Hans-Christoph Steiner @eighthave@librem.one

I'm working on a small project on the history of built-in "app stores". My hypothesis is that this idea actually originates from #GNULinux distros like #Debian. That was my personal experience of it. I started using computers in 1981 and have used DOS, Apple ][, C64, OS/2, GEM, Windows, MacOS, NeXTSTEP, MacOSX, Solaris, AIX, IRIX, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, and many distros starting with Slackware. I know the history of Debian, iOS, and Android well. Anyone have any other examples I might have missed?

If people get together and build themselves a really nice neighborhood that is pretty, fun to be in, good people nearby, effective services, etc. is it then inevitable that it gets turned over to mass tourism? Or gets sold out to foreign oligarchs? Both of these outcomes ruin the place. Those are both true for the places where some of my family are from, where I grew up, where I went to university, the city I lived for 20 years before returning to said city where some family live.

#SovereignTechFund provides an alternate model that fits better: fund essential free software from taxes, which companies cannot avoid paying, then everyone gets the benefits without worrying about sustainability. Kudos to Red Hat for making a market-driven approach work as well as it has for decades, but it is clearly not the best solution for funding infrastructural software.

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At the same time, RedHat has been a major funder of free software development, with key contributions to GNOME, Linux, GNU and more. Oracle is very unlikely to contribute anything near those levels, yet Oracle is a thread to RHEL. The non-profit RHEL forks might be able to raise real amounts of dev funding, but as much as I like that model, it is far from proven.

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Markets are a useful tool but they are not always the best tool for sustainable funding. #RedHat's recent decision to restrict access to source code provides a good example of that. #FreeSoftware via RHEL is the foundation for so many large companies but market-driven companies work to avoid paying for anything extra, even when they clearly benefit from it.

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#RedHat's policy of sharing source code with paying subscribers highlights the key differences between #FreeSoftware and #OpenSource thinking. Free Software focuses on #UserFreedom and #RHEL users have that since it includes #GPL source code. #OpenSource focuses on business model freedom, where companies are free to do whatever with the source code, including taking it proprietary and restricting the user. RedHat behaves Open Source, adding restrictions where it can.

https://sfconservancy.org/blog/2023/jun/23/rhel-gpl-analysis/

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The promise of USB-C is huge: standard plug for everything including charging, devices sharing power with each other, all the things over a single port. But wow, it is buggy compared to the old USB days. Like sometimes, devices just decide not to charge from a given USB-C connection. Hopefully this can still be improved, and USB-C doesn't turn out like #Bluetooth, where almost everyone feels like it regularly pranks them. I guess that's why there are still so many devices with headphone jacks

In my experience, the best UX for consistency and flow was Mac OS X circa 2008. Back then, #Apple was moving more towards #OpenSource and had gotten really good at defining Human Interface Guidelines and getting developers to follow them. Basically all the apps I used had the same UX for the core things (key commands, open/save dialogs, window management, etc). Then they got distracted by iTunes and shifted to working on devices that prioritize consuming rather than creating.
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The #UX situation on desktops regularly pisses me off: desktop apps technically are much better suited to providing a system-wide, consistent and easy UX. But #SurveillanceCapitalism means that all the money for development is going to the web, where tracking is built in and each site defines its own core UX patterns. So now the desktop can't keep up in terms of developer time, and sadly the web is often easier. 1/

With all this news about #BigTech doing layoffs because they are replacing people with #AI, I wonder if that is actually PR spin and what is actually happening is all the #AntiTrust actions are actually biting the monopolists where it hurts: their bottom line

I like to think about little hacks to increase my #privacy while working on code. Lots of build systems fetch all sorts of things from the network, and send all sorts of data. #Android, #Flutter, and others have opt-out tracking. One little hack I have going is to force #Gradle to fetch #Maven dependencies over #Tor (except from #Google which blocks Tor). https://gitlab.com/-/snippets/3642145