really old technology” to at least PHP 8.1 today.

Most likely. This blog was written in February 2022; support for PHP 8.0 was only dropped in November 2023.

I was half-asleep when I wrote this, lol. Bitbucket dropped Mercurial recently, too. Sourcehut is the only other code forge I know of that supports hg which I really love. Kind of sets a high bar for contributions, but not being vendor locked in is a bonus. And I wish they’d more tightly integrate the subdomains…

I thought Github only supported git, too. Did it support Mercury at some point? I assume this is the last of other VCS support in Github.

In case anyone was wondering what TorrentFreak thinks of this whole thing: https://torrentfreak.com/you-cant-defend-public-libraries-and-oppose-file-sharing-150510/

Public libraries started appearing in the mid-1800s. At the time, publishers went absolutely berserk: they had been lobbying for the lending of books to become illegal, as reading a book without paying anything first was “stealing”, they argued. As a consequence, they considered private libraries at the time to be hotbeds of crime and robbery. (Those libraries were so-called “subscription libraries”, so they were argued to be for-profit, too.)

British Parliament at the time, unlike today’s politicians, wisely disagreed with the publishing industry lobby – the copyright industry of the time. Instead, they saw the economic value in an educated and cultural populace, and passed a law allowing free public libraries in 1850, so that local libraries were built throughout Britain, where the public could take part of knowledge and culture for free.

The TorrentFreak article might have more information; I skimmed it. I don’t live in India, so I don’t know. Apparently, only the raw.githubusercontent.com domain was blocked, so Indian users should have still been able to access the main github.com domain. It’s the direct link to the files that was apparently blocked. But cloning repositories probably wasn’t affected?

The main Github.com domain was still accessible but raw.githubusercontent.com, where code is typically stored, was blocked.

Some days, like today, I regret commenting TorrentFreak out of my RSS feed reader.

It’s kind of funny, but it’s also kind of scary that not having access to Github would probably significantly impact a lot of companies and services. It would definitely impact me.

Oh well. We can always move to Sourcehut, right?

Maybe a different perspective could help?

YouTube advertising works a little differently to, say, Facebook. For advertisements longer than 30 seconds, the advertiser doesn’t pay if the user hits “Skip”. Ad-blocking users are far less likely to watch ads to completion, so I can imagine this having almost no impact on conversion.

I believe this change, if it is successful in blocking ad-blockers, will generally be detrimental to advertisers. It means advertisements shorter than 30 seconds (so, unskippable ads) are now shown to a larger proportion of people unlikely to be interested or paying attention to the advertisement. It’s beneficial to YouTube because they can claw back some of the money they spend serving ad-blocking users videos—that ain’t free. That being said, YouTube is still probably one of the most friendly big platforms to advertisers because of how flexible they are. While it uses the Google Ads system, it’s more friendly than Google search ads…

I missed an opportunity to ask someone who did a lot of YouTube advertising whether they noticed any impact at all from the recent ad-blocker blocking change recently, so this is all speculation.

It’s worth mentioning that Android Auto doesn’t work on GrapheneOS due to the privileged access it requires, and will not support it unless it is re-architected. Which phones were you thinking of when you said “compatible”?