bilb

It's not as if they are holding themselves up as supporting Free Software philosophies (as opposed to Open Source), so where's the pretense?

If somehow it ever makes strategic sense for them to stop making use of the open source model, yeah, they'll stop. That doesn't mean they were pretending.

I don't think they're pretending. Open source software is a valuable resource for basically all major tech companies, and a lot of it is driven by major tech companies. Some kind of combination of open source and proprietary software will always be a thing for them. This isn't some major contradiction, they use either model based on the specific needs of the project.

This is why some think "Open Source" is too permissive since they see it as free/cheap labor to be exploited by huge corporations.

I'm not sure that I see it that way, but I can see their point.

I honestly don't get the outage over that. I feel like I'm in the minority on that, though. I don't care if linguistic statics are gathered from my public comments. Knock yourself out.

This story is about "private" messages on a free hosted service, and I think their users are just being naive if they think this is beyond the pale. But I get the feeling of violation at least a little.

I see it as a social signifier more than anything else.

I just say "salud." I'm far from a fluent Spanish speaker, but I like it better. It's the same as "gesundheit" but easier to say.

It is.

The people in charge of maintaining Mastodon in particular though need to establish some kind of legal entity and that needs legal recognition somewhere.

It's very common for forums to have rules against posting in a thread that hasn't seen any activity for an arbitrary amount of time. When you do that, you will often cause a thread that has fallen from the front page to bump back to the top of the front page. It's not clear why this is a problem, though. Maybe regulars just dislike seeing old topics brought back up?

Don't worry about it, the angry edit was meant to be humorous- in general I agree that it's a mistake to let downvotes upset you.

(And because I'm the admin of my own instance, the votes are made visible through the UI. So if I wanted to be a vindictive weirdo about it, I could... 😉)

"In case this is a real question?"

Anyway, I just read through the settlement and I didn't see any explicit transfer of ownership of he code in there. I'm not a lawyer though, there are some things in there I may not understand the implications of.

On my instance, I follow most of the biggest communities with a "seed account" to fill out the "all" feed. This seems to work pretty well.

I try to do an "end-run" around federation drama by using my own instance, especially since I prefer to be as openly federated as possible. This is not without drawbacks, but it's really not bad.

My fear is that one day the biggest instances will switch from using block lists to instead only federate with an allow-list. That would basically make this use non-viable.