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Truly disturbing information. You certainly should not trust any large tech companies, but #ByteDance makers of #TikTok is emerging as just about a worst-case scenario. Support #decentralization

arstechnica.com/tech-policy/20

🤔 What are your favorite #OpenSource / #FreeSoftware projects on the #Fediverse that we should collectively try to convince to move away from mastodon.social and toward other instances, so more people can easily see and interact with them?

📋 Give them an @-mention in this thread!

#Mastodon #decentralization

Guten Morgen meine Damen und Herren, wir begrüßen Sie zur tagesschau!

Last year we announced we would be joining Mastodon to explore an alternative to today's social media. 



We’re excited to announce we’re expanding Mozilla.social to a private beta, with hopes to open to the public soon.

This is just the beginning. Read more about the launch of our instance, including how to join the public waitlist. blog.mozilla.org/en/mozilla/mo

Now given that this strategy was conceived and driven by , I see no way he can be trusted to do anything but the same in any of his endeavors. That is his clear track record over decades. His "charity" work is also driven my mentality, and often directly tied to his investments. Like he's investing in and giving "charity" money to promote it as a solution to .

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"“We discovered that with very few amounts of prompting in Bengali, it can now translate all of Bengali,” James Manyika, a Google vice president also interviewed by 60 Minutes, said on the segment. “So now, all of a sudden, we have a research effort where we’re now trying to get to a thousand languages.”

This is how their hype undermines startups actually serving their communities, like @asme's lesan.ai.

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And section 6.2

“Thus the risk is that people disseminate text generated by LMs, meaning more text in the world that reinforces and propagates stereotypes and problematic associations,
both to humans who encounter the text and to future LMs trained
on training sets that ingested the previous generation LM’s output."

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What is actually good at? Going thru their key products, it is clear they don't create new paradigms, they make often buggy implementations of ideas from other people: . One thing they are clearly good is building a . So it seems what they are good at is seeing good ideas, "embrace and extend" to control it, then building monopoly profiteering.

"it’s becoming all too clear that this new tech will be used in the same ways as the last generation of digital tools: that what begins with lofty promises about spreading freedom and democracy ends up micro targeting ads at us so that we buy more useless, carbon-spewing stuff"

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There are lots of promises of good around etc. This all is being developed by the same owners, people and culture of and that announced "privacy is dead" and that they are "making the world a better place". They aim to disrupt whatever they can to become wealthier from it. That is what is all about. Even if this tech is a good idea, the forces driving it now have a proven track record of decades of causing harm
theguardian.com/commentisfree/

Well look at this report that's intended as the context for the meeting:
* Funded by Futurewei (Huawei's US arm)
* Executed by a consultant directed by LF
* Does not mention OSI or FSF or Stallman
* Seems to omit non-commercial players from "community" (obviously I haven't read it in detail yet)

linuxfoundation.org/research/o

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Well look at this. Linux Foundation is running an invitation-only gathering to define "an open source credo, or statement of common value" in Geneva in July.
events.linuxfoundation.org/ope

I wonder who has been invited?

#OpenSource #FOSS #FLOSS #Linux

Hello, world!

Following recent changes at Twitter, the new home of the X.Org Foundation is here on Mastodon. Please follow for the latest in the Linux graphics world and the freedesktop.org community. Going forward, we will no longer post to Twitter, but we're so excited to join the Fediverse!

A pattern popularized by the is taking innovative social ideas, and building structures where wealthiest portion of society gets to live them, leaving everyone else behind. is a great example of this. Kubernetes is a case in point: it is built collaboratively by a bunch of competitors, they are enjoying the benefits of and , but for their users, they stick them with and proprietary lock in.

It turns out that is not yet included in @fdroidorg because of the difficulty of confirming that setups are fully . We welcome help here, to unlock lots of apps built with Xamarin. gitlab.com/fdroid/rfp/-/issues

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Jean-Baptiste Kempf on earning a living with :

"Money can restrict you. Of course you need a decent income, but you’re programming, you’re a developer in one of the most active industries, where there is virtually no unemployment, you’re going to be earning enough no matter what city you’re based in. Sure, more money would be fun, but most of the people I know who have more money are annoying. And if it makes you a slave to your work, what good is that?" welcometothejungle.com/en/arti

So the ad on this episode says: "Bitwarden doesn't track your data, only crash reporting, and even that is removed in the F-Droid installation." at around 16:30 twit.tv/shows/floss-weekly/epi

Maybe not a big deal, but it seems like a new level for : people paying money to promote based on F-Droid's principals, in this case, opt-out data collection is tracking.

One of the things that has become clearer to me over my three decades of work with as a student, at big companies, universities, startups, and doing grant funded development: is about freedom for the user of the software, while is mainly about freedom to make money with software. This struck me when listening to how much loves Open Source redhat.com/en/code-comments-po

I sometimes have the feeling that there is certain kinds of essential that either requires developers to already be assholes to be able to build it effectively, or working on it turns the developers into assholes. This is stuff that we all need, that society is built upon. I appreciate the work, but personally want nothing to do with those communities. Yet it is also important that essential software is free software and open to contributions. It is a paradox I often think about.

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