The Brexit lies and their perpetrators are indelibly etched into my brain.
That is more than fair enough, as said, not trying to get you to donate or anything, especially if you already donate your time. Just hoping to put something out there that some of us really do take the donations seriously and we try to be as transparent as possible with everything, I just wish more projects would do that to shake some of the potential mistrust.
Whilst I do understand that sentiment, with our project we have made as much effort as possible to make sure that nobody thinks we would ever do such a thing.
We are rather tight fisted with our donations and make sure we only spend them when absolutely necessary - none of it goes out as regular stipends for the team and all funds for expenses get sent in response to the actual bills incurred, I don't think any of us would dream of siphoning it into our pockets.
We were even debating if we should use the "standard" funds to foot the bill for a new hosted service thing but felt this was a bit of a grey area - the service would be provided for free but footed by the donors of which only a small percentage would likely use it... We realise just how much of a privilege it is to be in receipt of the funds so we treat them with utmost reverence.
Not that I'm trying to encourage you to donate money to projects rather than time, I very much do the same as you and donate time and effort rather than money, but there are some good guys out there.
I have to admit that I don't. I have done a couple of one-off donations before but I generally hope that my karma is balanced by some of the effort I put into helping out with a couple of projects.
That said, I've been utterly floored as to how generous the community has been with donating to one project I help with in particular. We added a donation platform with OpenCollective early on in the project but kind of hid the link away a little in the navbar, I thought we might get a tiny bit thrown at us every so often. When Distrotube did a video on us, one of the comments he made is that we should make the Donate button much more obvious, we did and now we have a whole bunch of super generous sponsors backing the project and making it possible. We keep the spending as open as we possibly can - it mostly goes into our backend hosting costs and website stuff and really does help it all stay alive.
There is a difference between censorship and the right to not have to listen to somebody. Being banned from having a platform to speak from could count as censorship (for example being banned from Reddit). However with Lemmy those on lemmygrad are free to say whatever they want, the difference is that everyone else is just as free to not have to listen. The idea of the Lemmy instances is that they have the ability to curate content - an instance catering to an LGBT community is not going to want to have to listen to right wing evangelicals and you join up on that knowledge. If you want to have the option to hear every single voice then join an instance with that mindset or just host your own.
And I wasn't aware of the Elementary thing with Flatpak! Admittedly I hadn't really thought of it in that way, I was thinking something more akin to F-droid where there are a couple of extra repos you can add which have applications not on the main one due to slightly looser requirements. But making it specifically for apps for that ecosystem in particular makes a lot of sense.
Not officially but people have managed to reverse engineer it before in order to host their own - https://forum.snapcraft.io/t/lol-an-open-source-snap-server-implementation/27109
Whilst I do get the sentiment (and in no way do I support Canonical in keeping it proprietary), how likely is it that alternative Snap repos are going to show up if they did make it possible? Even with Flatpak where it is encouraged and documented I don't think I've heard of anyone setting up a Flathub alternative of any significance.
(except snap, but they seem too Ubuntu specific).
For what it is worth you can install Snap on most distros. https://snapcraft.io/docs/installing-snapd
From the conversation it seems to be a similar situation to the project I'm with is in. The flatpak is essentially community maintained rather than being directly supported by the team. To become verified it needs to be done so by a representative of the maintainers of the software. To be verified it doesn't have to have a team member involved in it but this is a requirement Inkscape seem to have imposed.
For us we just aren't in a position to want to support it officially just yet, we have some major upgrades coming to our underlying tech stack that will introduce a whole bunch of stuff that will allow various XDG portals etc. to work properly with the Flatpak sandboxing model. To support it now would involve tons of workarounds which would need to be removed later.
Yeah this has been our (well, my) statement on requests to put out ARM binaries for Pulsar. Typically we only put binaries out for systems we actually have within the team so we can test on real hardware and replicate issues. I would be hesitant to put out Windows ARM builds when, as far as I know, we don't have such a device. If there was a sudden clamouring for it then we could maybe purchase a device out of the funds pot.
The reason I was asking more about if it was to do with developer licences is that we have already dealt with differences between x86 and ARM macOS builds because the former seems to happily run unsigned apps after a few clicks, where the latter makes you run commands in the terminal - not a great user experience.
That is why I was wondering if the ARM builds for Windows required signing else they would just refuse to install on consumer ARM systems at all. The reason we don't sign at the moment is just because of the exorbitant cost of the certificates - something we would have to re-evaluate if signing became a requirement.
I can't say I'm one who shares that sentiment seeing as the only two projects I'm involved with happen to be Electron based (by chance rather than intention). Hell, one of them is Pulsar which is a continuation of Atom which literally invented Electron.
Is that a developer licence thing? I know GitHub recently announced Windows Arm runners that would be available to non-teams/enterprise tiers later this year.
Electron apps using older versions that don't support the 16k page size are probably the biggest offenders
Never really had much of my Grandma's food other than her Christmas fruit cakes. My Mum would only ever cook out of necessity and never anything fancy. It was my dad that did all the nice cooking in my house.
The moment you exclude any group or persons from your licence, it is, by definition, no longer open source.
Of course that doesn't sit well with some people and there are some initiatives to try to account for that, for example the Hippocratic License that allows you to customise your licence to specifically exclude groups that might use your software to cause harm or the Do No Harm license with similar goals.
Honestly, I find it hard to object to the idea. Some might argue it is a slippery slope away from the ideals of software freedom (as has been the case with some of the contraversial licenses recently like BSL and Hashicorp. I'm not a hardline idealist in the same way and if these more restrictive licenses that restrict some freedoms still produce software that might otherwise not exist then I'm happy they are around.
Would I use one? Probably not, for me, whilst I like the idea, I think the controversy generated by using a non-standard licence would become its defining feature and would put off a lot of people from contributing to the project.
But... that is exactly what I've been saying since the start... If used correctly there is no need to instantly reject a project just because it uses Discord, or any other chat, as one of its options.
I feel you haven't been reading what I've been saying if you are claiming a "single chat log". The whole point of what I'm saying is that there are various forms of communication that can be used in a project and the one I'm part of literally couldn't function with an async-only forum type setup. Chat is for temporary, transient communication. Forums (and by extension Lemmy/Reddit) are for longer form async discussions with defined topics. Both are valid as has been the case all the way back into the days of having both a mailing list and IRC channel for a project.
You know IRC has been used alongside mailing list for open source software communities and projects for literally decades right?
The same could be said of Matrix though, I don't think you can see a Matrix chat without an account either. Discord does have a forum layout... ish. It is pretty bad though and not something we use as a forum. It is used but really only as a way to separate topics in what would be a busy single chat area - more akin to something like Zulip. Even IRC channels tend to need you to connect with a nickname but unlike the others you can't see chat history without a bouncer set up and at that point you have basically made an account in all but name.
So this is inspired somewhat by a question about somebody wanting to have a non-GitHub way of contributing to Lemmmy. I've really enojyed some other discussions on this community so felt somewhat inspired to ask this one too.
And whilst Lemmy is mirrored to a couple of alternatives (a self hosted Gitea and Codeberg) they can't really be anything more than a mirror and a backup. If one doesn't want to use GitHub they still can't realistically contribute without signing up to GitHub and creating issues and PRs.
So what would it take to actually get people away from GitHub and onto alternatives (GitLab, Codeberg, sourcehut)? The situation seems to somewhat parallel the whole Reddit and Twitter thing. Both have/had a huge monopoly on users to the point where it just wasn't really worth using anything else, at least not if you wanted to be part of a decently sized community.
Other mass migrations
Obviously the difference with Reddit and Twitter is that they both have had their version of "the Event" which cause existing projects (Mastodon, Lemmy amongst others) to suddenly explode in popularity. Has it killed off the originals? No but it has made the alternatives actually viable with enough of a community to sustain them and encourage more to join, even if slowly.
GitHub has had its fair share of controversy, most recently surrounding co-pilot and code scraping but no particular widespread outrage to cause people to leave it in droves.
GitHub is the home of open source?
I think for many GitHub has simply become synonymous with open source. The sheer number of repositories and projects hosted there means that people just use GitHub alone for all of their open source needs and don't even look at other forges. Not to mention all the services offered - most of the alternatives can offer some of the same features but not all of them. Not only do you get space for your project code itself but you get access to their CI/CD platform, a forum through Discussions, a wiki, a project management tool, static site hosting which is an awful lot for smaller projects like GitLab and community non-profit projects like Codeberg to compete with.
There of course are some people that rely on their GitHub profile and their activity chart in order to get jobs and advance their careers - many of these people I suspect wouldn't want to fragment their profile by having to split their activity up over multiple profiles.
So why would anyone not want to use GitHub. Quite simply it isn't really in the spirit of open source is it? Not only is it controlled by Microsoft who haven't historically been the friendliest towards open source but GitHub itself is closed source. You can't host your own GitHub and get all the same features it enjoys. It does seem somewhat odd that the biggest vault of open source projects is itself proprietary and completely closed off.
What would need to happen for things to change?
So realistically what could be done about it? What would need to happen in order to entice people off of GitHub? Something arriving in the hopefully not too distant future is forge federation - projects such as Forgefriends, ForgeFed and ForgeFlux aim to try and create a federation of software forges. One of the main issues about having to create different accounts for every single platform goes away as you just stick with the instance you like best (or host your own) and yet still be able to fully interact with software hosted on other platforms. This means that you should be able to interact with a project hosted on, say, Codeberg, from your sourcehut account. You should be able to see issues, PRs etc. just as if you were on the same website.
GitHub, I strongly imagine, would have no intention of joining in order to maintain and protect their walled garden. I just don't see a world where they would want to join in with federation.
Lastly I just want to add that I'm absolutely not judging anyone for using GitHub. The main project I'm involved with is also still on GitHub for some good reasons. Not only is it intertwined with their ecosystem but it provides services that we just need at this point. We still rely on some of GitHub's services so we don't spend our community donations on hosting stuff that we just don't need to. It lightens the maintenance on us whilst we are still in a very active stage of the project with an awful lot of moving parts. And the bit I hate most, we need to be visible to the community - we aren't big enough to go to one of the alternative platforms because what community engagement we have might well drop through the floor if people are suddenly forced to make accounts on other services just to log an issue or ask a question. I would love to move to a platform like Codeberg and any personal project I make would probably be hosted there but for a big-ish community project we just cannot justify it. So I am well aware of the attraction of GitHub and what keeps people there. What I want to know is what would be needed to actually break that inertia for projects, such as the one I mentioned, to justify a move away from GitHub - particularly people who may be far less ideological about the open source world.
tl;dr
- GitHub offer many nice thing
- Other places have not so many nice thing
- How other place make people change mind up to move from place with all thing and all people to place with less many people and thing?
So I was posting on this thread which is a meme about how everything is Chromium (except Firefox obviously) and was replying to somebody talking about needing the "Linux of browser engines".
This got me thinking about a few things as this is an area which I'm very much for reducing the, honestly slightly obscene, amount of control that Google have over this space with Chromium.
So I thought why not make a quick discussion to showcase some alternatives that are out there in development that people might not know about and bring them some attention as well as just foster a discussion in general on the topic.
So this won't be focusing on Blink and WebKit (nor KHTML which, whilst independent is still closely tied to Blink and WebKit. For those unaware KHTML is KDE's browser engine, forked by Apple to make WebKit which itself was forked to create Blink. It has also recently been killed off entirely for KF6 so is very much dead end now). By extension this also includes things like Qt WebEngine or anything else based on WebKit or Chromium/Blink.
I'm also not touching on Gecko - the other "big" engine out there. Whilst I am a huge proponent of Firefox, Gecko has proven that it just isn't as popular to use in alternative browsers as Chromium or Webkit. I'm not knowledgeable to explain exactly why this is but there are plenty of resources out there. By extension I'm also not expanding upon Goanna.
The reason for my interest is also because it goes beyond just browsers - for example these could be used in Electron-like projects for desktop Javascript apps.
So what alternatives are there or are currently in development?
Servo
A project started by then abandoned by Mozilla to develop a new experimental browser engine. Was picked up by the Linux Foundation and had a recent round of funding to begin active development again. Why do I find this interesting?
- It isn’t being created as part of a larger browser project - i.e. it is a project to develop the engine and not to develop a browser. Hopefully this means it is far more portable and embedabble for anyone who wants to use it for their own project.
- Supported by the Linux Foundation rather than any of the tech corps like Facebook or Google which hopefully means they are more open and friendly to community contribution.
- Written in Rust - I’m not claiming that this is good because of the language technology itself but Rust is currently very popular with lots of people wanting to learn it and contribute to projects so hopefully this inspires people to get involved with it.
- Not a KHTML/WebKit/Blink (or even a Gecko) fork
- Repo is on GitHub - Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a GitHub shill, but generally people monitor and know how to use GitHub better than Google and Mozilla’s systems. I’d honestly be just as happy if using GitLab or any other alternatives as they still confirm to that same user experience (and to be fair WebKit is also on GitHub).
Ferus
A much smaller and lower profile project described as "A toy web engine written in Nim" but one I find interesting enough to be watching
- Written in Nim - I'm all for getting less popular but interesting languages being used in more projects
- Small GitHub hosted and actively developed project that seems would be easy to get involved with if you wanted to help develop or improve the project.
NetSurf and NeoSurf
Not browser engines but browsers that use their own engine and not based on anything else. NetSurf is the original and has been ported to a ton of different OSs (it was actually made for Acorn's RISCOS originally) but development is somewhat slow so it seems NeoSurf is a fork to try and improve and build upon it.
LibWeb and Ladybird
Part of the fascinating SerenityOS project - Ladybird is its home grown but cross platform browser using its own LibWeb browser engine. Honestly I'm not particularly familiar with the project and the first link does a much better job of explaining it all than I can.
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So yeah, just thought to put some open source alternative browser engine projects that are out there to draw attention and foster a little discussion in this community. Interested to see what people think.
So in the spirit of this community and not just to focus on the Reddit... issues... I thought it might be nice to get a topical conversation going in here.
Basically, what open source projects are you currently working on or are you heavily involved with?
I think it would be nice to see what projects people have on the go, get some publicity out there and otherwise talk about stuff that we should be discussing here.