Red Hat, the world’s largest provider of open source software, would begin to reserve the source code of its flagship product, Red Hat Enterprise Linux, to paying customers only.

I think they should have done that in the first place. You can sell open source software just fine; you shouldn’t be expected to make the sources public—only to those with a binary copy of your software who ask for it. Organizations that write and maintain open source software should be paid for their work.

In 1984, a researcher named Richard Stallman released a software project called GNU. Stallman licensed GNU for free, with his only stipulation that users sign an agreement called the GNU General Public License. […] To Stallman, freedom meant no restrictions — not necessarily no costs. “Think free as in free speech, not free beer,” he is quoted as saying.

Yes. Stallman sold copies of GNU Emacs on physical media back in the day.

This article doesn’t touch on the contentious issue, which is that RHEL’s terms say, if you share the Red hat sources as a customer to a non-customer, Red Hat may stop serving you as a customer. The controversy isn’t about cost. It’s about being punished for exercising the freedoms Red Hat gives you.

Of course, SUSE and Ubuntu Enterprise have had the same terms for years. Red Hat was the outlier until now.

I haven’t missed a thing. I don’t even get most of my news from Lemmy or Reddit communities; I get it from RSS feeds or books. I lurked /r/linux for a long time after I stopped actively contributing. It wasn’t until a few months ago that I started contributing to Lemmy, the first collection of online communities I’ve been a part of in years. I’m of two minds about it.

I’m actually grateful for it because I started complaining about things that have bothered me for a long time, and The Great Lemmy Migration made me realize, well, there’s no reason I can’t do something about that. It helped me change my attitude. So, in a very real way, I’ve contributed to several upstream projects because Lemmy made me rethink things and I am now less annoyed. It’s weird how Lemmy feels like an actual community in the way no other social site (including Reddit) has.

On the flip side, I think I spend too much time on Lemmy…but this week has been uniquely rough.

So how else would you combat malicious forks like what happened to new pipe?

Trademarks. Anyone malicious can take your source-available code anyway, but if they infringe on your trademark by calling it “Firefox” or “Newpipe”, you are legally in your right to take it down. Trademarks deal with fraud; copyright doesn’t.

Iceweasel is a classic example of what happens when free software projects like Firefox seek to defend their trademark. They didn’t want to allow Debian to use the Firefox name, as that may cause users to attribute quality problems to Mozilla when Debian is actually responsible because of the patches they had made.

Want to remove an app using the GrayJay name without your permission if it’s a registered trademark? Here’s a link to report it to Google Play.

Yeah, uhh…it’s pretty stupid. The more I think about it, the more shocked I am that BMW is so aware of this that they need two separate warnings for it in the handbook, but make it the owner’s responsibility not to put themselves in that situation…?

Car is on some sort of lease program where you trade it in for the next model after a few years. There would need to be some way of installing a manual release without causing damage to the car…or preventing BMW from taking it back.

TIL Teslas are better designed than this BMW model 🤷‍♀️

The previous generation BMW car my friend owned worked fine. This is a new regression, and if you look further up the thread, you’ll see I’ve posted a photo of page 86 of the BMW handbook where BMW acknowledges their own bad design and pushes the responsibility onto the owner to not lock people inside the car. While also having an auto-lock feature which is on by default.

It would be good to find out if this design was intentional or somehow just not tested until they had produced these models. The wording makes it seem that way.

BMW thinks so too!

330i

This is how the BMW a friend owns works, and it’s not an EV. The unlock button in the driver’s seat just stops working if the car is off.

How do I know this? I decided to stay in the car while my friend went to go get something, and it auto-locked as he walked away. After about 5 minutes of trying everything I could think of to get out (including attempting to climb into the boot, which was too small for anything except a malnourished child to fit through), he came back and unlocked it.

There is no manual way to unlock the door from the inside. I checked the driver’s manual. It says it’s impossible to do without “special knowledge” and does not provide any pointers on how to do so. The friend asked a guy at the BMW place after a service how to unlock it from the inside, and he said “oh, yeah, there’s no way to do that,” and laughed it off.

Previous BMW models weren’t designed like this. I can’t imagine what they’ll do to the next generation…

It’s a shame that Cory Doctorow of all people seems to have misinterpreted this. And that he is using Medium to deliver this story.

You can build visual novels in Ren’Py, which uses only Python, but that might not be what you’re looking for.