Ideally the workers. But failing that, legislation would probably be a good thing to at least try to reduce e-waste from closed, discarded devices. Like, if a device line is at its end of line from the company, then they might as well make it open for the community. They're not supporting it anymore, after all, but someone might want to.
Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.
The Free Software community has always been political. Where have you been?
Introducing a non-binary mascot for KDE is no more or less political than for example Richard Stallman demanding that printer drivers should be free, back in the 1980s. And same way the use and preference of the term "open source" over "free software" -- or vice versa -- is also very political because it depends on if one wants to go with the described values or not necessarily want to stand behind them.
The Free software community involves people, and with people come shared values and politics. That's kinda what "community" implies. And if we really want to go into it, given the circumstances of the invention of things like computers, the Internet, etc. it'd be very erroneous to asset that software in general has ever been value-free or non-political. Computing artillery trajectories is political just the same way as promotion of LGBTQ+ people, even if people get more upset about the latter rather than the more kinetic kinds of politics implied by howitzers et al.
Your comparison is dishonest and wrong. printer drivers are a piece of software, sexual orientation is completely disconnected from software or technology.
This implies that the difference actually matters. In both cases there is a political goal behind the actions. Yes, printer driver software itself is very different from sexual and gender orientation, but wanting for the printer drivers to be free is a political statement and principle, and so is the uplift of LGBTQ+ people and celebrations of PRIDE month. Both are political despite being about distinct subject matters.
You can disagree with the politics in question, but to say that FLOSS has no room for politics is itself a political position, leading you to a paradox!
Yes, it matters. You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.
Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.
> You can try to distract and do as much mental gymnastics as you want but everyone rational can clearly see that one thing is doing politics for software (free drivers, open source, no DRM, …) and the other is about virtue signaling about subjects that are completely unrelated.
Okay, but you would still have to answer a really important question. Why does it matter?
Let's say that it's virtue signalling, for the sake of the argument (although people tend to not know what virtue signalling actually is, and just claim any public acknowledgement of one's values as such, which is incorrect).
So, why does one being virtue signalling and the other not being such actually matter? Does it actually change the messaging in any meaningful way? Does it make it less legitimate or whatever?
> Btw, feel free to label me however you want (others did already), which shows that they have no arguments and resort to pidgeonholeing and name calling.
I wasn't going to, but thank you for the invitation!
It seems that Yarvin didn't realise -- accidentally or more probably intentionally -- that the society in Soylent Green was not supposed to be taken as a model to emulate. It's not supposed to be a documentary! To even joke about it is telling.
As a tech industry we'll probably be complacent on whatever is coming up in the future, no matter if it's something like this or something far more insidious. But hey, some of our class got very wealthy and got to enjoy material prosperity so it's all good, right? People would chase ever higher wages and shiny trinkets and end up working for Evil Megacorps because "one needs to be able to afford to live comfortably".
I'd say that the onus falls on the engineer insofar as they need to ask the questions of "why are we making the new better tool", "according to what criteria is it better", and "do we need the better tool". And at least for me, that onus falls on the engineer instead of falling on the user because it's the engineer who is creating the tool, not the user, and if the engineer chose differently, the tool wouldn't be out there to be used for evil.
Sometimes it might just be better to not do the thing, especially if it conflicts with one's morals. And well, the idea that "if I don't do this, someone else will" seems to not work out well in practice.
And pray tell, what does the American or the Chinese worker in this case get out of their higher productivity and competitiveness? Because it really seems that it's not quality of life, that's for certain.
More money and material comforts? Well perhaps, but then again, I do wonder just how many would willingly take that rather than for example a proper work-life balance or clean environment. And we'll probably have to rethink the relationship of our societies with material consumption etc. in the coming decades anyway due to the climate emergency, and so maybe it'd actually be better for the US or China to adopt our "less competitive" stance rather than for us to try to agonise on trying to get ourselves competitive with them.
No one has yet figured out just what one's material possessions will do for them after they're dead. At best you can pass them to your next of kin, but that doesn't need the kind of hyper competitive, hyper capitalistic mindset espoused by the US or China.
Maybe we need a cultural shift then, because if one needs to use a platform like X, nowadays owned and operated by fascists, then there's something deeply wrong with the tech world. It'd probably take a lot of effort to do so, but it'd be absolutely worth it.
Besides, even if that wasn't a consideration, only posting the announcement to X is just crazy. As others have said, you'd expect for GitHub to make the announcement on their official website. Any paying client would then just follow that for their announcements.
I just spent a few minutes trying to think of a better place, I can't think of one, there is no professional social network, and linkedin doesn't qualify.
You don't need a professional network. This is a company informing customers about a security issue. It should be on their website. Anyone can subscribe to the RSS feed if they are a customer.
Remember RSS?
There is no need to add a social network element.
To be fair to us, the Euro is also a world reserve currency, alongside of course the US Dollar, the British Pound, the Japanese Yen, and the Chinese Renminbi. And the Euro is in fact the second largest in terms of external reserves, being only beat by the USD.
Of course, the USD has been for a while the largest one of these, but as you say, they're really trying to get away from that. And a currency falling in relevance isn't new, one can always ask the Pound about that.
Thats good to know, but I am a "out of the box" person. I never want to have to manually install extensions as thats just more stuff to remember when setting up a new machine. Yea thats a me problem, but still.
It used to support it out-of-the-box as well, but it's technically against YouTube's ToS to allow this without paying for a premium, so now you need this as an extra hoop.
Agreed, this sounds strange indeed. Much more likely is that Google found a reliable way to detect the screen status using a standard feature and Mozilla just implements the standard neutrally
Wouldn't know, as I have never been in charge of one, but I imagine Google having the power to make your browser completely irrelevant would be a pretty strong incentive.
Nah I want general media playback in the background. Doesn't matter if its Youtube or any other platform. I dont want giga corpos to monetize my attention. Youtube does well enough from ads anyway ;)
Would such legislation be perfect for dealing with these kinds of things? Of course not, but it would be better.
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