TBH, it is very difficult to me differentiating between the different flavors of authoritarians.
Maybe someone can make an easy to understand comparison matrix? You know, "Kills people because they have a different opinion.", "Suppresses minorities.", etc.
Most wars aren't "won" anymore.
One notable software business professional interviewed by RBC thought that the West’s decision would “adversely affect the life of the developer community, mutual trust within it, and therefore the quality of the product.”
It was Russia and other autocracies etc. that diminished the trust by actually financing developers for multiple years to first earn trust and finally introduce backdoors into open source software, as demonstrated by the XZ utils backdoor.
In open source projects, maintainers need to have some initial trust into each contributor, and let this trust naturally grow with time and contributions. They cannot perform intensive background checks on everyone before accepting a patch.
While it is easier to uncover backdoors in open source software, there is no good way to defend and prevent against this kind of attack in this type of development process. All open source projects can do is trying to take away some trust from people within higher risk groups. This of course might lead to discrimination.
That is why we can't have nice things. Everything needs to make a profit and cannot simply be good.
Infrastructure shoudn't be required to make a profit. They are there for the public good. What's next? Paying for sitting on public benches and entering public parks? Paying for the privilege to exit your house and use the public sidewalk? We already have to pay to use public toilets in some cases...
These things should be available to everyone for free and build and financed via general taxes.
In german there is only one word for it, which is a gift for german speakers.
"Copying is theft" is the argument of corporations for ages, but if they want our data and information, to integrate into their business, then, suddenly they have the rights to it.
If copying is not theft, then we have the rights to copy their software and AI models, as well, since it is available on the open web.
They got themselves into quite a contradiction.
Because this is fiction, where there is good and evil, right and wrong, the good people are rewarded and the bad people punished, successful people earned it and the poor deserve it, and complex problems have simple answers. Where every argument only has a pro and a contra.
But we are living in reality, where most things are in shades of grey, and everything is more complex than it appears. People have to make decisions based on partial knowledge, to not get stuck in indecisiveness. Where even the middle ground solution might be wrong. And with so many distractions and propaganda.
Just be kind and understanding to other people with different ideas, the real world is a complex one, and easy to get lost. Sometimes people like to flee into their simple worlds of populism, maybe through talking and listening we can help them find their way again.
No, publicly traded. One of the first steps to enshittyfication.
True, private companies are generally more focused on customer satisfaction, but that can suddenly change, for instance when the owner dies, and the new owners don't share the same ideals.
Private companies have a certain single point of failure built-in by having often just one or sometimes a small number of owners.
Nobody really knows what will happen when Gabe dies.
I just hope that valve becomes a worker cooperative... That would be the most stable form of company that probaly stays focused on customer satisfaction long term, since workers tend to favor providing long-term profits via good service instead of short term gains, for high frequency traders.
What I really like is that they double down on hackabilty by switching to metal torx screws, etc.
That, and a Linux system are IMO the main selling points of the SteamDeck, compared to any clones from Asus or Lenovo, etc.
At that point we get a tag system. Content Warning: politics, Content Warning: bad news, Content Warning: dangerous cuteness...
Codeberg is great, but it is hosted in Germany, and subject to their laws. AFAIK, Germany has laws against tools for "circumventing copy protection", or "hacking".
So I am not sure that they can provide a save haven for tools, where some lawyer could argue these points successfully in front of a court.