Andrew @andrew907@librem.one

I shouldn't have been surprised, but I am at how much harder it is to learn grammar in a new language than vocab. I think it's because I can associate images with vocab in my head.

Copyright and censorship are synonyms. Or more precisely, copyright is a kind of censorship. Perhaps there should be some limitations on free speech, such as speech promoting violence, but just because someone else said the same or similar thing first is no excuse for censorship. https://www.techdirt.com/2022/08/04/please-dont-normalize-copyright-as-a-tool-for-censorship/

I listened to UBPorts' latest Q&A. I applaud their work, I really do. I would recommend Ubuntu Touch to some people. I used to use it. But this episode highlights how important it is to have open hardware running mainline Linux, drawing on the standards, developers and apps that are making the Gnome desktop so powerful. UBPorts is making valiant efforts to salvage locked down proprietary crap. What could they do say on the Pinephone without a hand tied behind their back.

I don't understand why apparently Gnome Web won't play local audio but it can play online audio. Firefox can do both.

So if you pay Spotify your $20 for the right to hear song X for the month, and then you stop paying $20 or Spotify goes bankrupt, your song is gone. Music is too important to leave up to chance like that.

Shakespeare we own. If you buy a Shakespeare book, you can give away infinite copies, or translate it, or write a sequel. It's yours. Not exclusively yours in a way that you would want your avocado toast to be exclusively yours, but yours nonetheless.

It is time to stop pretending that infinitely copiable works are like physical things. As Nina Paley would say, copying is not theft. If I copy your bike, you still have a bike.

It is time to insist on owning your music (or whatever other artform). Copyrighted works only have one owner: the copyright holder. Even if I buy the CD, I don't own the work; I only bought a license to listen privately until the CD wears out. Or if I buy the book, to read it till the book wears out.

And for all my ranting, the grass is greener on this side of the fence.

What if we went back to the copyright side of the fence? Suddenly you can't remix and you can't share. That's miserable.

What if we went back to the closed source side of the fence? One problem is my niche music preferences. Buying commercial music software is not only costly (I already wasted that money) but a UX nightmare. Open source tools take set up but can chain together for unintended uses, and we're up and running!

The good news is, most open-source developers I've come across do acknowledge that Linux on ARM is a thing. So I can stop banging my head against the wall and go back to getting work done and having fun. It's just that the world is blind.

For all Apple's flaws, at least they're proving that Intel/x86 hardware belongs in the past.

The assumptions. Everyone has both an Intel machine running Windows or Mac, and a machine running iOS or Android.

Wrong. Linux on ARM gets you so far and lets you do almost anything you want. And then when you have to interact with the outside world, you run into assumptions. What if I'm not running iOS or Android? What if even your Linux app doesn't work because you assume I use Intel? How about everyone offer at least an HTML5 app and if you want to make proprietary crap on the side, you can?

The feeling you get when, despite all their sophisticated cookies and tracking, certain Web services keep kicking you off and making you log in over and over. Do they use their own products? They have the short term memory of a goldfish.

I find it mildly insulting that a certain major website assumes that I'm using Google Chrome without checking. Even Google would say, We see you're using Firefox, you should use Chrome!

Does Santa Claus exist? The literal answer is yes, there is a good white-bearded man named Santa Claus who lives in North Pole, Alaska. But that's not the Santa Claus people really want to see exist.

There are two obstacles to socialism: scarcity of physical goods and services, and censorship laws called copyright and patent. Without copyright, Santa could come much closer to existing. He could give limitless music, books, art. But at least he can give from the public domain and cc0 works.

I'm hearing that ads are coming to the Android lock screen. It's giving me flashbacks to when I used Android and got interrupted by ads every 90 seconds as a penalty for doing things as harmless as saving my file. If you enjoy ads and clutter as little as I do, you know the solution: go Linux! pine64.org or puri.sm

When my Librem 5 finally comes, maybe it will be even better, but I got tired of waiting and got a mid tier Pinephone. Flashed Mobian on it right away. It is quite good, easily the best phone I've ever had and fully (maybe with a bluetooth keyboard) a laptop replacement. This is largely thanks to Phosh, but the Pinephone is dutifully supportive if occasionally sluggish

Spot on. We have a problem in our culture. Everyone either thinks read-only culture is okay, or ignores copyright law (good for them, but what are more risk-averse folks to do?), or is a shareholder in one of the big greedy media companies. https://www.techdirt.com/2022/07/25/why-is-media-lamenting-disneys-loss-of-copyright-instead-of-celebrating-the-public-domain/

I do make an exception for work and for free software. Would it be better if all software developers renounced their copyright? Yes, but we don't have two hundred years of public domain software in libraries to revive. Free and open-source licenses will have to do.

Therefore it is time to go digging in old libraries, revive old culture, and produce new cultural content licensed under cc0.

I respect Nina Paley's position on copyright. It is a fair argument to ask, why are we letting Big Copyright steal 95 years of culture when we can disobey? Why are we giving them that power? For me, the less risky course is to boycott the whole tangled mess as much as possible. Yes, we lose the incalculable cultural wealth produced over ten decades and stolen from us. We also gain independence from the insatiable demands of the greedy monopoly holders, which are parasitic publishers not artists.